Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Steve said it, Bucky could hardly believe it. “I’m putting my foot down.”  Steve fucking Rogers trying to put his foot down—it was enough to make a man laugh.  Enough to make something frantic wriggle at the back of Bucky’s throat.  Putting his foot down, Jesus!  Next thing, Steve’d have a rolled-up newspaper in hand, just waiting to bat him like an unruly puppy. Putting his foot down.  The words whirled with a rapid-fire repeat.   He would have laughed, but somehow he thought he might just fly apart at the seams if he so much as breathed.  For all the absurdity, Steve was as serious as a heart attack—no bullshit.  

“Look,” Bucky was talking to a closed door like an idiot, “I’ll quit– I’ll do better, Steve, I get the message.  I’ll journal my… feelings... or whatever fairy shit that therapist wants me to do, I’ll write in goddamn glitter if I have to!”

Silence answered.  

“You gonna talk, or do I need to send a telegram, Steve?  I’ll shut up about the damn thing, just—” 

The door opened, and Steve was there with a suitcase, and Bucky’s heart plummeted.  His metal fingers twitched and Bucky winced at the sensation.  It was like the damn thing just wanted to make all Steve’s points for him.  Thanks a lot, HYDRA. 

“That’s not what it’s about, and you know it.” Steve’s gaze was steel, clouded over, no clear blue skies today.  “I’m going to give you some space to think and… I don’t want to keep fighting you on this.  I…”

No.  Please, no, Steve.  Bucky felt like he was falling, like the world was tilting up under him to swallow him whole.  Please, no.  Why couldn’t he say anything?  

“I’m not…” Steve ran a hand through his hair, irritated by something, probably Bucky.  “I’ll text you, and we can make a date to actually talk.  It’s not—I don’t want it to be forever.”

And then he left.  

Just like that, he left.  Only the smell of his stupid, expensive sandalwood soap (and if Steve had been a day under a hundred, he’d have had no excuse for liking it—fucking geezer) lingered long enough for Bucky to form a thought.  

The handhold Bucky had maintained for so long slipped, and he plummeted into despair.  Why couldn’t he have just made Steve happy?  If he’d just done what Steve wanted,... but what did Steve even want?  He was angry about… He was angry about Bucky’s weird food stuff and how he didnt’ want to fuck with the arm.  He hated how Bucky was when he didn’t “take care” of himself on his own, and he hated how Bucky was when he did “take care” of himself.  

Time was, he’d just straight up order Bucky to do things, and that had pretty much worked, hadn’t it?  He’d turn on that CO voice and tell Bucky where to stand and wait and to listen to the doctors or sit still for the techs.  It wasn’t Bucky who obeyed orders in moments like that.  There was this thing that happened in his head, this sudden quieting of the mind, this emptiness that always terrified Bucky after it was over—but in the moment, it was fine!  So what if it was the same emptiness that smacked of HYDRA?  It got the fucking job done.  

He dreamed of it sometimes, in bed beside Steve, this hulking monster with its metal arm and dead stare and absolute obedience, because even Bucky’s subconscious seemed dead set on ruining his retirement.  Now, without Steve breathing beside him, Bucky sank into their bed and watched the afternoon sunlight stagnate on the wall.  

Sunlight fell warm across his cheeks, and the only sounds to be heard were cowbells in the distance and the whisper of meadow grasses.  Bucky stared wide-eyed over the green pasture land, stretching up and spilling down the mountainside, his eyes followed the dirt path until it disappeared behind a ridge.  Just beyond, there was a village.  There would be houses, the sounds of people, the smell of bread, and hearthfires.  Bucky’s heart pounded.  His stomach was in a constant free-fall lurch.  The wind rustled the grasses.

It was behind him.  He knew it was, even though it made no sound and cast no shadow.  It was right there, and Bucky didn’t want to turn around.  Why was it always here?  

He’d been here once, in a different life.  This was Austria, Bucky was pretty sure.  Maybe it was somewhere specific in Austria, or maybe it was an amalgam of several Austrian mountainsides.  The only thing that was clear to Bucky in this place was that this was Austria, and it was before.

The hand he never looked at in waking, the one that was a constant, painful reminder that he had been made into a monster and sicced on the innocent, hovered in front of him.  Here, in this unreal place, it was human again.  No longer a gunmetal cold shine that made him wince each time he glimpsed it, no more cold malice where there should have been warm fingers.  This was his arm.  It was his arm, his hand, dirt under his fingernails, the scar on the back of his thumb from when Dick Vanderhoff tried to fight him in the scrapyard—his.  He used the newly human hand to flip the bird and smiled darkly at the familiarity.  

All of this was his.  It should be his!  It was his dream, his mountainside, his tattered memory of Austria, his arm… And looming behind him, a palpable cold, was his monster.  

This place should have been beautiful, but the monstrous shadow merged with his, and where it fell, Bucky knew there would be blood.  It was one thing to ruin every peaceful memory, to steal his sleep and his peace of mind and years of memories, but now it was trying to ruin what he had left with  Steve—It was trying to take Steve away from him.  It was the reason he couldn’t be fucking right.  It was why he had to live with the guilt and shame of the things he’d allegedly done, of the harm his body had wrought on the world while the fucking monster from his nightmares had worn it like some kind of skin suit.  It was why he couldn’t keep a meal down sometimes, why he couldn’t talk to people or go fucking anywhere without being weird, it was what he kept trying, out of his mind with misery, to scratch and pry and burn out from under his skin or rip clean from his shoulder.  

Heart hammering, Bucky let his terror swirl and heat and grow into a rage.  He had no weapons, but he didn’t give a shit.  He’d throw it off the damn mountain.  

“Hey asshole!”  He shouted, and no sound came from his mouth, but the sky was suddenly dark with clouds.  The monster was thirty feet away, though he’d just felt the cold that radiated from its arm, and its sudden displacement sent a fresh wave of terror through him.  

Bucky was no stranger to pushing through fear.  He could think when machine guns spat over foxholes and mortars splashed frozen earth like it was water in a bathtub.  Hell, he could keep shit to himself under torture, and he had it on good authority that even though torture was categorically ineffective, it still wasn’t nothing to keep fucking mum.  This was his goddamn dream and he wasn’t about to let the fucking freak they’d tried to turn him into take it away from him.  

He stalked toward the creature.  Its face was all a mask, its body clad in black but showing the gleaming metal arm.  Bucky hated that arm.  He fought the grass as it clung to his feet, trying to slow him and storm clouds rolled over the mountain ridge.  The monster turned and fled just as the wind picked up and rain began to fall, leaving Bucky to struggle on the slippery footing toward a castle.  It loomed, rough stone walls and ancient-looking and familiar, though Bucky couldn’t remember ever having seen it.  He’d seen enough castles, though.  Goddamn Nazis loved their goddamn castles.

“Get back here!”  He shouted, and the words were swallowed by the wind.  The rain tasted like the ocean and Bucky bared his teeth at it.  The castle’s walls seemed alive with it, like they were moving under the rain.  Well before Bucky could catch up to it, the creature slipped through the doors, and they closed with a thunderclap and the flash of lightning.

“You fucking coward!”  He screamed into the sound-deadening doors even as they radiated darkness into his mouth, “You piece of shit fucking coward, let me in!  Come out here and fight me like a fucking man!”

He screamed and attacked the door as the sky darkened and the doors swung open to reveal a bottomless darkness, and Bucky stormed in even as lighting flared and thunder crashed on the mountainside.  There was the monster, the freak, the thing they’d made out of him, and Bucky was fury itself—

Bucky woke with anger still prickling under his skin, his heart still racing, and night air spilling cool through the window.  He sucked in a long breath and slowly released it.  His arm was metal again, and every stupid twitch of it radiated pain up into his shoulder and spine, just one more love letter from the HYDRA assholes who’d made it...  Piece of HYDRA junk, polluting him on the outside like the Winter-fucking-Soldier that prowled around on the inside.  It had to go.  He couldn’t keep going with that thing inside him.  What a goddamn delight that instead of a night’s rest he got to enjoy lifechanging epiphanies in an existential Nazi dream castle.  Great.   

So Steve had wanted to put his foot down.  Fine.  That was… That hurt a lot, actually, but Bucky could put his foot down too.  He couldn’t keep pushing Steve away, he needed to stop.  He needed to get better, to be better, because Steve deserved better and goddamnit, if Steve was going to settle then Bucky was going to make damn sure he didn’t settle for misery.  

Bucky was brimming with that miserable thing, it wore him like a coat sometimes, it hovered at the edges of his consciousness: the monster in every closet.  It was ruining him for Steve.

Words dripped through him, sheets of rain down rough stone walls: freak, monster, weapon, asset.  That’s all it was.  It wasn’t him—it wasn’t Bucky.

It was a fucking disease and he was done with it.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t like home.  

This conversation would have happened in their kitchen with coffee Steve made, and ham and eggs, and leftovers from the previous night—except that Bucky had been a coward before. He’d been shitty and difficult and Steve was right, anyway.  It wasn’t like the piece of HYDRA trash was going to fix itself, and the alternative was just not having an arm, which…

Losing an arm was one thing—losing Steve?  Hell no. And Steve didn’t want to play nursemaid to Bucky all the damn time. Bucky was just going to have to man the fuck up and let Stark’s guys look at the stupid arm.  

He’d realized it all about a half a second before Steve walked out the door.  He’d dragged his feet and argued, insubordination will not be tolerated, and now he had to meet Steve here, in this neutral limbo, and he had no right to hate it.

Bucky tried to be subtle about his discomfort. The coffee shop was nice, even when he wasn’t comparing it to outright torture, and that was the real test of how swanky a place was.  It was warm, and the music was quiet enough that he could easily hear the conversations around him, and in Steve’s absence, he listened in.  It was probably an abuse of that super hearing or whatever, but it wasn’t like he knew these people, and the mundane dramas of a partner who wasn’t pulling their weight with childcare or the surreptitious planning of a retirement party were distractions.  It was a reminder that life went on, that no matter what else was happening, people would just keep on being people.  

The waitress had checked on him six or seven times now, and Bucky wished he’d shown up later.  Steve had said one.  He’d be here at one.  Bucky glanced at his watch, chagrined to see that it was still only eleven thirty-five.  

It was eleven thirty-five, and this wasn’t the kind of joint where coffee was bottomless, so it seemed a bit rude that the waitress so clearly wished he’d pay up and go—he was paying good money to sulk here.  But he was eating up space, and the waitress clearly thought he was pathetic.  He hadn’t ordered anything yet, and apparently “waiting for a friend” was getting old, but at a robust almost-a-fucking-hundred, Bucky had earned the privilege of sulking over cold coffee while an impatient waitress tried to ignore him. 

It was his God-given right as an American.  

Steve, teacher’s pet and chronic watch-synchronizer, arrived ‘right on time’—five minutes early—and sat down, nervous, saying, “I didn’t mean to make you wait.”

“No,” Bucky’s disused voice was off, croaky, and embarrassment only made the lie sound stupider.  “I just got here.”  

Steve looked at Bucky’s hand like he wanted to touch it. Even though he knew the feeling of being touched would make him want to crawl out of his skin, Bucky wished he would.  He really wished Steve would just… make everything better.  It was about as practical and likely as a toilet seat made of gold, but a guy could wish...

Anyway, Steve used to be a regular Mr. Fix-It before Bucky’s brain hit blender this last time and started making both their lives extra fun.  He used to be able to shoo away the shadows.  It had been such a hellish, messy, violent return to sanity for Bucky, and, through it all, Steve had been there.  He’d been a fucking lighthouse, a refuge.  He’d shouldered so goddamn much that it was frankly cruel for Bucky to try to pile more on him, but his heart was a ridiculous thing.  Not a lick of good sense.  

Still, he remembered nights waking up disoriented and wild with fear, and Steve holding him, Steve waking him and putting him to bed, Steve shepherding the zombie he was for weeks.  Steve had been his whole world, and Bucky had been terrible; fractious and angry, he’d thrown food and clawed against gentle touch.  He’d been a wild animal.  

He owed Steve everything, so before Steve could say anything, Bucky beat him to the punch.

“I’ll do it.”

It was hard not to see Steve’s presence here, in the pristine lab at Stark Tower, as a statement of distrust.  He’d said, “I’ll go with you,” like it was a favor, but it wasn’t.  Bucky had the distinct impression that he was being handled.  Managed.  Better Steve, he supposed, than anybody HYDRA had assigned.  

God, but at least HYDRA hadn’t made him read fucking “consent forms” before this kind of shit.  This time there was homework—a questionnaire where he had to write down risks and benefits of getting the stupid arm tuned so it wouldn’t hurt all the time, and he was pretty sure there’d just be more hassle if he wrote “Risks: I lose my marbles and kill everybody in the room, Benefits: Steve will finally quit looking at me like that.”  

He didn’t even want to get it fixed—he was fine with it hurting when it got warm or when there was a magnet nearby.

“It’s going to be okay,” Steve placed a hand on Bucky’s bouncing leg, and he wrestled himself to stillness.  The air was cold.  It was heavy in his lungs and heavy on his skin.  

His body hunkered, locked up muscles afraid to even shiver, and it was ridiculous.  It was stupid.  There was no reason for this.  He wished they’d just… He wished they’d tie him down—that way, he wouldn’t have to fight to stay still. 

The engineer Stark brought in sat at his fingertips. The orthopedic surgeon settled near his shoulder, where the maroon snarl of scar couldn’t decide between painful oversensitivity and numbness where it was touched.  

It was all overwhelming before these specialists came in and started talking all at once to each other and Bucky and Stark.  Objectively, Bucky knew that there was nothing threatening about them.  They greeted him, they spoke kindly, they joked.  Thoroughly vetted experts, they had been handpicked because they were skilled and safe, but nothing could convince the cringing trapped animal in Bucky’s brain of that.  

If there was one thing he could thank HYDRA for, it was the fact that he could keep his freaking out to himself. Nobody needed a supersoldier having a visible panic attack. Bucky would have laughed, but he felt like shit— It was a good fucking thing that they hadn’t started actually watching his vitals yet. 

A bit before they injected local anesthetic—where he had to assume the arm insinuated itself into his shoulder and back, but it wasn’t like anybody at HYDRA had bothered to mention anything, and Bucky found himself deeply uncurious now—they offered something for his nerves.  Decades of forced calm had disintegrated for a second at the thought of being drugged helpless through this.  It was bad enough as it was, and it was a miracle that he managed to sound casual when he said, “Just the local’s fine.”  Jesus.  He didn’t want to fucking be here.

He let go of Steve’s hand as his heart sped up and then sped up again.  Steve would be pissed off and make him take the sedative if he found out. He didn’t want to be drugged. He could feel his heart in his eyeballs. His teeth.

Everything was fragments.  Details.  The metallic glint of tools on a stainless steel tray.  Blue drapes over sinister shapes. Conversations in English or Russian—it all blurred together after a while.  The burn of tears as he struggled to keep his breathing calm.  Don’t cry.  Don’t move.  Don’t beg.  Why is it doing that?  

Something in him folded. 

It wasn’t forceful, no resounding snap, no buckling collapse.  Something just closed in him, quiet as a library, the rustle of an overused paperback.  Soft hands to shield the eyes from all the horrors that stare by day—had he read that somewhere?  He blinked slowly, his gaze falling on a still life across the room, the plum just a little too purple to be believed.  Nobody was talking to him.  Conversation faded to a hum.  There was a dead pheasant on the table by the plum.  A yellow butterfly perched on a grape.  Steve was in the kitchen, saying something.  

Bucky blinked again.  

When had he gotten home?

“You want a sandwich?”  He asked again, poking his head around the corner to smile at Bucky where he sat on the couch.

No.  He still felt sick.  His heart was starting to pick up again. The terror was catching back up. 

“Maybe later,” he said, and the tension didn’t quite ruin his voice.  The living room was too big.  Steve was too loud.  Fuck.  Everything was—Why is it doing that?—it was all going to shit.  “I’m gonna go lie down.”

Yeah.  His bedroom.  That would be better. 

He grabbed the pillow from his bed and stared around, and hated how exposed he still felt. The wall pulled at him with a near-magnetic force.  It was cool and sturdy against his back, and he inched along it.  He could still smell the fucking gloves—Oh, it really doesn’t like that, huh?  Increase the—it was on his skin, that smell, that smell, that smell—  

The closet swallowed him up, and Bucky pulled the door closed behind him.  In the darkness, he pushed his face into the pillow and tried to smother the smell of the gloves and the sounds he made as he let go.  His body was like a spooked horse; it needed to run itself out before it could calm down, and so he rode out the shivering and the crying and the—can’t somebody shut it up?—the fucking sounds until everything bled away.  Until his body was too tired for more.  

The closet smelled like mothballs. He breathed it in greedily.  Mothballs because it wasn’t cedar.  Cedar would have been nice, too.  The panic gave way slowly to a low-grade dread over how he’d gotten here.  He knew they’d tuned up the arm and that he and Steve had decided to walk instead of taking one of Stark’s cars, but none of it felt real.  This wasn’t supposed to still be happening, this feeling like after the wipes when nothing could stick to his cooked brains and his body just did shit on autopilot.  

It was over—why isn’t it moving?—it was fine.  He’d gone, he’d gotten the stupid fucking arm looked at.  Steve had wanted that, so he did it, and it was over now.  It was over—Oleinik, handle it.  It was over, and Steve wasn’t going to hate him or accuse him of hurting himself on purpose or say he couldn’t be here anymore.  Soldat?  Oh, no, you’re alright, just… just rest. He was so tired.

So goddamn tired.  

The day had scoured him out, but he dragged himself out after a few hours when Steve called.  The food was good, it always was. And as always, it turned to ash in his mouth.  

On a mountainside in Austria that smelled of meadow grasses, rain poured like blood down the sides of a dark castle.  The Winter Soldier waited for him in the shadows beyond the door, dark except for the menacing gleam of its metal arm and a ring of keys.

Bucky stalked past the creature—it was afraid of him, but he wasn’t afraid of it.  It was the future that would never be his.  It was the inhuman thing that they’d tried to fit into his human body. And yeah, Bucky still bore its fingerprints on his mind, and, yeah, when he woke up, its arm would be hanging from his shoulder. But there was going to be one winner here, and the boogeyman in his dreams wasn’t going to be it.  The first door was locked, and the second, too. Beyond them, it was too dark to see.  How many doors were in this place?  

“Give me the key,” Bucky demanded, and the soldier… did it try to say something?  Whatever it said, it was swallowed by the mask and Bucky’s racing pulse.

He didn’t care what it had to say.

“I said give me the key!” Bucky rounded on it, and the Soldier stiffened, ready to fight, fingers tight around their glittering prize.  Metal in metal, a horrific squeak.  Bucky’s reflection stared at him in the creature’s black-goggled stare.  

Again, it tried to speak, but Bucky was over it.  The Soldier stumbled when Bucky shoved it. He grabbed for the keys, and there was no resistance.  The air smelled like grief.  In the strange way of dreams, the door was in front of him and the key turned before Bucky thought to turn it.  Crimson light poured through the door, pooling in the dark hall.  A trailing smear of blood, or perhaps a trick of the light, trailed across the floor and through the door, and Bucky stepped into the crimson, buoyed by a rage beyond words.  

White lights pinned him down.  The table was cold under his back; no sheet to insulate.  The familiar cloy of nitrile and bleach and the million unpleasant things that the bleach had cleaned up made the breath stop in Bucky’s lungs.  His eyes darted to and fro.  Some of these faces were familiar, but no names came to mind.  He didn’t know this place.  

Soldiers stood in pairs at the edges of the room, guns pointed at the floor, eyes pointed at Bucky.  Of all the men in the room, they frightened Bucky the least.  The ways they hurt him… They wouldn’t hurt him like the men in physicians’ coats and their scrub-clad assistants.  The men spoke quietly, a discussion that slid over the surface of Bucky’s mind, details evading him as his head swarmed with bees. 

It was fine.  He got the gist.  They wanted to improve his function. 

There were new parts for the arm.  

“It’s awake, Doctor.”

The words came from out of sight, and Bucky tried to crane his neck.  The rabbiting thump of his heart bumped against his fingers and lips from the inside, something trying to escape his body.  His tied-down body.  And there was a certain uncanniness to the way cold saline traced an icy path up his vein.  

“That’s fine,” the doctor waved the tech away. 

A stool with wheels squeaked up behind him, and another question flew through the air. A voice that was soft enough, high enough, that Bucky knew the guy must get shit for it.  “Here is alright?”

It was answered with grunts of approval from the doctors, and wheels squeaking, the heat of another body close enough to warm the top of Bucky’s head.  The guy’s soap smelled like mint.  A mask pressed over his face, and a hand rested on his shoulder, warm.  People were talking about the process of installing the new parts for the arm, and Bucky’s mind couldn’t hold the details.  

“It’ll metabolize it fast.”

“Monitoring will be constant; Masimov will watch the eyes—it’s the most reliable.”

“Won’t it make a sound?”

“It’s not reliable—”

He was starting to feel dizzy.

“Can somebody be ready to remove the restraints once the paralytic takes effect?”

“General says the restraints stay in place,” one of the soldiers called,  “Once it stayed quiet until half-way through a surgery just to take the scalpel from the surgeon’s hand and slit his throat!”

The soldiers with their guns pointed at the floor all shared a laugh over that. The tension among the medical personnel was electric.

Bucky didn’t remember doing that, but he was proud.  He’d fought.  Even when he couldn’t win, even though he couldn’t remember, he’d fought.  

“Make the installation, then bring it up just enough to test and back down for adjustments.”  Somebody rattled the plan off again as if they hadn’t confirmed and reconfirmed enough.  The chorus of agreement to what sounded suspiciously like the guess and check method except with surgery on his fucking arm sent his heart racing somehow faster. 

He looked up at the tech seated at his head.  Hair under a cap, mask hanging around his neck.  He glanced down at Bucky, and when their eyes met at the bizarre angle, he gave a reassuring little smile, and for a moment, Bucky imagined the tech was somebody else.  This man should have had freckles and that chipped front tooth—who?  This was Masimov, Bucky reminded himself.  Masimov, who would watch his eyes.  Bucky tried to watch him back, even as a strange grief colored his rising panic.

“Alright, let’s begin.”

Somebody must have pushed something into the IV because Bucky’s body wasn’t shivering anymore, but from the cannula in his hand to his shoulder to his chest, the medicine burned.  His muscles went slack.  His lungs wouldn’t move, and he would have tapped the table or grabbed somebody, but his body wasn’t his, and something cold and hard was pushing his tongue down—and did the metal taste like blood, or did blood just taste like metal?  The question was obliterated by pain that struck terror through him.  It hurt deep in his throat—it was going to tear him.  It was going to rip through him, and he would bleed out here in this cold, bright place with only Masimov, who wasn’t the right person—Masimov, who was supposed to be somebody else—touching his forehead with a soft palm.  

It hurt too much, and he wanted to thrash and cry out and fight, but his body was his enemy.  His body wouldn’t listen.  His lungs were on fire and all these fucking people were talking over him and around him, and Masimov was holding the metal blade down his throat while something fucking huge shoved in and in and in and past where anything should be, he could feel it in his chest and the pressure of it and he was going to die here.  It was pressing so hard, pushing him out from the inside, and Bucky could imagine the soft bits of him ripping and tearing, because on the inside he was just offal, just meat. How did he not understand until now that he was going to die here?  They were going to rip his lungs out of him; that had to be it because why would they do this otherwise?  

Air.  

Something pushed air into his lungs, something was keeping him from dying, and Bucky’s eyes wouldn’t focus on Masimov’s face, but Masimov’s body was warm, and his chest pressed Bucky’s head.  His hand came down on Bucky’s cheek and forehead and stroked and Bucky wished he could tell Masimov how much that fucking meant.  How scared he was and how much of a difference it made to just have that hand, warm and dry, reminding him he was human.  All he could smell was the overwhelming stench of nitrile.  

Movement began.  They were fiddling with drugs.  “The paralytic is fast-acting, but with his metabolism, it’ll be gone quickly.  Start timing… now.” 

Masimov watched Bucky’s eyes, and a heartbeat after Bucky felt his throat constrict painfully against the tube, Masimov said, “There.”  Somebody called out a time.  Why the hell did Bucky need to be awake for this?  He twitched against the restraints in weak protest, tried to cough.  It was awful but survivable.  That was the worst part of this, wasn’t it?  That he would live to do it again.

And then somebody opened the service panel on the arm, and Bucky was denied the ability to so much as scream.  He was trapped in a body that wouldn’t even try to protect him while they ripped the sensory bits of the arm out and refitted it, and his heart was racing so fast that he was going to black out, even with the tube breathing for him.  He couldn’t fight back and he couldn’t fight back and he couldn’t fight, couldn’t fight, couldn’t—

There was a metal hand at his throat, and he was thrown across the room, hitting the wall hard enough to knock the wind from him.  The Winter Soldier stood between him and his body on that operating table where Masimov-who-wasn’t, at his head, announced when the paralytic eased off enough to test the new components of the arm.  The smell of nitrile clung to his nose, blue and cruel and sterile, and the Winter Soldier stalked up to Bucky.  

Behind the soldier, they were taking his body apart, but it wasn’t Bucky on that table anymore, twitching just long enough to check whatever they were doing and then being forced again to stillness.  Bucky stared in horror because he didn’t remember this, but he did.  It had been a little while before Georgia.  He’d had that handler with the limp and the problem with spicy foods.  

The soldier advanced and grabbed Bucky, and for a moment, Bucky didn’t even want to fight it.  At least he wasn’t there.  At least he didn’t have to feel what they were doing to him.  A hand covered his eyes, and Bucky thrashed, finally able to fight.  He threw his head back, catching the Winter Soldier on the chin, and used the surprise to slam him into the wall.  Red light illuminated the dark hall, and in the dimness, he saw his terrible reflection.  His personal monster.  

His monster, trying to take this from him.

“Let me go!” 

Immediately, he was across the hall from the soldier, and it was probably just the adrenaline that made it seem like the creature was shaking.  He ran back for the door, determined to see what the creature didn’t want him to see, abandoning it again in the dark.  

The door burst open to a familiar cell.  He remembered this.  He remembered these men.  This was a long time ago, before they’d hung the metal arm on him.  He’d more or less recovered from the fall, from losing his arm, and they’d taken an interest in how his body wasn’t quite human anymore.  How the serum had changed him.  Bunch of marblemouthed Russians everywhere he looked, running experiments on POWs.  

There was a kid in the cell facing his who was going to die. 

His cough was awful and getting worse, and sometimes he was just so weak.  Sometimes the pauses between his rattling breaths were so long, Bucky wasn’t sure there’d be another breath.  He remembered what he was about to say before he opened his mouth to say it.

“He’s sick… Sick,” he coughed for emphasis, even though coughing made his shoulder and chest ache where they’d tried to clean up where his arm used to be.

“I understand,” the guard drawled, bored by the little game, accent so thick that Bucky hardly understood him.

“He needs medicine.”

“I need vacation,” the guard shrugged, “And yet we go on.”

He remembered this pause.  The way he had weighed these words.  This wasn’t anything new, so why was the soldier trying to hide this?  He waited until the guard was close and spoke quietly, knowing how his offer would be taken.

“What do I need to do to get him medicine?”

If this guard had been Volkov—and where was Volkov today anyway?—he would have asked for English lessons, or for Bucky to correct his pronunciation, or to talk about movie stars and slang.  Hell, if this had been Volkov, the kid wouldn’t have asked for anything at all.  He’d have just figured out a way to slip the guys a little extra to eat, a little medicine, maybe a blanket.  Not this guy, though.  Bucky didn’t remember this guard’s name, or hardly a thing about him.  Boring fucker.

The boring fucker’s hand went to his belt and he gave Bucky a meaningful look, and… He didn’t remember how this went.  Did he blow the guy?  He remembered doing that once or twice, quick blowjob for some asshole who liked feeling like a big man by putting Bucky on his knees.  With a quick exchange of nods and a rattle of keys, the guard pushed into Bucky’s cell, and the guys were watching this.  They could see.

“We can go somewhere—”

“You want or no?”  

“C’mon,” he whispered, “Not here.  I’ll make it good, I’ll… whatever you want, just… not here.”

“Take this off.”  Hands, then, at his belt, and Bucky rushed to comply, but with one hand, it was slow going.  Whatshisname-the-private was hardly even shivering anymore, and he was the only one who’d be able to see this, anyway.  He wasn’t gonna fucking notice—and he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anyone—and as long as Bucky didn’t make a whole production of it, nobody else would have to know.  

Yeah.  Okay. 

He could do this. 

The belt came off his waist, and the guy wrapped it around Bucky’s legs, just above the knee, and pushed him onto his thin little cot.  Shitty thing didn’t have a blessed spring in it, so at least it was quiet.  Bucky was quiet too, just shuffling where directed until he was on his belly and unsure what the hell the plan here was.  The guard yanked Bucky’s trousers down, pulled himself out through his fly, and spit on his hand, and that was about all the overture there was. 

Warmth on his back, bracketing his thighs, and it made his skin crawl, but it was fine.  It was fine, wasn’t it?  This was the price to not watch a kid die fifteen feet away from him over the next week.  This was nothing. 

When the guy slid a spit-slick dick between his thighs and started rutting away, Bucky wanted to fucking puke.  Still… It was fine, wasn’t it?  Whatshisname was gonna get medicine, and as far as torture went, this was pretty tame, if embarrassing.  Yeah, he was probably gonna have some guy’s come stuck between his thighs until the little lab techs decided to hose him off, but who cared what those assholes thought, anyway, right?  And nobody else had to know.  

Behind him, the boring fucking guard made a frustrated noise even as his hips slapped against Bucky’s skin.  Yeah, well, it’s not my fault you wanted to do this, Bucky didn’t say.  Best to shut his smart mouth before he got himself in trouble.  But it was taking for fucking ever.  The insides of his thighs were wet with spit and precome and he was tired and irritated, and he finally snapped, “Fucking get on with it!  Jesus, I don’t have all day.”

A string of curses, then, and the guard was adjusting himself.  He wasn’t aiming for the space between Bucky’s legs anymore, spreading his ass like he was kneading fucking bread dough, spitting.  Realization like lightning struck him, sent his body rigid, but he couldn’t buck the guy off and there he was, pressing and pressing against Bucky’s asshole which was not a fucking entrance, and he knew—he knew—he’d fucked up.  This wasn’t… This wasn’t… The pressure kept increasing but there was no fucking way.  It wasn’t possible.  It was impossible—

Across the cell, pinned under a guard whose face Bucky couldn’t remember, legs bound by his own belt, fighting as best as he could with one arm and a body weakened by his recovery and the cold and too little food, Bucky screamed as something in him tore.  Something just… gave out, and his pride gave out with it, and he was sobbing for it to stop, to take it out, heedless of the audience across the hall.  He was begging—he was watching himself beg, and the pain and the fear weren’t his somehow.  They didn’t touch him, but the Winter Soldier did.  It had him again, pinned by its metal arm, its human hand rising to Bucky’s eyes again, trying to hide what had happened.  

It was trying to hide this.

It didn’t want Bucky to know about this.

The lingering horror stopped Bucky from fighting as hard as he should have.  The Winter Soldier’s arms shielded him.  Its hand came up to cover his eyes again.  It didn’t want him to see this.  

Fuck.  Bucky didn’t want to see this.

Too shaken to fight back anymore, Bucky shook in the soldier’s arms.  The absence of those memories was… It was a fucking blessing.  He didn’t try to pull away the hand covering his eyes.  The red light of the hall chased Bucky’s heart into his throat when the Winter Soldier removed its hand, and Bucky saw again.  The hall was dark and silent, and the soldier was dark and silent.  Water dripped down the dark walls, almost as if the castle itself were bleeding. 

Or crying.

The Winter Soldier stood in the red doorway, fighting to close the door again, keys casting dizzy light-shadows, scarlet against the darkness.  Bucky grabbed the soldier by the back of its jacket and yanked it away from the door.  It stumbled, its head hit the ground, and the goggles were gone.  Its eyes were red in the light from the door.

“No,” he told it, and again it tried to speak—some mumble, drowned in its mask, and Bucky’s unwillingness to listen. 

“Why are you hiding this?”  He demanded, and something passed over the soldier’s face, an expression Bucky couldn’t read in its eyes, and—

The moon cut a cool wound into soft, enveloping darkness.  His heart was a stone.  Heavy and cold in his chest, pressing on his lungs, it thumped a sluggish march as Bucky stared at the slice of silver light across his bed.  Without letting the light touch him, he eased out of bed.  Steve slept with his bedroom door open, and Bucky padded in, mindful of the floorboard that always creaked, and watched him.  Straw-haired and curled, holding a pillow to his chest.  The image was soft.  Bucky’s heart ached, heavy.  It fractured.  

Steve’s eyes opened, sleep-soft, and he grumbled something as Bucky climbed into his bed, into the warm little place Steve kept for him.  Something was missing.  Something was lost, and Bucky could feel its absence in his chest, in all the places his bones ought to be.  Steve’s arm slid around him, and the warmth made him sick.  

“I’m sorry,” he whispered once he was sure Steve was sleeping.

Chapter Text

“Buck?”

Steve was watching him again.  Not a glance or a gaze or whatever—None of that sweet shit he used to do back when he loved Bucky.  There was a wariness to the watching, a cautious care.  It was fucking awful.  

“I don’t think she can help me,” he said to his potatoes, because it was easier to talk to his plate than to Steve when Steve watched him like that.  He didn’t want to see what Steve’s face would do when he heard it.  Some dark part of Bucky wondered if Steve would just make him. 

It would be so much easier.  

For years and years—for decades—there had always been somebody to make him.  In Japan, they grew watermelons in clay cubes, and the watermelons came out as cubes. And for the longest time, there had been systems in place to make sure Bucky grew into the right shape like the watermelons in Japan.  Now he was round and unwieldy, and he didn’t know how to be different.  He didn’t need a shrink; he needed a handler.

They hadn’t all been bad.

“Give her a chance, Buck,” Steve said, and even if he said it like that, it was an order.  

Orders were easier, anyway.  

Bucky nodded.  

“It gets easier, you just gotta try.”  

Bucky nodded again, and he could feel the moment when Steve gave up on the conversation.  He could feel the defeat: Steve defeated, Bucky defeated, everybody defeated and sitting here at the dining room table like some picture-perfect little family, like the moment before—no!  Bucky jerked his thoughts away from the memory; this red-hot stove in his mind, waiting to burn him.  

“She wants me to talk about the things I did,” Bucky told the potatoes.  They were probably cold.  He hadn’t been hungry, so he’d touched the food with his fork for however long it took before Steve stopped waiting for him to eat, then given up.  

“You should.  It’s just talking, Buck.”  The hope in Steve’s voice was the worst because sooner or later, Bucky was going to disappoint him again.  Sooner or later, Steve was going to figure out that he was just too fucked up—that seventy years in HYDRA’s loving arms had ruined him for normal life.  “You just gotta try.”

Tears burned with a speed and ferocity that left Bucky frozen, fighting for all he was worth to hold them back.  For a moment, he couldn’t understand why.  What was this wave of emotion?  What the fuck was wrong with him?  God, but he was just so angry.  

“I am trying,” he said, voice flat because he shouldn’t be angry at Steve.  He couldn’t be angry at Steve.

“I mean with her.”

“Yeah.”  

He stood, plate full, and scraped dinner into the trash, guilt twisting only a little less dangerously than the nausea.  The dishes were a mechanical task.  They were Bucky’s job.  Steve did the cooking, and Bucky cleaned up after dinner.  Halfway through his dish, Bucky abandoned his job, and with it Steve, with his worried tones and wide eyes.  

“I am trying!”  

Maybe Steve didn’t listen, but here, in his dreams, there was a chilling listeningness to the silence in the castle.  The Winter Soldier listened.  For all its strangeness and terror, it, at least, listened.  

“I’m fucking trying!”  

He shouted it at the Soldier, huge and cold, just like the emptiness in the castle—just like the emptiness at the dinner table—it soaked up the sound, drowning Bucky in silence.  The door was still open, red light pooling on the hall’s damp floor, horrors just beyond it that crawled and skittered into Bucky’s waking memory like many-legged insects.  The water on the walls dripped, black in the darkness, threatening to stick like blood if he touched it.

The Soldier watched him with none of Steve’s unsure worry.  It shook its head, and there was a sound like it was trying to speak, but Bucky didn’t want to listen to it.  

“I’ve been trying!  All I fucking do is try!”  He had the soldier pinned to the wall, its hair sticking to the wetness there, eyes darting all over, reflecting the red light in the hall.  “And you?  You won’t fucking leave me alone!”  

The Soldier’s eyes were Bucky’s eyes, and that, more than anything, disgusted him.  

“There’s a way somewhere here to get rid of you.  There’s a way to make you go away.”  It was the kind of dream-like certainty that arrived all at once and filled his very bones.  He knew that behind one of these doors was the way to make the Soldier disappear.

”Do you even know what they did?  You were the monster they made—you could have stopped it!  You didn’t have to…” 

The Soldier was staring at him, something lost in its eyes.  

“Give me the keys.”  

They were in his hand like they’d always been there, and the Soldier stalked toward him where he fumbled with the lock.  The answer was somewhere here.  Somewhere in this place was a way to get rid of the Soldier, and Bucky was going to exorcize the demon because otherwise Steve was going to hate him. 

Steve already hated him.  

A metal hand sent cold pouring through Bucky’s body, and he jammed the key at the lock even as the Soldier tried to speak again, its voice swallowed by its mask.  The door opened, and Bucky shut his eyes against the new world, against a wind that stung every inch of his exposed skin.

He had too much exposed skin.  

Snow was falling in a white world, and Volkov stood awkwardly, hat pulled down over his ears and hands stuffed under his armpits, Kalashnikov neglected.  It would have been stupid for any other handler to be so careless around him, but Bucky wouldn’t try anything.  Not with Volkov.  

Bucky disassembled his rifle.  He’d clean it later.  Leaving it dirty made something in him itch, but Volkov was waiting, and he was cold, and he’d gotten another blue magazine, and another with all the American starlets in it, and Bucky wanted to see. 

He was professional, mechanical as he finished, and Volkov watched him with those soft, brown eyes.  So eager.  Not for the killing, or the missions, or the… Bucky wasn’t quite sure what the word meant, but the Russians said it where a word like “credit” or “glory” would make sense, so that was probably it.  Volkov wasn’t like them, though.  Hell, there was no way Volkov ever would have been selected now.  He was just lucky that Bucky, mad with fever, had mistaken him for Steve not long after they took his arm, and Bucky had… imprinted, he guessed.  Like a baby duck.  Ironic, because Volkov was the baby duck between them.  God, but he was so young.  

Volkov, it seemed, was in it to learn English and gossip about American movie stars and talk about what it would be like when he finally could go to school and become a book translator.  He wanted to translate poetry, which was maybe the single stupidest and loveliest thing Bucky had ever heard.  

“C’mon, punk,” Bucky said, “Let’s shake a leg.”

And then there was no snow.  

The Winter Soldier was nowhere in the softly jostling world of the train cabin.  Volkov sat at the little table with his thin book of verse, Russian this time, and he kept reading out loud like Bucky cared.  Bucky lay in his bunk, warm and unhurt, and tried not to feel the way his body was tacky with blood. 

He faced the cabin, because to lose sight of Volkov was unthinkable, his soft, sandy hair and clean hands.  Bucky bathed in blood, but Volkov would remain clean.  Volkov must remain clean.

Otherwise, what was it all for? Bucky’s hands hadn’t been clean in a long time.  

He reeked like an abattoir.

“This one I like.”  Bucky could feel Volkov shift closer to him.  “This one with grass and wind.  This… images… it shows like a mother’s touch, yes?”

A hand on his shoulder.  Risky for anybody but Volkov.  The touch was soft and deliberate.  Gentle.  Bucky’s chest seized and he sucked a harsh breath through his teeth.  

“You do what you must, Soldat.”  Volkov’s hand slid through the wet mess under the coat they’d thrown over him when he returned from the— fuck!  He tried to think about the poem. To think about Volkov’s voice and his hands.

Volkov’s hand under the coat.

The coat was to hide the blood.  Because they had to take the train.  Because they had to go back.  

Bucky had nothing to say.

“They will be safe,” Volkov said, and the promise was a wound.

He didn’t even know!  Volkov thought it was about them, but it wasn’t.  It wasn’t about the other prisoners anymore.  It wasn’t about them, and Bucky hated that it wasn’t, because they deserved his protection too, didn’t they?  They deserved it more, but it had been about Volkov today.  Ivanov threatened to take Volkov away, and he had ripped through that townhouse because he’d rather… he’d rather… 

Oh God! 

He curled forward and vomited beside Volkov’s leg, and shook through several minutes of his body trying to expel the contents of a now-empty stomach.  Volkov didn’t strike him or shout.  He didn’t even take his hand off Bucky, smoothing fingers through his wet hair until Bucky went still again, his body as defeated as his spirit.  

“Wash your mouth.”  He passed a flask of vodka, and Bucky took it gratefully, relishing the clean burn. Vodka wasn’t allowed, but that had never stopped Volkov. 

He closed his eyes.  His whole body was wet with blood.  And when he opened them—

—He was on his hands and knees in the big shower room, the one by the rifle range.  Green and white tile, the little hexagons forming dizzying daisies across the floor, sloping to the drains.  There was blood on him.  Not much.  Blowback.  It had sprayed on his lip and he couldn’t think about where it had come from.  He couldn’t.  He mustn’t think about where it was from.  

Ivanov was higher up, gold glinting off his chest, and he stood casually watching Bucky.

“You want to be clean of this,” he said.  “So you shall be.”

Every gentle touch made nausea swell.  Every praise was damnation.  The hot water was so rare.  It was so precious.  He retched under its onslaught.  The blood was pulled in pink threads off his body, peeled from his mouth and cheek and neck, scrubbed from his knuckles where it had splashed thick and hot before drying tacky and cold.  He wanted it back—don’t take this away too!  He wanted to undo it.  He wanted to go back.  

A nurse, then, and a needle, and thick cotton towels and wool socks like Volkov’s sister—no!  His body curled up like a question mark—how had he gotten here?  He’d been with—No!  Cotton pajamas, a robe.  Rewards.  These were rewards.  Ivanov praised, and he didn’t degrade because Bucky had done what Ivanov wanted.  Bucky had— Stop!  

Ivanov, then.  His hand on Bucky’s neck, thumb at his hairline.  Bucky’s body was retching with the sobs that racked it.   His face was wet from… the shower?  Hot water.  Precious.  A reward.  

“Another,” Ivanov said, and the nurse brought forth another needle, and Bucky couldn’t care.  He couldn’t think.  If he thought, he’d remember what he’d… what he’d… 

Finally, his lungs relaxed and he could pull in a breath, and his body choked it out.  That was the rhythm of his not-death, now.  Gasp in, choke out, hot water on his face, a reward because he’d been good.  He’d been good, and Ivanov pressed Bucky’s wet cheek against the rough wool and cold leather at his belt, and his fingers pressed Bucky’s neck, feeling the vein like a threat.  Ivanov’s hand was almost like Vol… almost like Vol… almost solace.  Almost absolution.  

Nothing could absolve him now.

“Is it safe?  Good.  Another, then.”  Ivanov’s voice was fuzz.  

The nurse came back, and Bucky let Ivanov stroke his wet face as the nurse touched him and drew the pain away.  Morphine and vodka were against regulation.  They weren’t to be administered without prior command approval.  Volkov gave him vodka because he didn’t listen to command.

Ivanov was command.  

His voice carried Bucky’s mind away, dripping poison that muffled unspeakable pain, and Bucky’s numb mouth felt for the edges of a name.  Daniil.

“I know, Soldat.  It was necessary.  It was the only mercy left.”

Light poured behind Bucky out of the open door.  It was the color of marigolds, and in it, the water that dripped down the castle walls glowed a hostile, silent orange.  The red door beside it cast blood across the floor, and the Winter Soldier shied back from the puddle of light.  

Bucky stalked up to the Winter Soldier and threw the keys at it, watching how it shrank back, the keys nowhere.  Shadow swallowed the soldier’s body, black on black, but it couldn’t hide.  Water pooled on the floor beneath their feet.  

“That isn’t me.”  Bucky panted, pointed.  The door behind him was an accusation, and the Winter Soldier watched him with eyes that reflected red and orange.  It reached for the mask, but Bucky slapped its hand away.  Coward.  “You’re pathetic,” he hissed and let the castle doors shut, lightning-clap and thunder-strike.  

He stood in the cool of the summer night and watched Steve’s face, peaceful in sleep and haloed in the yellow light of a lamp.  He looked uncorruptible, a sleeping saint, perfect for eternity.  There had been a time, once, a long time ago, when Steve had smiled unworried smiles at him.  There had been a time, once, long ago, when he was good for more than hurting and being hurt.  Steve’s right hand rested over his sternum, still curled over the spine of the paperback novel he’d been reading before bed, and Bucky wanted more than anything to be the man from that time, once, long ago, when Steve had been happily in love.  

With his real hand, he lifted Steve’s fingers, and with his other, he pulled the book away, marking the page before setting it on the bedside table.  Steve’s fingers were cool, and Bucky switched off the lamp before taking Steve’s hand again and tracing the elegant roughness of his knuckles.  In his sleep, Steve’s eyebrows drew together momentarily before his features smoothed, softening into sleep’s ephemeral youth.  Bucky slid himself under the quilt and lay on the metal arm, uncomfortable, but concealing.  If Steve woke now, Bucky would look normal.  

His real fingers traced up from Steve’s fingers to his ear, and then his eyebrow.  When he drew a thin line down Steve’s nose, he sneezed twice and turned on his side, his eyes opening to the cool gloom, almost silver in the moon’s sacred light.  

“Heya, Buck.”  Scratchy with sleep, Steve’s voice was maybe the sweetest thing Bucky had heard… ever.  

“Well, hiya, Steve.”  He smiled, and for once it didn’t feel shitty.  It was effort, but it was clean effort.  It was like running up that godawful hill in basic, the best kind of hard—the kind with ballyhoo and back-clapping at the summit.  He didn’t move his hand from where it hovered; the backs of his fingers still rested feather-soft on Steve’s cheek.  Outside, a car alarm cut through the night.  “Band’s terrible,” he whispered, “But at least they got rhythm.”

Steve raised slow eyes to the window, but the alarm stopped before Bucky could move to close it.  The night’s quiet settled soft as rose petals, and Bucky leaned forward to brush his lips against Steve’s.  A tender, confused sound—Steve’s eyes were open and searching Bucky’s face for something.  It was an offer, and Bucky made it again, letting his lips part slightly, feeling the way his nose pressed and slid against Steve’s.  

“It’s the middle of the night,” Steve whispered, and Bucky hummed and pressed a kiss to the side of Steve’s mouth, to his jaw.  When he reached Steve’s throat, Steve gasped.  

“It’s the middle of the night,” Bucky answered, licking a stripe up over Steve’s pulse, letting his nose find the space behind Steve’s ear so his voice would tickle the way Steve liked.  “Were you busy?”

Steve mumbled something incoherent as he rolled closer to Bucky, hooking a leg behind his knees and mirroring Bucky with reverent fingers, and Bucky didn’t know how afraid he’d been until relief crashed over him.  Steve’s fingers in his hair were benediction, his lips a sacrament.  He hadn’t pushed Bucky away, and he couldn’t.  He mustn’t, and Bucky licked his lips and pressed forward, letting a knee press forward just enough to part Steve’s legs.  

“What’s got into you?”  Steve breathed, and Bucky didn’t want him to think too much, so he kissed a new line down the sensitive column of Steve’s throat, and this time Steve made one of those little sounds of his, hoarse and surprised, and his thighs squeezed around Bucky’s.  

“Nothin’ yet, Rogers.”  This was good.  This was almost like before.  Bucky pushed up just enough to kiss Steve’s mouth, dragging another sweet little sound out of him.  

“Aren’t you gonna salute me?”  He asked, with a pointed press of his thigh, and Steve gasped and ground forward, surprised by the scandal of it.  His cheeks were rosy and warm, and Bucky could do this.  He could do this.  A dark corner of his brain quietly reminded him that he could probably do it better now, what with the seventy years of practice with a host of… exacting… partners.  

Steve was still fuzzy with sleep, but he was turned on now, breathless and ready.  Bucky wanted Steve to erase the last seventy years.  He wanted to paint over everything right up to that last night, the night before the train, when he’d fucked into Steve’s fist and Steve’d done the same, and they’d desecrated that red and white handkerchief that Steve had gotten as a gift.  This was his chance, and he wasn’t about to let it go.  

He nipped Steve’s throat and licked hard over the site of the offense, and Steve groaned and grabbed his hair, trying to squeeze the space between them like a near-empty tube of toothpaste.  “Christ, Buck,” he mumbled, “Joined the goddamn army just to salute you.”

Bucky chuckled and tried to make his mouth distracting.  His body distracting.  He let his hand trace down Steve’s side, and Steve smiled that handsome smile of his.  God, but he was lovely, and Bucky wanted nothing more in the world than to be good for him.  There had been a time, once, long ago, when he could be good for Steve.  His body was alive where it touched Steve’s, right by proxy, good by association.  

“You don’t gotta…” Steve trailed off as Bucky let his hand begin to wander, thumb pressing hard under Steve’s jaw, then tracing its firm path down his side to dig into that sensitive part of Steve’s hip that always made him gasp.  “Buck, wait—”

“Please, Steve.”  Bucky didn’t want to beg, but he wasn’t above it.  Hell, he’d begged more and for worse as recently as a couple years ago.  “Let me?”

God, his pupils were huge.  Probably partly from the dim light, but the way his mouth didn’t quite want to close anymore?  The way his tongue darted out to chase Bucky when he pulled back?  Bucky was doing it right.  He was doing good.  His fingers tangled in the waistband of Steve’s underwear, and Steve grabbed his wrist.  Jesus fuck, come on!  Bucky’s throat was tight with fury—why couldn’t he just have this? 

“Are you…”

“Stevie, please.”  Longing.  Breathless.  Quicker pulse, which was fine, because a lot of physiological arousal overlapped with sexual arousal.  Steve was the same, anyway, blushing and perfect, those blue eyes like a… “C’mon, doll, say yes.”

Steve watched him for a moment.  He was looking for something, but Bucky didn’t want to be examined.  He didn’t want to be a bug under a microscope—not while something better was so close he could taste it.  He bent forward and tasted Steve, licked a hard stripe up Steve’s throat and kissed into his mouth, staking claim over his little corner of heaven.  Bucky’s name never sounded better than when Steve said it like that, pulling it long like taffy, sweet on his lips, thick in his mouth; “Bucky.”  

His grip loosened.  He released Bucky, and that was all Bucky wanted.  He could have cried, he was so happy, and he pushed up and back and hoped his metal arm was warm enough now that it would feel like two normal hands when he grabbed Steve’s shorts and pulled.  

Everything about him was good enough to break Bucky’s heart, from the surprised laughter to the way he worried his lip with his teeth, to the way his cock blushed at the tip.  Nose to nose with it, Bucky licked his lips and looked up at Steve in that way that had earned a thousand awful praises from a thousand awful men, and he wanted Steve to wash it away.  Steve’s fingers traced the curve of Bucky’s cheek, and he looked worried again, but there was no time for that.  No time.  

He shot Steve a wolfish grin, then whispered to his cock, “Don’t tell him, but I missed you,” like it was a secret.  That was the magic ingredient, because Steve laughed a belly-jumping laugh that vibrated through Bucky’s body, and scooted up so he could watch.  All that intent evaporated the moment Bucky licked up the shaft of Steve’s cock and Steve’s head lolled back, his mouth open, a breathy moan on his lips.  This was right.  Bucky sighed and felt the tension bleed from his shoulders and neck.  Good.  This would be easier if he wasn’t tense.  

Warmup was everything.  He started slow. Steve would be upset if he gave any indication that this was difficult, so he bobbed his head experimentally, adjusted his position, and tried again.  It took a couple adjustments until he felt good about it, but he was subtle, and Steve was loving it.  His fingers stroked through Bucky’s hair, twitching when the sensation surprised him.  Of all the fingers to have in his hair… 

He didn’t want to think about that.  

Steve smelled like soap and tasted like skin, and his skin under Bucky’s hand was smooth.  Bucky drew a deep breath and pushed Steve deep.  This was the best way.  Things were a little floaty out in the world, memories swirling threateningly with the now, and Bucky wanted none of that.  There was an urgency to his body’s response when Steve hit the back of his tongue, a spasm and a warning that set Bucky’s heart thumping.  Yes.  Fuck, he needed this.  He needed this more than he needed to breathe, and it turned out…  

Bucky could have this, and he didn’t need to breathe.  Not much, anyway.  They’d timed it once.  They’d forced his head under— 

Nope!  Bucky pushed himself down, trying to lift his chin and swallow to make it easier, to make the tight, painful shove into his throat more bearable, and fuck!  It was what he needed.  It was what he wanted.  It drove every thought away, the way the sensitive muscles twitched and spasmed, the way his stomach tightened.  

Steve cursed—Steve Rogers himself, practically sang, “Fuck!  Oh, oh, Buck—oh my God…” And was there any sound prettier in this world?  

He’d missed this.  

Or… not this specifically, but he’d missed this feeling.  It was like coming home.  His eyes watered, and it wasn’t just the dick down his throat… or it was, but it was making him sentimental.  He swallowed again, and Steve’s belly tensed like he was trying hard not to buck up into Bucky’s mouth.  And they said chivalry was dead!  Ah, but Steve was a regular Don Quixote, chasing his windmills.  The star-spangled madman with a plan.

Bucky supposed that made him Dulcinea.

Maybe this was unfair to Steve.  Bucky wanted this, he needed this, but Steve… Steve would be happy no matter what.  He’d never threatened to leave Bucky for not fucking enough.  Not wanting people to touch the arm?  Sure.  Not wanting to be dissected by a shrink?  Absolutely.  But he’d never predicated anything on sex, and Bucky knew that he’d never go for it if he didn’t think Bucky liked it.  

That was fine.  Bucky liked it.  He liked this.  He liked the way the pain forced him into his body, the way the constricted airflow made him woozy but not in a drugged-out or panicky way.  He liked the feel of Steve heavy on his tongue and the sounds he made and the way his fingers twitched helplessly.  When he pulled off to heave a few deep breaths, keeping his hand moving over Steve’s length, because he knew better than to be lazy, he liked the way Steve looked, the deep pink of his cheeks and the look of hazy amazement in his eyes.  

“Heya, Steve,” he croaked, then coughed a little because his throat was irritated and phlegmy.  

“Hiya, Buck.”  Oh, that grin.  God, he loved that smile.  He laid his cheek on Steve’s thigh and shifted a little so Steve wouldn’t notice he hadn’t gotten hard.  He didn’t really want to be hard anyway; he just wanted this.  He wanted to live in this little pocket of time.  

He’d have dragged it out forever if he thought he could get away with it, but Steve started mumbling a string of curses and pleas, and Bucky hated to deny him.  It was with a near-violent enthusiasm that Bucky fucked his throat down onto Steve.  The pain was bright, and it made him feel alive and present, like his body was his again, and like it was only him and Steve in this room, in this bed.  Air came in sips until he finally pushed down as far as he could and swallowed around Steve, and felt the way his body shuddered and jerked.  The gentle curses tangled around his name released something in Bucky’s brain, and his eyes were wet with tears. 

When Bucky pulled off, proud of himself, proud that he could make Steve curse like that, Steve cupped his cheek.

“Do you want me to…?”

Bucky shook his head, already pulling himself up to lie by Steve.

“I ought to, though.”  

That wouldn’t do.  He nosed near and then kissed Steve deeply, and Steve made an indignant sound at the taste of his come in Bucky’s mouth.  

“There,”  Bucky grinned an impish grin, and Steve made a sour face.  “Now you’ve tasted.  Anyway, I didn’t need any help.”

“Asshole,” Steve mumbled, pink and happy and sleepy at Bucky’s side.  

“I love you,” Bucky traced the shell of Steve’s ear and watched his eyes as he said it.

“I love you, too,” Steve mumbled, and sleep was already taking him.  

Once Steve was asleep, Bucky lay awake a long time and watched the moonlight crawl across the floor.  

Bucky glared around the office.  The woman, Dr. Addo, was pretty. She seemed sharply observant from the get-go, and it was near-impossible to guess her age, with near-black skin and hair that was barely contained in an exuberantly colorful scarf.  Whatever mind-virus had convinced her to wear an outfit that was exclusively loud patterns in primary colors had also infected her office, which dripped with houseplants and distracting little decorations.  Where she bedecked herself in the most obnoxious colors she could find, all her stationery was pastel, which matched her powder green lipstick and acrylic nails.  

Who the fuck had let him pick this woman?  

Steve had, obviously.  He’d shown Bucky a list of names, and Bucky, desperate to comply with Steve’s demand that he talk to somebody, had selected the first name on the list.  Addo.  Because it was alphabetical.  Hence… 

He’d sat here in silence, in this stupid chair in this stupid office, staring down this insufferable woman while she did paperwork, for the last three sessions.

”I don’t want to talk to you,” he’d said after a couple bits of attempted small talk that felt, somehow, deeply invasive.

”Oh,” She’d perked up at that, which was fucking ludicrous.  “Okay.”

”I’m only here because Steve’ll leave me if I don’t come.”

”Alright,” she’d said, and jotted a note in a pink notebook with a pen that had a flamingo on the end of it.  How was this woman a doctor?  “It’s your fifty minutes. Do you mind if I chat a little?”

”I don’t want you to talk to me.” 

Here was this… well, excluding the whole look she’d cultivated, an otherwise unoffensive lady and Bucky had been so goddamn hostile.  But somehow, she hadn’t seemed upset or put off by Bucky’s silence, and after a couple moments, she’d pulled out a book of poetry and Bucky had seen the cover, and promptly left.  The next week and the next, she’d stuck to working on her computer, looking up at him only occasionally.  She was doing that now, typing away, then pausing, and then typing again.  Even her goddamn keyboard was pastel.  Who the fuck was this woman?

“Is everything you own pastel?”  Bucky asked, and if he’d been a better man, maybe the disdain wouldn’t have dripped from his tone quite so much, but Bucky had proven over the last seventy years that he was as far from a better man as a human could get.

Dr. Addo raised an eyebrow.  Today her makeup was all in greens, and she’d painted her eyebrows an emerald green to match her lips and the rainforest pattern of her jacket.  She obviously put thought into how she looked.  How the fuck could somebody think as hard as she did and still fuck up so bad?

”What if,” She leaned forward conspiratorially, “When I leave work, my whole aesthetic is actually black leather a la Harley Davidson?”

What the fuck?

Bucky was frozen, his brain unable to reconcile the images of bikers with this tropical bird of a woman.  

It was absurd—she was absurd.  How the hell was she a doctor?  

But the absurdity cracked something in him that even most torture couldn’t crack, and he started to laugh. 

“Oh, we all contain multitudes, don’t we?”  She made an eloquent gesture with her hand, and Bucky realized her nails were different now.  She’d let somebody paint old-school emoticons on them in yellow and orange.  “Maybe I go home and change into— whatever you’re picturing, and walk my two matching Dobermans… Dober-men?  I don’t think that’s right, but I like it better.”

The surprise and laughter subsided, but something had changed.  Addo’s attention was on Bucky now, even if she was minding her eye contact and not staring.  Bucky realized, belatedly, that he’d talked.  He’d opened the gates, and now he couldn’t un-open them.  Fuck.  Could he go back to Steve and just pick the next therapist down the list?  Would Steve let him?  

But he kind of didn’t hate Dr. Addo.  She was weird, but she’d been willing to just ignore him for the last three sessions, and Bucky got the sense from Steve that that was pretty unusual, and that people usually talked to therapists, and he really didn’t want that.  Shit.  He really didn’t want that.

“Oof, alright, too much?” She leaned back in her chair, letting Bucky have more space even though that was stupid—he was a supersoldier and she was… it actually didn’t matter, because he could literally pick her up and throw her through a wall.  She was as far from being a threat to him as a person could be, but here she was, trying to make herself seem less intimidating?  Ridiculous.  This was ridiculous.  Bucky hated this.  His fingernail worried the seam in his metal arm, and he suppressed a wince when the plates parted and his nail slid into the narrow space.  

Addo intentionally made herself somehow calmer.  ”Yeah, okay, so I notice that you look like you’re back on high alert.”  

Fuck her and fuck her observations.

”We’ve been pretty committed to not talking to each other so far.  We had a pretty consistent thing going for the last three sessions, and today got a little different.”  She observed.  Bucky dug his nail in harder just to feel the pain.  He was going back to the list as soon as he went home.  There was no way in hell he was coming back here.  

“You know that talking just now doesn’t mean you’ve committed to talking to me going forward, right?  We can go back to sitting quietly if you want.”

What kind of coward did she take him for?  Bucky wouldn’t stand for it, so he had to say something.  He had to…   “I don’t want to talk about the past.”

”Ok.” 

Addo said it like it was nothing.  Like that was allowed.  

”And I don’t want to talk about HYDRA.”  Bucky could feel his pulse in his fucking teeth, feel the jarring vibration of the arm’s motors at work.

”Sure.” 

Something was unknotting in him, and Bucky made himself keep going, because if she was okay with not talking about shit, then maybe she was still better than the alternatives.  Maybe she was still okay.  

“And I don’t want to talk about Steve.”

”Alright,” she picked up a pen that had a daisy stuck to it with floral tape.  “No past, no HYDRA, no Steve.  There is nothing that you have to talk about.”  She gave a little smile, like Bucky might be in on a joke with her.  “By now, I hope you believe that you don’t actually have to talk at all.”

”But you have to tell Steve I’m trying.”  He didn’t say the second half, though it still felt loud in the room: ‘Even if I’m not.’

Fuck, that sounded desperate.  Bucky dug his nails in harder and then froze when Dr. Addo noticed.  For a moment, he thought she’d say something—you are not to damage HYDRA property—dumb cunt broke itself again—but she didn’t.  Instead, she fixed him with a serious look and pursed her lips.  

“So, I’m willing to check in with Steve if you want me to,” she said, and this was feeling distinctly like talking to a teacher.  Like there was some glaring thing he’d missed in an assigned reading.  “But whatever is said here is between me and you.  I know you signed stuff at the beginning, but I just want to remind you that the only time I will share things without your explicit permission would be if you were going to hurt yourself or somebody else.”

Bucky ground his teeth and pulled his nail out of the seam in his arm.  

“Yeah,” Addo twirled her daisy pen, and Bucky thought maybe he didn’t totally hate it until she pointed the flower at his arm.  “I might ask you about that at some point, if you decide you’re okay with it.  But, look: You are trying.  I can tell you don’t want to be here—you haven’t made any efforts to hide that.  The fact you’ve shown up four times in a row at all means you’re trying.  You don’t know me, you have no reason to trust me or believe that I have anything to offer you, and you’re here under duress.  Honestly, the fact you said anything at all today is a big try.”

Bucky opened his mouth to protest, but all that came out was a weak little sound.  He wasn’t here under duress.  Nobody had forced him.  He’d been forced to do things—he knew about force, and this wasn’t that.  This wasn’t…

”Again, I’m not working with a lot, but the fact that Steve threatened to leave you unless you came here, and you believe that he needs me to tell him that you’re trying…” She shrugged, “I’m not saying he’s got a gun to your head, but it’s clear you didn’t choose this for yourself.”

Weirdly, that helped.  Bucky’s foot quit jittering on the floor, and his knee quit shaking.  

He nodded and sat back a little.  For a while, they sat in silence, but it was a different kind of silence.  He looked at Addo, taking in her noisy patterns and weird nails and pretty face.  She wasn’t like anybody Bucky had known, and maybe that helped.  He took a long breath and felt it unwind the tension in his chest, and across the desk, Addo took a deep breath too.

”So, there’s plenty to not talk about, and obviously we can keep on not talking.”  Her voice was soft, understanding.  “But do you want to talk about something that’s not on the no-go list?”

Bucky felt the way his heart started racing at that, but… he shrugged.  Fuck it, right?  He was probably never coming back here anyway.

”Do you follow baseball?”

Bucky frowned.  Steve loved baseball.  Steve and old people.

”Are you only asking that because I’m… from the past?”

”Yep!”  Addo smiled brightly, and it was the first time he’d seen her smile with teeth like that.  It was… nice.  “Pure stereotyping, plus it’s baseball season—my next guess was going to be Jeopardy, hard candy… radio shows?”

”Oh, fuck y—shit—sorry… uh,” He fumbled with the indignation, embarrassed and off-kilter.  “No, I, uh… I do actually really like Jeopardy.”

Chapter Text

He needed to do this.  

It didn’t matter that the thought of stepping into a clinic made him want to shut himself away among the mothballs to rot forever, or that the idea of discussing his private humiliation with a stranger seemed worse than jumping out of a moving train.  It didn’t matter because Steve needed this.  Steve needed him to be… better, so he needed to do this.

He had to.  It was mission-critical.  Three times now, Steve had wanted to be close, because Bucky was doing the right things.  He was eating and going to therapy with Doctor-Fucking-Addo and her bright clothes and nails and casual demeanor—weren’t shrinks supposed to be serious?  Actually, it didn’t matter.  What mattered was that it had worked, and Steve wanted to be with him again.

What mattered was that no matter how desperately he wanted things to be good for Steve, he couldn’t get hard except the stray stiffy waking up from a nightmare (and wasn’t that just fucking great?  Just so fucking great.)  Steve would have hated knowing about this, knowing that Bucky couldn’t make himself want Steve, even if there was nothing in the world he wanted more than Steve.  

Steve had dealt with enough of Bucky’s weird shit, and it was essential that Steve didn’t have to deal with this, too.  

But once he was in the stupid little room with its stupid little fake plant, everything was different.  The place smelled like nitrile, and his whole body braced against it, like it was ever the glovesthat had been the problem.  Fuck but this was pathetic.  

“I’d like… uh…” He stared at his hands.  This was stupid.  “I’m having trouble with… the ladies… and… I’ve seen ads on TV and stuff, so…”

Rip how many people apart with your bare hands, but you can’t ask for a goddamn dick pill?  Real nice, Barnes.  

“Oh, yeah, I got you.” The nurse-practitioner smiled warmly, and Bucky tried not to think about all the techs he’d tried to kill.  “It’s not at all uncommon to sometimes have trouble achieving an erection—less common for people who are your age, but it happens—and there are plenty of good options.  Let’s just talk through some medical history, and we can discuss options, and if everything checks out, you’ll walk out of here with a prescription, yeah?”

That was fine.  Bucky could lie through a couple dozen questions.  Other than the parts that made Bucky want to French a shotgun, it was shockingly easy.  Yes, this was more recent, no, he hadn’t been under more stress lately (because who would find living with their best friend more stressful than being imprisoned? Fucking nobody).  He resented the subtle implication that it was all in his head when the NP said, “And if this doesn’t work, we can look at other options.  Sometimes it can be stress-related, and that’s less likely to respond to these types of medications.”  

The NP didn’t even ask that many questions once Bucky brushed off the possibility, and the pharmacy had the pills ready in twenty minutes.  All that drama for nothing.  

Mission fucking accomplished.

Dr. Addo seemed unimpressed by Bucky’s frankly staggering valor at the men’s clinic.  It was downright insulting, actually, because she usually seemed impressed by the most mundane shit, and here Bucky had gone and done something that was actually hard—for him, at least—and she just gave him that cool, appraising look like she was about to explain something he ought to already know.  

God, he hated that he cared so much what she thought.  

“So,” She began, more delicate than usual, which meant that whatever was coming was a velvet fucking hammer.  “First, I think it’s great that you’re advocating for your needs, and I agree that going into a medical setting of your own volition marks a pretty big milestone for you.  In the past, it’s seemed like you couldn’t tolerate environments like that without Steve acting as your ‘handler,’ and this time you went all on your own.”

Oh fuck.  Here she went validating.  That was a bad sign.

“You mentioned that the stakes of your visit to the clinic were pretty high.  Can you tell me more about that?”

Shit.

“It’s not that I think he’d leave me,” Bucky hedged, trying to maintain as much of his victory as possible in the face of Addo’s siege.  “It’s just that I want to give him this.  I want to make things feel… right again?  Things used to be so good, and then… seventy years of HYDRA happened, and… I just want this back.”

“Yeah,” Addo nodded along.  She could be casual in that same way cats could be when they knew a mouse was approaching.  Patient as a sniper.  “It makes a lot of sense that you’d want that control back, and honestly, it sounds like you were being pretty resourceful about it.”

“But…?”

Addo chuckled, warm and approving.  “Now, what makes you think there’s a ‘but’ hanging over us right now?”  She gestured to the air above their heads, and Bucky scoffed.  

“Look, I don’t mean to be blue around a woman, but I can’t get it up to fuck my… friend.” Bucky didn’t mean to raise his voice, but he was pissed, and Addo was being willfully difficult right now.  “And what kind of fucking man does that make me, huh?  What kind of guy can’t get it up when somebody wants him like he wants me?  And I’m so shit-tired of everybody thinking it’s fine that they took that from me—that I’m just this now—I’m a goddamn man!”

“Are you angry at me right now?”  Addo asked, looking like she hardly cared what the answer was, and Bucky realized he was standing.  Standing and shouting.  

Fuck, he was standing up and shouting at a woman.  

His fingers went to his metal arm, nails sliding between the plates, and the grinding ache of shitty wiring bloomed bright for a moment, and Bucky pulled a deep breath and sank back into his seat.  

“Sorry.” He picked at the seam, letting the pain pull him back into the present.  

“Does that hurt?”  She asked, pointing at Bucky’s fingernail worrying the metal arm.

“It doesn’t damage the arm,” Bucky evaded, but Addo was too clever for him.

“Oh,” She smiled that beneficent smile she liked to smile when she caught him in a trap, “That’s not what I asked.”

“If I talk calmly about my dick, can we ignore my arm?”  He bargained, and this time Dr. Addo gave a wry chuckle.  

“You know what?”  She twirled her pen, “It’s a deal.  If you quit hurting yourself, I’ll even spare you having to talk first.”

Bucky shot her a disbelieving look, but took the weird, clacky little toy—a shark whose body was composed of nesting cups so it could flop around.  

“So, I’d like to point out that you equated sexual performance with being a good man,” she said, nonchalant as the day was long.  “Building on what you’ve said in previous sessions, that means that a good man takes responsibility for himself, is willing to accommodate the needs of the people he loves, and has erections.”

Bucky blinked and fiddled with the shark, nervous. She’d really picked the worst way to say that. He would have protested that he’d never said that, but he kind of had.

“Because, and I know I’m splitting hairs here, but you were very specifically concerned about your ability to have an erection and how it related to being a good man.”

“Can you stop saying ‘erection,’” Bucky snapped, and he didn’t realize until he said it how uncomfortable the word made him. 

“Sure.  Can you tell me what’s going on for you when I use that word?”

Bucky shook his head, and Addo let it go.

“Is there a different word I can use, do you want to try to talk around it, or do you want to step away from the subject of sexual arousal for a little bit?” 

She sounded like she meant it, and Bucky kinda thought that if he’d insisted on saying ‘giraffe’ or ‘coconut,’ she’d’ve done it.  That, more than anything, made the irritation bleed out of him, and his shoulders sag.  “Jeez, no,” he sighed, “It’s fine.  It’s… I’m fine, you can say whatever you want.  I know what you’re getting at.”

Addo smiled like she understood how annoying this was. 

“And, I get that I, of all people, should understand that getting hard doesn’t make you a good man—met enough bad men with, uh, a stand.”  Wasn’t that the understatement of the century?  Over a seventy-year career, Bucky might have the record for having met the most bad men, both numerically and in terms of sheer viciousness, and he laughed darkly at the superlative.  

“And I can see what you’re doing.” His accusation was toothless, “You’re not sneaky.”

“Not trying to be,” Addo demurred, “But go on.”

“You want me to think that being good for Steve doesn’t mean doing all the things that would do right by him, and that’s just not true!”  

“Earlier, you talked about being a good man, and now you’re talking about being good for Steve specifically,” Addo observed.  “Is being good for Steve the same as being a good man?”

Bucky scoffed.  Stupid question.

“He’s… I mean he’s Captain America, and whatever you think he’s like, he’s even better than that—he’s got more upstanding in him than the Washington Monument.”  He watched Addo for any sign that she agreed with him, and saw nothing.  God fucking damnit.  “And I used to be… I kind of got it back.  For a little while, I could be good to him, make him feel good, and it was good for me, but if he ever found out that I’m not… That I didn’t like it the same way, he’d never touch me again.

“And I do like it! Just because I’m not… just because I don’t get off on it doesn’t mean it’s not good—never gotten off on watching the stars or eating pancakes, and those things are good.”

“But,” Addo was being deliberate, and Bucky could feel the fucking crosshairs on him.  “Didn’t you say that a good man is willing to accommodate the people he loves?”

Bucky froze in his seat, the stupid little shark midway through another slinky twirl, and stared daggers at Addo.  How fucking dare she?  He wasn’t sure he’d ever been this angry at her, but he couldn’t even get himself to get up and leave.  His body was trapped here, the fury some strange entrapping ice.

Something passed over Addo’s face, first a curiosity and then recognition, and she ceded space in the room, even though that was stupid because what the fuck difference did it make how close to her desk she sat?  But it did.  It did make a difference.

“Okay, I’m sorry,” she said,  “I can see that was a misfire.  I wasn’t trying to imply that Steve isn’t a good man.  I meant to imply that, because he’s a good man, he would be willing to hear you out and accommodate your needs.  For a while now, we’ve been approaching the idea of talking to Steve directly about some of your experiences and needs around sex and intimacy.  It’s clear you want that sense of closeness and intimacy with him, and that he feels like he could be a safe person for you to have that with.”

The shark’s little layers reminded Bucky of the plates in his arm, and he slid a fingernail between them and wiggled it in the loose space.  “I can’t talk to him about that,” he said.

“Can you talk to him in general?”  Addo answered, and Bucky knew it wasn’t an attack on Steve, but it still felt like one.  It felt like every time he talked about Steve, he made Steve seem like this huge dickhead who only thought about what he wanted and never paid any attention to Bucky, and that was so far from the truth.  It wasn’t like that at all.  Steve loved him.  Or… Steve hadloved him. 

Steve wanted to love him. 

Bucky forced himself to nod, because if he said no, it was going to make Steve seem worse, and Steve wasn’t worse.  He was so good that looking at him made Bucky’s eyes water.  He was like the fucking sun sometimes.  

“This is tough stuff,” Dr. Addo said, and her voice was gentle like she knew Bucky was having a moment.  “If you’re not sure it would go okay, you can get some proof of concept by bringing up something safer, but still challenging.”

Bucky looked up from the shark.  

“Maybe some small thing from your past to test the waters.  I know you struggle talking about it, but you’ve brought up some things that feel safer to you.”  She smiled when Bucky shook the shark’s body so it looked like it was swimming.  He was being really dumb, but Addo didn’t seem to mind, and he couldn’t focus his whole brain on this conversation or he’d explode.

“The nice thing about that is this:  If things go great, you’ve grown as a couple, built trust, and laid the foundation to have the harder conversation.  If things don’t go as well, you can address what went badly, grow as a couple, build trust through that repair, and lay the foundation for having the harder conversation.  It’s win-win!”

The worst thing about her idea was that it seemed really solid.  Bucky scowled at the shark.  

“Look,” she offered,  “Conversations about sex can be confrontational or intimidating.  Sometimes we invite partners in for a session to facilitate those conversations.  We can talk about that if that’s ever something you want.”  

“I don’t want to work up to talking to him about sex stuff, because he thinks nothing was my fault,”  Bucky said, finding it hard to look at Dr. Addo.

“And you?  What do you think?”

“It’s just…” Bucky stared at the spider plant in the window.  He didn’t want to be here, but he’d promised Steve and lately everything was bringing shit up.  “Sometimes it was my fault.”  The truth of it was comforting. 

“That’s an interesting take.” Dr. Addo didn’t usually come right out with, pull your head out of your ass, Barnes, but he could clock her gearing up for it.  He could feel his mind trying to arm itself against her socratic assault, the questions that would inevitably lead Bucky to the sour conclusion that he’d gotten something wrong.  It was almost annoying, except that’s what she was supposed to do, right?  

“So, what does it mean that sometimes it was your fault?”

“Most of the time, actually,” Bucky mentally cataloged the most bothersome recent memories, his whole mind just one big fist, balled up against the coming fight.  “I just mean that if I stab myself and then need stitches, it’s my fault if getting stitches sucks because I fucking stabbed myself.”

“Is this a real example?”  That single raised eyebrow, painted blue because Addo liked dramatic makeup.

Bucky rolled his eyes.  

“Ah,” She smiled, youthful face warm as the sun.  “Not made-up, but not the one you’ve been thinking of?”

“I thought you said you didn’t read minds.” Bucky groused, petulant, but already the coiled tightness in his chest was unspooling.  It was unfair.  Psychological warfare waged in this cozy, green space that smelled like cinnamon and tea and whatever exactly Dr. Addo put in her hair.  

“I don’t want to talk about this stuff,” Bucky stared at his knees in defeat.  What was the fucking point of this if he couldn’t just… Wasn’t he supposed to talk about what he’d survived, about the banal fucking horror of living day-to-day?  About the monster they had tried to replace him with?  

Addo seemed unfazed.  Maybe she had already decided he was beyond help, and now she was just biding her time until she could dismiss him.  Maybe there was nothing for him in her green little office.  

“What makes it hard to talk about?”  Her tone was curious, light.  Like it was nothing even though it was fucking everything.  Somehow, that made it easier.

“I mean… If it’s my fault, then what business do I have complaining, right?  My actions, my consequences, my problem.”

“You take a lot of responsibility,” Addo smiled again.  Warm.  It was going to suck when she told Bucky not to bother with another appointment.  “You’ve mentioned before that being responsible for oneself might be important.”

“Yeah?”  Bucky scoffed.  “What kind of a man are you—or… what kind of person—if you can’t be responsible for yourself?”

“Have you had to deal with many people who don’t take responsibility for themselves?”

Bucky actually laughed at that.  “Too fucking many—uh… too many.  Sorry.”

“You can curse,” Addo’s eyes smiled when she smiled, and the worry again unwound.  “Too fucking many?  What does it look like when somebody won’t take responsibility for themself?  What are those people like?”

This woman.  She asked it like she didn’t know, and Bucky scowled for a moment at his knees.  “You deal with fucked up people all day,” he said, “You gotta see them all the time.”

“Humor me,” she said. 

And he did.  

Bucky let himself fall into the couch with an undignified bounce, and Steve looked up at him from his tablet.  He smiled and made room for Bucky, opening a little space like an envelope that Bucky could tuck himself into.  How many times had he made that same little gesture, that same little opening while he had a book in one hand?  Some things never changed.

Bucky tried not to show his fear.  Some things never changed, but some things were about to.  

“You want me to be more honest with you.”  The words were bitter on his tongue.

The excitement in Steve’s “Yeah?” was enough to set Bucky’s palms sweating. 

“I...uh, I don’t know what you want to know.”  Bucky couldn’t maintain eye contact with Steve, not when he was this intent, this interested.  “What… What do you care about?”

“I care about you—”

It was too much, and Bucky had to cut him off. “There’s literal decades of history, Steve.  I’m not asking to be shitty.  I’m asking because there’s too damn much and I don’t know where to start.”

“I just…” Steve looked taken aback.  How many times had he stonewalled Steve into this painful silence?  And now he was being unfair again, but he needed the advantage.  He needed the high ground.  Steve’s search left him shaky, adrenaline and garden-variety terror swirling into a nauseous soup.  He didn’t want Steve to know just how unclean his hands were.

“Did anyone ever…” Steve looked wounded already.  “Was anyone ever kind to you?”

Just like that, a thin, freckled face with mousy hair came to mind.  He remembered so little about Volkov, but he knew the kid had been good to him.  Bucky nodded.

“There was a guard,” Bucky didn’t want to see Steve’s judgment, because, joke of all jokes: Bucky’s stupid heart still ached for the kid for reasons he just couldn’t understand.  “Volkov—I can’t remember his first name…  I just remember thinking it reminded me of flowers.  He was just a kid.”

A wave of grief rolled through him, tilting the world around Bucky, and he clung to his composure like it might save him from this conversation. How could the grief be so big when he struggled so much to remember the kid?

“I think they assigned him to me because he was studying English and I didn’t speak Russian yet.”

He dared a glance up, and Steve’s tablet was face down, his eyes soft.  He looked like he wanted to reach out and touch Bucky, but everything was too raw for that now.  He didn’t want to be touched.

“He wanted to be a translator.”

“But… he was kind to you?”

Bucky’s memory was so shabby that he hardly ever trusted it, just so many fragments, shards too small to tell if they’d once been a teacup or saucer, but he knew Volkov had been good.  He’d been one of the precious few good things in those dark early days.

“He loved American movie stars.” Bucky’s voice was small.  The sentiment felt so fragile, so breakable, that he wanted immediately to take it back.  He wanted to protect this piece of Volkov, and why?  He was probably an old man now—an old man or dead.  He’s dead, Soldat.

Bucky dug his nails into his knee.  This fractured memory was precious to Bucky, and he couldn’t understand the prickling swell of emotion.

“It just…” Steve cleared his throat, all choked up over nothing just like Bucky.  “It means a lot to me that someone was good to you.  I know it wasn’t… God, Buck, I mean I read the… documentation they had, I know it had to be hell, but…”  

Steve’s eyes were wet, and Bucky couldn’t name the feeling that curled harsh and uneasy at the thought of Steve reading that.  Jesus Christ. Two grown men acting like this.  Fucking ridiculous.  It was all in the past.  

Steve must have noticed Bucky recoiling from the thought, the vague sense of horror at how little he remembered, because he offered an out.

“Maybe some other time,” Steve offered,  “Maybe you can tell me about… whatever you want.  I want to know what mattered, what matters to you.”

“I don’t want any of it to matter.  It’s in the past.  I want it to stay in the past.”  

“I just wish someone could have protected you.”

After the first time, something shifted in Steve.  He was like the old Steve, and Bucky felt like he’d upgraded his “real person” costume from Spirit Halloween to Ren Faire.  Steve would shoot these sly, flirty little glances, or glance at Bucky and blush, and it made Bucky feel like a man again.  Like a person.  

There was a giddiness that buzzed in Bucky.  A sense that he’d gotten away with it.  Like he’d snatched something precious and purloined it away.  Success had only emboldened him, so he stole kisses in the kitchen and flirted until Steve stared and he got to tease him about catching flies.  

Sitting together, Steve sketched the ugly rust patch on the fire hydrant outside and Bucky blew smoke out the open window.  Steve had always liked that he smoked.  He’d always liked kissing the taste out of Bucky’s mouth, something filthy and forbidden and all theirs.

Steve’s pencil stopped.  He breathed in the evening and breathed out his particular, lovely calm.  “I missed this.” Steve turned those china-blue eyes to Bucky, and he ought to have called him ‘doll’ or said something suave.  He hadn’t been ready for it, though, so he took another drag on his cigarette and watched three pigeons investigate a crack in the sidewalk.  

That night, he fucking sang for Steve while Steve fucked him.  He was careful to keep a hand on himself, to keep a running commentary full of goading flirtation and praise, and Steve was so happy.  He was so, so happy.  

Steve was so happy that Bucky could almost feel it in his own chest, and it was like being alive, and he loved Steve more than anything.  He loved Steve.  

Why wasn't it enough that he loved Steve?  His artifice was armor, but it couldn’t protect him.

Protection.  

That word resonated sharply, the aural afterimage of a bell, something that vibrated just beyond hearing. 

Chapter Text

“What if it is protecting me?  What if… What if it’s not just fighting to fight?”

The idea felt dangerous.  Bucky’s knee bounced.  Dr. Addo had gotten a new clock, and it had little birds on the hands, and the colors clashed with the rest of her office.  Never had Bucky suspected a shrink’s office would be so… exuberant, and the strangeness of it sometimes pulled his mind off his nerves. 

Not today, though.  Today, he felt like he was facing a fucking firing squad.

“You’ve said it’s a monster,” Addo said.  Her lipstick was blue today, a shade to match the pattern on her jacket, and her nails were sunflower yellow.  The fabric of her jacket was gingko leaves over a dizzying chevron background in bright primary colors.  She’d told him the name of this fabric before, something from Africa.  Kitenge, he thought.  Once she’d said her mother still sewed clothes for her, and it had reminded him so acutely of the world before… everything.  His mother had made all of Becca’s dresses.

“I’m curious about this monster.  What does it look like?”

The question was ice water, the terrifying splash of somebody pushing his face beneath the surface again and again.  He steeled himself against it.  He’d withstood that and worse, and he was here now.  He was fine.  It was just words.  

“It looks like me.” He tried not to speak to his knees, not to mumble.  He didn’t want to reveal just how ashamed he was, but it was hard.  “But not like me as I was back before; me like I am now—with the...” He shrugged his metal shoulder, not wanting to have to name it.

“What are you like in these dreams?”  Addo asked, “Are you as you are now?  Or are you different?”

“I’m still…” whole, me, he didn’t like either word.  “I have both my arms.”

“Maybe this doesn’t lead anywhere, but I’m so curious about what the differences are between you and your monster-self.  You called him the Winter Soldier.”

“That’s what they called it.”

“I notice you use the word ‘it’ instead of ‘him,’” Addo observed, curious and calm, like Bucky didn’t have a monster lurking under his skin.  Like part of his body hadn’t been ripped away and replaced with a weapon.  Like his goddamn soul hadn’t been ripped out and replaced with something unspeakable.  “What do you think the Winter Soldier might be protecting you from?”

“I don’t remember a lot of things,” Bucky hedged.  He wished Dr. Addo could just figure it all out and tell him what it meant without him having to wade through this muddy river in his mind.  “I don’t know.  It’s just, sometimes when I do remember something, it’s… I don’t think I forgot the stuff because it was fun, is all I’m saying.”  Bucky took a deep breath.  He wasn’t going to be a coward.  “And in the dreams, when things got… I mean, they were nightmares, you know?  But then, instead of being in the nightmare, I’d suddenly be fighting it or it would grab me and drag me away, and… The nightmare would end.”

Addo nodded, as impassively interested as she always was, like he hadn’t just had to force that confession out with every drop of his willpower.

“Yeah,” she agreed, “I’d be curious to see what happens if you choose to think about it that way. I mean, it’s not like the dreams have stopped, which isn’t to say I’m not still open to prescribing something to help with that—” Bucky shook his head, and Addo continued, “Yeah, so if that’s still not interesting, then you’re likely going to have some chances to test out this new way of thinking.  What do you think will happen if you approach it as a protector?”

Bucky shrugged, then snorted.  “Maybe it’s a trap and it’ll finally kill me.”

Addo smiled, the royal blue stretch of her lipstick, the flash of her teeth, made Bucky feel like he wasn’t on the verge of ruining everything.  “Oh, please survive.  How will I find out what happens in the dream, otherwise?”

“Are you trying to protect me?”  he asked, the familiar anger still too close to the surface, a thin cover for whatever weakness lurked beneath.

The mask hid any twitch of the lips, and the Winter Soldier’s eyes were as cold as snow.  It sent a shiver up Bucky’s spine, and he growled in his frustration.  He wanted to fight it.  He wanted to punch it and rip at it and fucking bite it.  He wanted to throttle it until it quit moving, and then just keep choking it out.  The impulse towards violence was like a flare, hot and bright and lingering, but not near.  Not present.  A magnesium burn over long-shadowed forest, cold and distant.

There was a hint of a nod.  An affirmative, and the rage brightened again.

“I don’t want your fucking protection,” Bucky spat. “Do you even understand what you did?  Do you even… Decades of my life!  Do you even care?  I… You’re a fucking monster, you ruin everything you touch—you ruined me!”

Something, then, like a flinch, but just in the Soldier’s eyes.  

“Just give me the key,” he demanded, grabbing the Soldier’s wrist and yanking it toward him until he could pry the key free.  Unlike last time, it felt like handling a mannequin, lifeless and stiff.  

The thought of the monster trying to keep him, to possess and protect him like a dragon guarding its horde, just another of HYDRA’s many arms, made Bucky sick.  Never more than now did he want to obliterate it.  He wanted to erase it, destroy it, ruin it.  He wanted to rip it off of himself and melt it down until it was just a hunk of scrap metal, harmless and inert, until its animating essence was less than a memory.  

The door opened and spilled starry golden light, warm as a sunrise.

Bucky stepped through the door.

The room was a galaxy.

Somewhere, a string quartet was playing, audible over the hum of polite conversation.  Women in gowns that glittered and dripped with sparkling jewels carried crystal glasses and graced men with their smiles, and the men preened and babbled about the vast contracts they were signing, the weapons they were building, coastlines that would bristle with missiles, and guns enough for every man, woman, and child to defend the rights of the mighty to their land’s wealth.  

The wealth in this room could have ended world hunger and stopped every war.  The power in these men’s hands could have tilted the world toward justice.

The men in this room took no interest in such insipid things.

The man Bucky knelt before had his fingers buried in Bucky’s hair, and his hands weren’t strong.  Nobody was strong compared to Bucky.  Nobody could force him.  Bucky was on his knees because he chose to be, and there was power in that.  His power wasn’t in bending the world to his whims, but in being the strong hand that would grab the world for these smug men.  

He was not forced.  He allowed the man to pull him until his nose met the black tuxedo pants.  It was by his leave that the man held him there until the muscles in his stomach jumped and his legs trembled, until his vision grew gray and loud.  It was important that Bucky allow this.  It was vital.  If he didn’t allow this, something terrible would happen, so he forced himself still.  The need for air was louder than a jet engine.  Every sluggish, racing heartbeat was mortar fire.  

But Bucky didn’t feel it.  

It was bizarre to watch this happen to himself and to feel none of the terror he knew should be coursing through his body.  He knew what was happening, but it was like it wasn’t happening to him.  He was disgusted by these men, but nothing they did could touch him.  Nothing could hurt him.

Not really.  

Anyway, this was still better than—No. Best not to think about that.

Best not to think at all.

They choked him with cocks and hands until tears wet his face and neck.  Until he nearly blacked out, and then until he nearly blacked out again, and then again.  That small mercy of unconsciousness denied him, Bucky fought to stay upright and pull air into sour lungs.  

“Aren’t you worried you’ll kill him?” somebody asked.

Some of these men were civilians.  They were not handlers.  Handlers were more trustworthy.  Predictable.  Handlers read the manual, but civilians didn’t.  This wouldn’t kill him.  It hadn’t killed him.  

Bucky watched himself from among the men, breasts shining like Smaug’s treasure, satin lapels that gleamed like scaly armor. He watched himself on the floor and felt nothing.  That wasn’t right, was it?  That couldn’t be right.  Where terror should have breathed, there was something reflective and not-there.  Something recoilingly familiar, and Bucky balked from it, abandoning himself to the thin mercy of these shining men.  

He fled himself, the door had to be somewhere here, didn’t it?  He’d just come through it, so it had to be here.  The keys were in his hand (had they always been in his hand?) and the door was… the door was… 

There.  

He fumbled the key in the lock, seeking the grace of the empty hall, the coolly weeping walls, even the metal-armed Minotaur that guarded it.  Anything was better than this place of vague horror and horrifying emptiness.  He struggled with the keys. Rust or blood stuck to them, snagged in the lock, and Bucky cursed the keys and the doors and the world for this place that should never have been.  

The darkness that welcomed him was salvation.  

Salvation and the smell of incense, and a room that was warm and dry.  This wasn’t the castle.  This wasn’t… 

This was… 

Bucky remembered this.  How could he have ever forgotten?  This was that arms deal.  Georgia.  He’d been between handlers, and the wipes hadn’t been perfected yet.  There’d been that… he never learned the man’s name nor his title, but he’d been briefed pre-mission.  There had been a man who needed to see the asset’s compliance, and the asset needed to comply perfectly.  That was fine.  It was nothing.  The asset was perfection, and its compliance was perfection, and complying with orders was hardly memorable.

Bucky remembered this, though. 

He waited, and they’d dressed him in silk gauze—he remembered because whoever had dressed him had bitched about it and threatened to punish him if he hurt the fabric, though he wasn’t allowed to touch it—decorated in tiny golden stars.  The man who had arranged him here, lounged lazily on this low bed with its thick ruby brocade and its many cushions that all smelled of spices and cedar, had arranged the fabric in a sensual drape so that the stars framed the most appealing parts of the asset’s body and invited the eyes to feast.  

He remembered how his body hadn’t flinched when the door opened and golden light spilled in and was dammed again quickly by a newcomer.  He remembered how the two guards’ attention shifted from lazy appreciation of the asset’s body to wary watchfulness over their guest.

He remembered this guest.

Soft hands and a soft voice, and everything had been so strangely, surreally soft.  Gentle praises and worshipful touches had rained down on him, and Bucky remembered that it hadn’t been painful.  It had been nice, almost.  The watery slide of silk over a body that had been meticulously groomed and scrubbed and cleaned, prepared like a meal, laid out with pride by the loving chef.  This man was no starving dog.  He delighted in the presentation long before tasting.

And even being consumed by this man was soft and lovely.  Bucky watched himself answer touch with softly-voiced moans and hitched breaths.  His body squirmed under warm, dry hands, begged without words to be touched gently, touched like this.  Touched like a lover.  

“So beautiful,” the man said, and his words were worship.  “So lovely, so devoted.  You trust me, don’t you, love?”

Bucky nodded.  He did.  He trusted this man because his mission was to be good for this man, and what this man wanted was his trust.  That was fine.  He trusted that this man lacked the physical power to kill or maim him, even if he made no effort to protect himself.  He had no weapons.  He was a civilian.  A weapons contractor, Bucky was fairly certain.  Bucky vaguely recalled hearing that he was the spoonful of sugar in this weapons deal.  

“Be still for me, love.”  The man kissed Bucky’s jaw, and he smelled like pepper and clean sweat.  Fresh.  A carved wooden box with a brass closure in the shape of a lion’s head opened, and inside it, there gleamed metal.  Thin rods, a dozen of them, and they made no sense.  They meant nothing when the man showed him, and again asked for Bucky’s trust—the asset’s trust.  

Then the man’s hand had reached for the penis, and Bucky watched it and felt nothing.  He felt nothing as gentle fingers pulled aside silk that hid nothing, silk that shone with stars.  Pulse raced and cheeks flushed, the body was trembling finely when the man ran a hand up the inside of the thigh, under the silk, over the belly.  It wasn’t Bucky’s body.  It wasn’t.  It was just a body.  

Just a body.

The body was just a body, and sensation was just sensation.  Cool lubricant spread around the tip of the penis, the shine of metal, its faint blood-odor because metal smelled like blood and blood smelled like metal.  It didn’t have to mean anything, and Bucky stepped back from his body.  He watched in detached fascination as sweat beaded over the body like the finest drops of dew, shining like stars in the strange, intimate light.  He watched breath speed and hitch, and how his eyes locked to the man.  The praises, the endearments, the reassurances, all so gentle.  Everything here was gentle.

It wasn’t happening to Bucky, anyway.  

Years of training had cultivated in the body an ability to go loose and lax.  Many things were less damaging when the body didn’t fight them, and surely this would be too.  Surely.  And surely the body would relax more readily if there was just a little bit more time.  There were ways to look at men that could buy time, ways to turn the parted lips and the small sounds riding the breath, even the hectic flush of arousal or terror, into a honey trap.  This man was just a man, wasn’t he?  He could be trapped as readily as any other, and the asset had been ordered to be good, not to be still.   He could—shake those hips like a good little slut—he could.  

“Please?”  

It was like feeling through clouded glass.  He was both aware of and disconnected from the sensations in his body.  The warm hand that should have grounded was instead a vagueness where embodiment might once have been.  

“It is so small,” the man said, “See?  Nothing to fight?  There are men who love this, and you?  You are strong.  You, too, will love this.”

The rod was thin and cool where it touched Bucky, and he didn’t want it to touch him.  He didn’t remember what had happened, but he knew that he didn’t want it to happen.  He didn’t want to see, and yet he needed to see.  He needed to know what lay beyond the cruel void where memory should be, and he watched his knees part further to accommodate the man. He watched his foot begin to bounce.  

“I won’t hurt you, love,” he soothed, and Bucky didn’t believe him.  Nothing hurt.  Nothing this man did hurt.  “You must be so still for me.  So still.  So brave.  This does not hurt.” 

The tip of the sound dipped into the… into his… into… Fuck!  Bucky stared at it.  It was going in.  It was going inside, and he’d known when he saw the rods what they were for, but this was different.  This wasn’t the same.  This was a piece of thin, smooth metal, disappearing inside his—

A flash of anger, indignant and righteous, when the body gasped against Bucky’s command.  The pulse raced so fast that it sent dizzying spots across the whole visual field, and there was a sound of tearing fabric when the metal fingers pierced the mattress beneath him, insinuating themselves among the springs that shrieked to be touched.  

Nothing should have been able to touch them, and they weren’t ready, and they protested the touch of Bucky’s hand.  They hated it.  They begged the hand to leave and Bucky focused on that strange violation, the power he had to sink his fingers into the bed.

“Stop that,” a guard knocked the cool muzzle of his gun to the sensitive skin at the top of the arm.  A shot there would be terrible to recover from.  

Between parted, trembling legs, the man seemed sour and annoyed.  

“Apologize.”

The apology fell like a stone from tingling lips.  

“It is only the tip,” the man said, “See, love?  Only a few millimeters.  Does it frighten you?”

A shake of the head.  It was nothing.

It slid in a centimeter, two.  It was cool, or maybe it was hot.  It was inside.  It was inside.  It wasn’t stopping!

“Please!”  

The word was reflex.  It was involuntary.  He didn’t mean to, it just… 

Another reprimand, another rifle, a bruising rap across the temple, and the man cooed and soothed, and this wasn’t Bucky’s body.  He wasn’t here.  He watched, but it wasn’t really him.  

And then the sound slid further, the man twisting it to distribute lubricant, and the sensation was wrong.  It was wrong.  It was wrong!  

The chest leapt with every panting breath, sweat wet the body and caused the silk to cling to the skin.  The heart hammered at a sprinter’s pace, and hot and cold chased themselves and raced themselves through the body, through tremblingly taught muscles.  The teeth chattered until the jaw clenched against the sound and the threat of more begging.  

To see his body—but not his body—doing this, to know every sensation divorced from the hatred he had for being touched, was strange.  Bucky watched his right hand trembling where it held onto the ruby brocade, soft and heavy and velvet—and wanted to soothe the tremor.  

The head was shaking now, frantic denial after frantic denial.  It couldn’t stop.  The guards had encroached to hold the hips down, to press the knees aside.  To open a space for the man to slide his shining thing inside Bucky’s penis, and it wasn’t his penis.  It wasn’t.  It wasn’t his.  He didn’t want it to be his.  He didn’t want the scream building, coiling like a spring, squeezed tight like the trigger of a grenade, to be his either.  Something changed; the overwhelming wrongness became blinding.  It was a magnesium flare inside his body, too bright, too hot, white and cold in the night sky, a star that wasn’t a star—nothing like the soft stars picked in gold thread on the silk.  

The sound twisted, and suddenly the scream transformed.  The body juddered with laughter, wrong and insane like the terrible thing buried where no thing should be buried.  The laughter made the guards’ hands cruel and the man’s hands still, and Bucky had seen enough.  He’d had enough.  It was enough, and he lunged forward, ready to drag the guards away, but they were smoke between his fingers.  They were gone before his hands could touch them, as was the gentle man with the gentle hands.  Bucky banished them, and even in the sanctuary of their absence, the laughter continued.  It was the shriek of bed springs under metal fingers, the hysterical cackle of machine gun fire.  

He ripped away the starry silk, the nothing of it insubstantial under his fingers, and hauled at the red velvet roughness of the bedspread.  It wasn’t his body, but he needed to cover it.  He needed to conceal its nakedness, to protect the tender flesh, the frightened softness of its penis, empty now but aware of the horror it had survived.  He needed to stop that laughing, because it was making his teeth itch, his ears clench, his fingernails ache.  

It was an accident when his fingers touched the grotesqueness of the Winter Soldier on the bed—it wasn’t him.  It wasn’t, and yet when careless fingers brushed the slick temple, terror like a mortar obliterated whatever detachment Bucky had managed.  He choked on it—this terror wasn’t his.  It shouldn’t be his.  Nothing in this room belonged to him, but the terror didn’t care.  Fear oozed infectious from the mad monster in Bucky’s shape, and he couldn’t survive another second in this terrible room.  

He couldn’t leave the Winter Soldier here either.  Hadn’t Ivanov once said mercy was a bullet to the brain, not a sympathy after a gutshot?  We are only remembered as cruel when what we hurt does not die quickly.

The Winter Soldier was immovable.  It shook in silence now, laughter inverted into tense, trembling gasps.  The silence wasn’t the balm Bucky had hoped for, and he fought the creature’s gravity.  It was too heavy to move, yet Bucky pitted himself against it, ordering and begging and “move, damn you!”  The keys were hot, or maybe they were cold in his hand.  They were slippery with blood or rust, and the door was so far away.  It was too far away, and he roared out his frustration and the world around them was dark, cool.

Water streamed down the walls, and golden starlight graced through the doorway—the third doorway—pooling glitteringly on the wet floor.  Bucky cringed away from the starlight and remembered the Winter Soldier cringing from the orange and red lights of the first two doors.  

No.  

He looked at its curled body, the ruby dream brocade trailing off into black shadow, staining dark with the castle’s strange water.  Its body shook, and it might have been laughter or it might have been sobs.  Water poured down the castle walls.  

No.  

Bucky bent near, afraid to touch.  Afraid to hurt this hurt creature, afraid because he knew his touch would hurt it and because he knew he would touch it anyway.  Words filled his mouth, and he feared to voice them because they were true and he didn’t want them to be his.  With careful fingers, he pulled the wet blanket over the Winter Soldier. The shuddering intensified. The water poured.  He pulled the blackening brocade until it covered the whole body.  Its vulnerability was grotesque, and Bucky hated it even as he shielded it.

Some fucking protector.

Outside the castle, a storm raged.  

“So, you’re starting to explore sexual intimacy again, and suddenly the dreams appear to take on a bit of a theme of sexualized violence.”

There was a new potted plant in the corner of Dr. Addo’s office, and it had deep pink overtones to the leaves.  

“Sounds like a coincidence,” he grumbled, knowing that the cat was out of the bag already.  

“Could be.” Dr. Addo gave a bright smile that seemed to shout, but you and I both know it’s not. 

He looked over from the plant, and Addo had her usual, placid look about her.  She never did take the bait.  “Sometimes I really don’t like you.“

“Honestly, I’m just glad you talk to me.”

She watched him for a moment, then got serious. “I’ve been a little more direct with you lately, and I’ve been a little more pushy, because you seem to tolerate it pretty well and you seem to trust me more than you did in the beginning.  This isn’t easy, Bucky, and I’m grateful that you’re willing to talk about these things.”

Bucky looked at his knees and shrugged. “Steve’s the one with a thing for praise, doc. Don’t gotta do that for me”

“In all seriousness, I hope you trust that I’ll back off if you tell me it’s too much.”

“Sure, doc.” Bucky shrugged again and stared at the holey monstera leaves by the window. “But I won’t tell you.”

“I guess I’ll just have to be careful, then.”  

“I just… I can’t stop thinking about how it was laughing.  I don’t know if that was real or… Did I go crazy?  Is that… Can that happen?  Did I go insane and now I’m just a ticking time-bomb waiting to go off again?”  The question escaped, a crack that released a flood.  “It wasn’t funny.  There was nothing funny—”

The rest of the sentence died as Bucky’s throat squeezed shut. Ok, fine. It was gonna be one of those sessions.

Addo lit up, though, and it was a face that Bucky recognized (and he hated that he knew her well enough to recognize it) from the times when she was about to do one of her famous, patented Dr. Addo TED talks. She loved a lesson—it was wild she’d decided to deal with crazy people all day instead of becoming a teacher or something. 

“Oh god, is there gonna be a printout for this?”  Bucky huffed, trying to bat away the cobwebs of tension. 

“There can always be a printout,” Dr. Addo beamed, and he really ought to have disliked that sentiment more than he did.  “But no, no printout today, but it isn’t because this is such a rare or strange thing that nobody’s typed one out.  We’re just having some technical difficulties at the moment.”  

She smiled and gestured at her little printer, which bore a sticky note with a picture of a sad face and a band-aid.  

“What you’re describing is something that is called an incongruent affect.”  She leaned back in her chair, and Bucky leaned back in his, listening.  “So, your affect is how you show your emotions, and very simply, incongruent affect is when what you feel on the inside doesn’t match what you show on the outside.”  

She looked pretty happy to be talking about this, and Bucky noted that he probably looked like he was paying attention, and that was fine, but… “So, all the time, basically.”  Because that was just it, wasn’t it?  Maybe in this moment he looked about how he felt, but he spent so much of his time wanting to disappear but forcing himself to look engaged, or terrified and forcing himself to look fine.  Hell, he spent a good chunk of therapy cracking jokes to seem like everything was copacetic when it just fucking wasn’t.  

“Yeah,” she said, and her mouth tugged down a little, sad.  The emotion talk was bringing everything to front-of-mind.  “It’s pretty common in people with trauma histories like yours, but it’s important to note that not everybody’s affect reflects what they’re feeling all the time, and it doesn’t have to.  Theater couldn’t exist if perfectly healthy, okay people weren’t able to show emotions they weren’t feeling, and sometimes we need to put on a brave face or project a certain emotion because of the situation we’re in.”

Bucky nodded along with that.  It seemed… maybe too normal for what had happened in the dream.

“What you described, though, is where that mismatch can be pretty distressing.  Sometimes people cry when they don’t feel upset, which, ironically, becomes upsetting.  Sometimes people will laugh at funerals.”  Bucky cringed at that last example, and Addo gave a gentle little shrug.  “It happens, and, again, it doesn’t mean something’s wrong with them.

“What you described was really extreme, and it happened because you—”

“It wasn’t me,” Bucky protested, but it felt hollow.  

“Of course,” Dr. Addo recovered, “Because the Soldier was so terribly trapped.  In a dangerous situation, we’ve evolved to fight, flee, freeze, and in some cases fawn to appease dangerous people.  The Soldier tried everything.  He tried to ‘be good,’ as you put it, to appease, he tried to shut out the experience and freeze, running away and fighting back were impossible… There was nowhere for that instinct for self-preservation to go, no release valve for that pressure.”

Listening to it told back to him, Bucky was shocked by how much his body responded.  These stark, simple terms left his heart beating heavily, his breath shallow.  

“Now, I personally find this bit very interesting:  Laughing and crying are actually pretty similar tasks with pretty similar functions, and they use very similar parts of the brain.  Both serve to relieve pressure, and both can be involuntary.”  Addo was good to listen to.  Bucky listened, and felt himself cooling down a little, and he thought that if she taught classes, he’d probably want to listen in on them.  “So, deprived of any options, that pressure built and built, and then your brain ran out of options and had to release some of that pressure.  It didn’t care if it was going to make sense in the moment, because it was just trying to survive.  What came out sounded and looked a lot like laughter, but it was really just your brain and body’s way of saying, ‘help, I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t see any way to make it better.’  

“And here’s the kicker: it should have cut through the noise in the room and cued somebody to help you.  Because laughter in a situation that’s that overwhelming is a red flag.”

“They beat it,” Bucky said flatly, the images floating like dead fish on the surface of his mind.  “The Soldier.  They beat it until it shut up again.”

Addo’s mouth got thin.  She was upset, and Bucky kinda didn’t get it.  She sighed. It wasn’t a happy sigh.

“You signaled in every way available to you that you needed it to stop,” she said, and Bucky recognized this as a high horse that she probably didn’t need to be on, because he was pretty sure all those guys were dead by now, but he didn’t really mind.  It felt weirdly good to know that, even when he couldn’t, she cared that something shitty had happened to him.  “I understand that the bar is extremely low for these HYDRA people, but even if they only cared about the Soldier inasmuch as he could work for them, they must have understood that the kind of psychological distress they caused would—”

“It was an arms deal.”  Bucky stopped the thought right there.  He’d made HYDRA’s arguments to Dr. Addo before about how the shitty things were just business, and she’d pointed out before that their logic didn’t hold up to the sadistic fucking glee.  He didn’t need to hear it again.  “Plain and simple, and… And it wasn’t like the guy hurt me… it… fuck.  He didn’t actually do any damage.”

“Except that decades later, you’re still feeling the pain of that event.”  Addo sure knew how to execute a finishing move.  

“Oh, yeah, well,” Bucky shrugged, retreating a bit, “If you think that’s bad, just wait ‘till you find out what they did to my arm.”  He wiggled the mechanical fingers so the motors would be audible, and Addo didn’t quite laugh, but he thought he saw that little sparkle of amusement.  

“Well,” she smiled, “with about five minutes to go, we might have to come back to it next session.  I’ll just have to live in suspense.”  

“Yeah, well, just don’t look too close if you don’t want to spoil the surprise,” Bucky joked, and then he quit joking a little bit while Addo asked him about what kinds of supports he could lean on at home this week, and what he might do if he needed to ground himself in case some of the resurfacing memories got to be too much.  She reminded him that he could lean on Steve, and not just for sex, and Bucky tried hard to imagine a version of himself that would actually do that.  

Nodding and answering along, Bucky realized he wanted to be the version of himself that Addo described at the ends of sessions; this guy who was okay enough to ask for help and take care of himself and all that crap.  This guy who could talk to his partner instead of just fucking to drown out all the noise, who didn’t retreat into his room and hope that days would just slip past until the world ended, who didn’t lie when he was doing bad. 

That Addo thought that guy and Bucky could ever be the same was a minor miracle, but he wanted her to be right, so he tried.

Chapter Text

The thin tickle of sweat succumbing to gravity, rolling across his skin, was all Bucky could think of.  It raised goose flesh along his side, an almost pleasant intensity that he associated with nothing but the pure, simple joy of exertion.  It was a feeling of waiting in silence and watching from his sniper’s nest as the sun baked the world around him.  A world of other sensation fell away as he focused on that narrow path, on the coolness and hotness of his body.  

He hadn’t slept hardly at all, fearful of sleep’s horrors, but this might be the next best thing.  Everything was just rhythm, the relaxation of his body, sweat, breath…  Steve existed in the periphery of his awareness, also here.  Also sweating.  Near.  Strange that he could be so near, and so far away.  

“Buck?”

It was the third or fourth time he’d said it, and Bucky frowned, struggling to connect the word to any required action.  There had been no command… shit.

Bucky swallowed.  “Sorry,” he said, “Sorry, I just…”

”Are you sure it’s okay?  We don’t have to—“

”It’s fine,” Bucky mumbled, taking account of his body. He realized the problem almost immediately.  His hand fell to his dick, wrapping it in gentle fingers.  It wasn’t hard, but that was pretty typical.  His hands had fallen away from Steve, which was probably what had upset him.  He’d gotten lost again—he’d relaxed into the sensations and gotten lazy.  This was about as easy a task as there was—fuck.  No.  Not a task.  “I’m fine, just… just keep going and I’ll catch up.”

The suggestion clearly didn’t land.  Steve’s earnest expression still made Bucky want to scream some days.  Nobody could be that soft and survive.  The world was going to chew him up and spit him out, and Bucky wanted to just do it all at once, rip off the band-aid.  

Rip off the band-aid...  Volkov would have liked that saying.  He— Something about Volkov was a hot stove in Bucky’s mind, and he always flinched back from those thoughts.  

“I don’t think you’re ok,” Steve said, low and careful, like he thought Bucky would run away, which… fair.  It wouldn’t be the first time Bucky had run from an uncomfortable conversation.

”I’m fine,” he grit out, digging his fingernails into his thigh until the pain cleared away some of the fog.  

“Am I doing something wrong?”

What the fuck?  Bucky wanted to shake him.  Doing something wrong?  Ridiculous.  Like there was a wrong way to use—to fuck him.  And Bucky wanted it!  He did.  This was… so the dick pills hadn’t done a whole lot, but he still wanted this because he wanted Steve.  He tried to shake his head, but Steve slid a hand up his thigh to his belly, skirting his cowering dick.  Pathetic.  

“It just doesn’t seem like you’re getting into it,” he said, “Is this… This didn’t happen last time, did it?”

“It’s not a big deal.” Bucky said, wishing to God that he could just disappear. This was fucking embarrassing 

Things would have been better if Steve had put Bucky on his belly and just gone for it.  It was a good opportunity to sack himself out to it, to just muscle through the nausea and fear, the clinging memories of other hands and other cocks and other men speaking other words, just like that, Soldat.  It always got better, the realness of Steve slowly overwriting the old terror, giving him something new and good to remember.  He wanted that.

“What does that mean?”  Steve’s anxiety was too much.  It was thorny in the air.

“Maybe if I’m on my stomach it won’t bother you,” Bucky offered, trying to be as gentle as he could.  It wasn’t Steve’s fault. None of this was Steve’s fault.  

Steve swore quietly and pulled back, and Bucky felt his heart rate pick up, fear swelling in him, a river overspilling its banks.

“This is… Okay, information purposes only,” Steve carefully picked out the words Dr. Addo had given them to use, but Bucky could feel the agitation beneath them.  There were going to be right and wrong answers.  “Do you enjoy sex?”

The fear exploded through him, a blast that flattened the forest of Bucky’s mind.  There was a right answer, and there was a wrong answer, and Bucky knew his answer was wrong.  He was going to say something or he was going to say nothing, and no matter what he did, something terrible was going to happen.  He was fucked if he lied, fucked if he told the truth, and fucked if he didn’t say anything because his heart was going a mile a minute, and it was harder to stop himself from panting like a runner under the strain.  Steve was going to know.  Steve was going to find out.

“Buck?”  

Fuck.  Fuck!  He sounded so hurt already.  He sounded so small.  He wasn’t supposed to know because Bucky should be able to do this—he should be able to give this to him. A brief flash of unfair resentment lit Bucky from the inside when he thought about how much Steve knew. He’d done his homework when Bucky was too fucked up to tell him to read a novel instead, and it had poisoned nice things for them, and Bucky was so so fucking close to getting them back, and now Steve wanted to shut things down. Fuck that!  

Hands clasping around his startled Bucky enough that he froze, breath stopping midway, teeth pressing until his jaw ached.  Raising his eyes to meet Steve’s hurt gaze was a Herculean feat.  He looked shattered.  

“It’s fine,” he tried to reassure, but nothing he could say would be reassuring.  “I can—”

“Oh God,” Steve’s voice cracked over the blasphemy, his eyes were heavy with unshed tears, swimming.  “I thought… What about last time?”  

“It’s fine—”

“It’s not fine!”  Steve shouted, and the anger was so much better than pity.  It was so much better than hurt.  “It’s not fine!  You didn’t want it and you didn’t tell me, and there’s—Jesus, Buck, there’s words for men who fuck people who don’t want it—”

“I wanted it!  I wanted it,”  Bucky tried to reassure, his words a rockslide, but nothing he could say would fix what he’d done.  He’d lied, hadn’t he?  By not stopping Steve, but not telling him that he wasn’t excited by fucking, by trying to get what he wanted instead of caring about Steve, hadn’t he taken something?  

“No, you didn’t!  Because if you did, then you’d fucking like it, and you don’t!” Steve scrubbed a hand over his face, pacing, putting distance between Bucky and himself.  “You didn’t, and you didn’t tell me, and then I… Why would you…?  You made me just like them.”  

The weight of the accusation filled the whole room.  It pressed the air out of the space, and Bucky stared.

“Take it back, Steve.”

“I didn’t want to…” 

“They were rapists and torturers, Steve,” Bucky tried to reason.  Steve was till piecing together the horrible puzzle, and Bucky wanted to stuff the words back into his mouth.  He wanted to stem the tide, but his efforts were just a finger in the dyke.  “But this is just sex.”

“It fucking wasn’t!”  Steve shouted, fingers twisted in his hair, body curled around the hurt as if it were something physical.  “It was never just sex!  Not for me!  It was— I have to go.”

Bucky wanted to argue, but how?  Steve wanted him to want sex and like sex, and he didn’t.  He just wanted to prove to himself that his body was his, that sex was something he could control, and he’d used Steve.  That was clear now, he’d just been too blinded before by his own petty desires to see it.  Steve wanted something beautiful, like before, but Bucky was too ruined for beauty.  Apologies clung like dewdrops on his tongue, heavy yet unfalling, and eventually, Steve excused himself.  

For the rest of the day and the next, Steve didn’t touch Bucky, and Bucky didn’t come in at night.  He overheard Steve making an emergency appointment with his version of Dr. Addo, a man he referred to as Randall instead of by his title.  Other than the few encounters coming in and out of the kitchen, he was scarce.  Bucky hated that he couldn’t hide better.  Before starting to “process his trauma,” —Addo’s term, not his—he’d been able to handle himself.  Hell, he’d been able to put on a good show before.  Why was it that he could moan like a fucking whore for all those men who only wanted to hurt him, but he became useless the moment Steve tried to be gentle?  

Two nights without sleep were about the maximum he could manage anymore.  Volkov had always carried drugs to help him, and subsequent protocols had been based on Volkov’s findings. They used to have the good stuff back in the day.  Two wakeful nights perched on a neighboring rooftop, watching the light Steve left on for him, the warm window gazing out into the dark, left Bucky feeling disconnected from reality.  He was slow and every sense was sandpaper against his mind, but some animal part of him couldn’t tolerate the idea of being found asleep. Volkov would have watched for him.  Aleksey would have too. How long had it been since he thought of Aleksey?  His memory emerged into Bucky’s consciousness like a mangled bullet being squeezed out by the bizarre healing power the serum imparted.  

Aleksey had laughed so much.  Bucky watched Steve leave out the front door and had to snatch his mind away from drifting so he could sneak back into their townhome to sleep.  Just a bit.  Just while Steve was away and the house was safe and empty.  

Rain poured on the castle.  It shimmered in the low light of three open doors, thick like blood on the stone.  In the darkness, the Winter Soldier waited.  Water made the walls shine like glass.  

Keys crunched between his fingers as he approached the Winter Soldier in the hall.  The pool of starry light repulsed them both, and Bucky skirted around it with a vague, queasy horror.  The Winter Soldier pressed to the next door, protecting its chipping, green-painted surface from Bucky and the keys, and Bucky hated it.  

He was disgusted by it.

This pathetic, pitiable thing that had supplanted him, that had worn his body around while doing HYDRA’s grim bidding… Everything about it was repellent to Bucky, and he wanted to rip it to shreds.  He wanted to peel the metal arm off of it and leave it bleeding and fragmented on the ground.  He wanted to sink fingers into its throat to punish it for even thinking it should be allowed to breathe the same air as real people.  

He went for the lock, and the Winter Soldier grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t—” it said, and its voice was thin,

“Don’t touch me,” Bucky snarled, and the Winter Soldier didn’t touch him.  The world was sliding, too slippery to hold, and he couldn’t stop thinking about how the Winter Soldier had tried to shield him.  How it had done terrible things, terrible things.  How he never would have been able to do those terrible things.  How many people would still be alive if the Winter Soldier hadn’t been so goddamn weak?

“If you were trying to protect me, then you did a shit job.”  Bucky turned the key in the lock, and soft, green light spilled out through the door.  “What are you even good for?  You ruin everything.”

The plants in this place were watered with blood, and they had been for a long time.  Kolyakov’s most recently—a fact the asset couldn’t bring himself to regret.  There had been many, many handlers, and Kolyakov stood out as a particularly demeaning little sadist with no respect for the asset’s military superiority.  So he’d ignored the asset’s indications that he should stay put?  So be it.  Brass would probably disagree, but it wasn’t the asset’s fault that Kolyakov was splattered across two streets.

Direct hit. Shame that it would have been quick, Kolyakov always did have such a zest for suffering.

The whole city had taken such a barrage that it was a miracle to find anything green left alive, but after two and a half days of constant rain, the leaves on the trees were waxy and dark and undeniably alive.  It was the small greenery of this little courtyard-park as much as the presence of the new handler that drew the asset. 

Aleksey Lebedev had been given the words, but apparently no training whatsoever, marking him as uniquely unqualified to handle the asset.  He lacked the good sense to just put the asset away before he went carousing with the other soldiers, and so the asset was forced to sit here around a small fire and listen to Lebedev’s inane bullshit, fish stories about heroic deeds as Russia’s Red Guardian.

Ridiculous.

Lebedev had prattled with the soldiers for at least an hour, delivering anecdotes and current events and synopses of the latest movies (which he hadn’t seen either).  The bear of a man had a real way of interrupting the asset’s peace, and it didn’t help that he was the temporary handler.  There were many ways of being a terrible handler, and Lebedev certainly didn’t do anything dramatically cruel or depraved, which probably meant he wasn’t the worst, but listening to him go on and on, it was easy to forget that.  

The asset tried to focus on the waxy shine of the tree leaves.  There were things he knew about, but the local flora had never been a subject of training, and so he traced the shapes of the leaves over and over with his eyes.  All around, the voices of men echoed off the remaining brick buildings, calling in Russian.  Rowdy invitations to cards, claps on the back, liquor being poured… It was a foreign world to the asset.  He was rarely stabled among the soldiery like this, kept instead to the higher ranks as a bit of a novelty in between missions.  Handlers usually had no problem taking a little bribe in exchange for the asset’s cooperation in whatever the higher-ups wanted to do.  Money or women liquor, often more than one, would flow easily, and the asset would— do as I say, you dumb cunt, or you’ll eat your teeth.  

Lebedev wasn’t nearly as competent as other handlers, trading laborious storytelling for a few meager cigarettes, ignoring his most valuable chip: the asset.  Who’s the dumb cunt now, Kovalyov?  Shit.  It was overdue for a wipe.  Thoughts were starting to get away from it.  Kolyakov was blessedly dead

In the absence of anybody else to yap at, Lebedev turned his inane attentions to the asset.  “Tell me about yourself, Winter Soldier,” He smiled a lazy smile and held out a hard-won cigarette as if the asset didn’t know better than to take one without explicit instruction.  This was going to be insufferable.  Even the tests were pathetic.

“If I wanted to talk to a dancing bear, I’d go to a circus,” the asset growled.

Across their little fire, Lebedev made a small sound of surprise, though whether it was because he so seldom spoke or because it wasn’t one of the standard phrases, the asset wasn’t sure.

“For soldiers like us, we take comfort where it can be found.”

“Shut up and dance, Lebedev,” he snapped, irritation sharpening him until there was nowhere safe, “You’re not a soldier, you’re a fucking mascot.”

“Ah,” Lebedev’s eyes danced in the firelight, “And you are dog that bites.”

With a groan and a heave, Lebedev found his feet.  

“I have never met dog that bites who was not beaten first,” Lebedev intentionally walked too close to the asset, intentionally clapped a hand on his shoulder, and he knew that it was a reminder.  

The asset wasn’t allowed to deny this man.  Whatever he wanted to do, he was allowed.  That lesson had finally stuck, and the asset felt his breath grow laborious, its measured evenness now an impossible task.

“Ah!”  Lebedev took advantage of the asset’s compliance, his hand came down like so many hands, touched him like so many hands.  The sound it made when it clapped the asset’s shoulder rang in the empty courtyard.  “But perhaps you are special!  Sleep, Soldat.  You never know when they ask us to go.”

In the quiet Lebedev left behind, an ache bloomed.  It opened slowly, spiraling out from the center of his chest, rose petals preserved under heat lamps in the stinging cold of winter.  It had been so long since he’d felt like this.  With the heel of his hand, he rubbed at the ache beneath his sternum.  The ache in his heart.  

A fish in a barrel with nowhere to go, the asset eventually followed Lebedev.  He wasn’t a real handler, but he commanded the asset for now, and it was standard to guard handlers during sleep and wait to rest until instructed.  Kovalyov might have kicked it, but handlers came and went.  The asset and its protocols were eternal.  

Bucky ran.  He passed through doorway after doorway, moment after moment in a forgotten life.  Lebedev in his stupid red uniform addressing Russian troops, a general whose face crackled like radio static against Bucky’s brain, the endless deep blue expanse of sky and Volkov puffing out smoke as he passed a cigarette to Bucky.  Moments that didn’t frighten him, moments that were… 

“Why are you hiding this?”  Bucky whispered into somebody’s abandoned kitchen, lit by the stove, Lebedev somewhere warm and near.  In the corner, shielded by shadow, the Winter Soldier mouthed words that Bucky didn’t care to know or understand. 

“This is mine,” Bucky stood, stalking down his dark reflection, “You’re hiding it from me, and it’s mine!”  These precious moments of warmth, of solace. These rare moments in which Bucky had been okay, and this so-called ‘protector’ was trying to hoard them to itself.

He wrapped his hand around the Winter Soldier’s throat and, for a moment, it looked like the metal fingers were his and not its, but no.  No.  Here, his hand was a hand.  Here, he was all Bucky, no vestige of the monstrosity they’d wanted to make of him.  The only monster was thrashing against a dark shadow, punching at Bucky’s sides, fighting to escape.  

The Winter Soldier wrenched itself to the side, disappearing through a doorway, and Bucky pursued.

He stumbled through a door into flickering, fluorescent light.  In there was a pervasive smell of wet, like spring was outside, like people were carrying mud in on the soles of their shoes.  The disorientation of walking through a door in one time and place into another time and place still jarred, but Bucky almost thought he was getting the hang of it.  There was something settling, almost calming, about the space he’d shared with Lebedev.  No great tragedy, no horror, just a moment of almost peace.  Did the Soldier feel what he felt in these moments?  He must.  After that room with the bed and its red brocade cover, Bucky was sure they felt the same terror and pain, so was it such a leap to think they might both be able to care?  

The ache was still there, but fading fast.  In its place was a low-grade dread.  This was an old place, the stone basement of a church, a building repurposed and repurposed again.  Bucky took stock of his body.  He was cold enough to shiver, which wasn’t a normal sensation for him anymore.  His left arm was missing, but no longer bandaged.  Ok.  That narrowed things down.  

Bootsteps approached, and Bucky didn’t try to move on his cot.  They didn’t bother locking him behind bars, the two feet of pipe and chains around his ankles were an effective hobble, and with only one arm he couldn’t pick a lock even if he had the tools.  

“We are leaving today.”

Bucky tried to sit up, the action a struggle without his arm, with his legs spread and bound.  It was Volkov, the little one.  He hung warily back, as if Bucky would hurt him, which… alright, Bucky had done his fair share of damage, he’d taken the guy with the unreal moustache and put his nose into his brain, but that was because he’d tried to drag Bucky into the lab again.  Bucky did not like the lab.  But he wasn’t about to do that to little Volkov.  Not this kid.  

When Bucky’s hand slipped, Volkov lurched forward like he might try to help, before cringing back.  He was afraid.  Bucky was something to be feared.  Already the “treatments” were changing him, twisting him into something he didn’t recognize.  The drugs left him dazed and hazy, at times totally separated from himself.  Yesterday, he’d just… been here, chained and bleeding on the cot with no sense of how it had happened.  Even still, he was somehow certain that he wouldn’t hurt bookish, straw-haired Volkov.

Volkov said something in Russian and moved forward, steadying Bucky as he sat.  “I tell them that you walk with me, no problems.”  

“You told them?” Bucky smiled, “And they believed you?”

“I told them,” Volkov nodded, taking the correction in stride.  “Now, you shake your leg.”

Bucky actually chuckled at that one.  It was new slang for Volkov, and the kid was just hungry for it.  Sometimes he wrote down the phrases and sayings in a little notebook, but increasingly, he was remembering them.  “Time to shake a leg,” he let Volkov support him.

“I shake my leg, you shake your leg?”  Volkov asked, freeing Bucky’s ankles before cuffing his wrist to a belt around his waist.

“Just shake a leg.”

“You do not conjugate this one?”

“Ah, you sound like a teacher,” Bucky complained, and Volkov grinned.  All freckles and a gap-tooth and dark brown eyes.  He was just a kid.  Sometimes he reminded Bucky of Steve.  

Volkov laughed, adjusting the restraints, trying to make sure they wouldn’t pinch or squeeze too tight.  “This is funny,” he said, “because you are teacher.”

“You teach me too,” Bucky said, and it was about as close to thanks as was appropriate.

Anybody else’s hand on his waist, anybody else’s arm around him, would have been enough to make Bucky show off just how mean he could be, but not Volkov.  Volkov, stringy little thing that he was, held a special place in Bucky’s heart, and wasn’t that just the most fucked up thing about all of this?  Because Volkov didn’t exactly have clean hands.  He was working for these assholes, bringing Bucky from place to place.  He was no different from the other guards, except that he was.  

The higher-ups, whoever they were, didn’t let Volkov stay with Bucky when they did their sadistic little experiments anymore.  He’d put hands on a doctor, and the last thing Bucky had seen that day was Volkov shouting and struggling against two guys who could have each lifted him one-handed, and he’d tried to say the right thing, but the drugs were finally kicking in and the only words he could think of were, Christ, Rogers, what’d you go and do that for?

They walked through the cell door and—

—Volkov’s arm was still wrapped around him, but he was older now, solid and familiar.  He was talking, but Bucky couldn’t hear him well.  A terrifying pain bloomed through his right side, and Volkov’s grip was awkward because he was trying not to press into the absolute mush that his right side had turned into.  They’d done enough of those awful “tests” that Bucky knew he’d recover from this, that there was no need for the careful, gentle handling.  His “integrity was not compromised” by injuries like this one, but Volkov cared more about the little pained noises that Bucky hadn’t quite been broken of than the ever-growing manual that hung in a three-ring binder outside his cell.

“A little further,” Volkov said.  Primary handler, Bucky remembered.  Volkov commanded him for real now.  “Keep your feet, don’t sit down, Soldat.”

Bucky nodded, breathless, and stumbled on.  With Volkov on his left, he only had the monstrosity they’d put on him to hold on with.  Already, the blood on it was drying, causing the inner mechanisms to stick, new pains flaring down his spine and up into the back of his skull.  He couldn’t grab Volkov with it.  Not Volkov.  

“Come on, you get in truck and then you rest, okay?  Not before.  You are listening to me?”  Volkov kept on like that, this stream of encouragements, some in Russian and others in English, and Bucky realized he must be unsteady on his feet.  He hacked and spat, and tried not to see the worry that flashed across Volkov’s face.  That meant blood.  Fuck.  

It was only a couple hundred meters.  It ought to have been nothing, but without the adrenaline, the pain was making Bucky dizzy and sick.  By the time his knees hit the tailgate, all he wanted to do was curl up under that canvas top and pass out.  Volkov shut the tailgate and drew the canvas down, and the darkness was so much better than the snow-blinding brightness.  It didn’t hold much warmth, but maybe the cold would numb him out a little.

“You hold on, okay?”  Volkov spoke in English because the driver and two guards didn’t.  It was only for Bucky.  “You drink this.”

“I’m okay,” Bucky tried, but Volkov slapped his uninjured leg hard enough to make noise.  In Russian this time, though he knew his accent was no good, he recited the words he had been taught: “The asset is functional.”

“The asset will follow handler instructions,” Volkov countered, likely for the guards’ benefit.  They might not be watching, but they would be listening. “Drink from the flask, and don’t stop until I tell you to stop.”

“The new protocols—”

“Fuck this protocols,” Volkov hissed.  Wear and weariness in every line of his face, he looked older than his years.  “They want debrief when we get back?  You get medicine now.  They try to tell me what to do, but they cannot get rid of me.  Nobody sees, nobody knows.  Pick up and drink.”

The vodka was soothing fire, metal flask in his metal left hand because his whole right side was a mess.  He didn’t even feel the syrette poke him, and he didn’t think the guards noticed.  Alcohol and morphine in combination were not allowed.  Alcohol sometimes, but it had to be with permission from somebody higher up than Volkov.  Morphine wasn’t allowed at all.  Somebody had claimed it was too expensive, but it wasn’t.  They were just a bunch of assholes.  

Anyway, it didn’t stop Volkov.  

Whatever the opposite of desperation was, it sank through Bucky’s battered body like rain into the parched earth.  How long had it been since he’d slept?  He was freezing, covered in blood, but it didn’t bother him.  His captivity, the fear that had been chasing him, the horror at what they’d done to his body already and what they might do to it still; all of it fell away.  Only Volkov’s concern, the rough brush of his gloves, registered anymore.

“Daniil,” he breathed, and Volkov shushed him.  

His gloves came off, then, and he pressed a clean palm to Bucky’s forehead in a gesture almost as old as their uneasy partnership.  Bucky’s eyes closed even as Volkov slid his other hand into Bucky’s, tangling their fingers heedless of the blood.  The last thing Bucky heard in the shuddering truck was Volkov’s promise: “I’ll be here when you wake.”  

In the darkened hallway, the Winter Soldier waited.  

For long moments, they stood, Bucky backlit by the green light of the door, and the Winter Soldier in the darkness.  The keys were no longer in Bucky’s hand, and he stared at his other self.  In the darkness, the Winter Soldier shook its head.  

“Show me,” Bucky said, but he no longer expected some kind of answer.  

It was shocking, then, when the soldier stared at him, water running down his face just like it ran down the walls inside the castle, and said, “Don’t ask me this.”

Bucky woke beside Steve to the overwhelming sense that he had missed the other half of that sentence.  Don’t ask me this.  Why?  He’d run out of terrible things, it seemed, and now it was just a bunch of pretty nice Russians.  

Why?

Don’t ask me this.  

It rang in his mind, even as Steve stirred, alert to his wakefulness, and slung a heavy arm over him.  He mumbled something in his sleep, and Bucky chuckled.  He was so sweet like this, and something about the softness of the moment repulsed Bucky.  He couldn’t stay here, he couldn’t be around Steve—not like this.  Something terrible would happen if he got to have this, but what?

Don’t ask me this.

It was the voice of the void, some great emptiness inside him.  Some horrible, yawning nothing that swallowed up all things good.  Heart hammering, he lay still beneath Steve’s arm for an hour, maybe two, afraid to move, until the dawn woke Steve.

“I know you want me to want you,” Bucky forced himself to stand straight when he said it.  It wouldn’t do to shrink away from this.  Steve was hurt and every moment around Bucky hurt him more.  “I can try harder—”

“Don’t…” Steve squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, a hand rising to his unhappy mouth.  “We can talk about this, but I need us to do it like… I need you to not run away or wall off if we’re going to talk about this,” he said, “I saw Randall and he helped me understand some things, and I want to understand, but Buck, I feel like a monster.”

It made no sense at all, but Steve had no reason to lie and he looked so sad, so hurt.  

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”  Bucky said, and Steve nodded, pulling a huge breath.  “I thought I could get what I needed without…”  Shit.  He caught the lie before it could spill out of his mouth, because he hadn’t thought he could get fucked without hurting Steve, not really.  “I thought I could get what I wanted without you finding out.”

“What did you want, Buck?  Because I... I didn’t ever want…”

Bucky didn’t know how to put it in words, the huge need for his body and its pain or pleasure or compliance or struggle to belong to him again.  The silence stretched and Bucky knew this was just another version of running away, but he didn’t know.  How could he answer if he didn’t know?  He’d wanted Steve.

“I hurt you,” He steered away from his own tangled thoughts for a moment, hoping the reprieve would let him think again.  “I am—have been—a monster, but you… Why do you say that?”

“You didn’t like it,” Steve said, blunt fingernails pressing into his palms.  “And it happened more than once, I mean, Christ, it’s been going on months and I just found out you didn’t like it.  Never liked it?  And it’s like I’m one of them.”

“There were times I liked it with them,” Bucky blurted, to his immediate chagrin.  It was the wrong thing to say.  Steve grimaced.  “There were times I wanted it with them.  There were times I got to choose,” he continued, “And they weren’t always the same times.”

Steve’s fingers twitched like he wanted to touch, he’d always been so tactile, so liberal with his affection, leaving Bucky to man the brakes.  In this strange reversal, Bucky didn’t know how to move forward.  He stared at Steve’s hand and longed for it, but he knew better than to reach for the things he wanted.  

“I want to get to choose,” Bucky said, every word feeling lame and ineffectual.  “Even if I don’t… Maybe I can’t like it the same way anymore, but I want to be able to choose, and I do want… There were things you never got off on, but you did anyway, so how is this different?”

Steve stared at him, the betrayal written into every line of his face.  His rebuttal was fast and unfair.  

“I was never brainwashed—“

“I don’t want to let them take this away from me!”  Bucky’s voice was crackly, dry leaves underfoot, but the truth of his words rang through him like a bell, and he could see Steve felt it too.  “Please,” He could feel Steve loosening, his resolve easing, “Please don’t let them take this away from me too, okay?”

“It’s not okay,” Steve said, and he said it like he’d practiced these words which meant he probably had.  He’d probably practiced this with Randall and agonized over what he was going to say, because he did that sometimes.  He worried and worried even though there was really no need.  “Because, ever since…  You were sick for a long time, and you had… You were recovering a lot from the brain stuff, and I was in a position where I could… I could protect you and take care of you, but I could also abuse you, and I never wanted to do that.  I never wanted…” Steve swallowed, and Bucky watched the shadow of his Adam’s apple as it rose and fell.  

“Steve,” Bucky’s fingers wanted to touch him.  The bereft look in Steve’s eyes cut through Bucky.  He’d been literally gutted, but for a moment, Steve’s pain hurt more.  For the first time in a long time, for the first time since… maybe since Lebedev, his hands yearned to touch and his arms yearned to hold.  

“No, Buck.” And there he went again. Steve fucking Rogers putting his foot down, grinding it down on Bucky’s goddamn balls because he refused to believe that Bucky could be a fucking man. “Because you can’t be safe.  I won’t let you make me into your own personal HYDRA reenactment.”

Steve was looking right at him, but Bucky had never felt more unseen.

Chapter Text

It was important to be honest, and it was important not to hide things.  Bucky knew that, and Dr. Addo had never used honesty to hurt him, but it wasn’t the easy thing it ought to have been.  He looked at the cascading plants, their waxy leaves, and imagined he could smell the chlorophyll greenness of them.  Maybe he could, it might not be an illusion—the supersoldier serum had heightened many senses, and lately he felt more… connected to the supersoldier.  To the Winter Soldier.

“The dreams are different,” he said, before he could chicken out.

Dr. Addo didn’t jump on it right away.  She regarded him with soft eyes for a moment, assessing something beyond Bucky’s understanding.   “Different how?” She asked.

“Less… violent?”

“The violence was distressing,” she observed, “What has that been like?  Is it easier to sleep?”

“I wake up… sad?’

For a moment, Dr. Addo contemplated.  The whisper of a frown decorated her pretty face, and Bucky felt guilty for making her work so hard.  “Tell me about the Winter Soldier in these dreams”

“He’s smaller.”

“So, as the violence decreased, he became smaller.” She observed.  Bucky watched her fingernails, the little white flowers painted on them. “What do you think about that?”

He looked up, met Dr. Addo’s eyes.  “Are you asking if I think they’re related?”

“Sure, do you think they’re related?”  Did she know how annoying it was that she sometimes parroted things back and made Bucky think about them?  

“No?”  He frowned,  “Maybe.  I don’t know.  I don’t think it’s… Violence was what it was for, you know?  But I don’t know… It never wanted me to see that, but it seems more upset that I’m seeing… other things.”

Addo jotted something in her little notebook.  She had to burn through those things, the way she was always making little notes.  Today it was pink, and it clashed with every other color on her.  He kind of liked that. 

“So, he tried to stop you from seeing the really traumatic stuff before, yeah?”  She waited until he nodded before going on.  “Yeah, okay.  But now, is he trying to stop you from seeing this other stuff—and I do want to come back to what exactly that is—but is he trying to stop you from seeing that other stuff?  Or… okay, that wasn’t a great question.  How is his response different wben it comes to these other things you’re seeing?”

“I think it’s sad.”

“Huh.  You used that word earlier too, said you keep waking up sad.”

He had.  Damn.  He chuckled darkly and shot her a little crooked smile.  “This is why I pay you the big bucks, huh?  Shit… I think I feel what it feels.”

She smiled that warm smile, and it felt really good.  It was wild therapy could be so fucking hard, but Dr. Addo was still weirdly easy to talk to.  “Is that new, or do you think that’s been happening for a while?”

“I think… I think it’s been that way all along.  I think maybe I just didn’t see it.”

“So the fear early on?”

“That was his—its… that was its fear.”

“And you’ve said at points that you were angry.”

That thought caught on the gears of his brain, stopping the machinery for a moment.  He had been.  He’d been furious, hateful—he’d wanted to destroy the Winter Soldier, but had the soldier ever wanted to hurt him?  From the start, it had only ever tried to run away or hide.

“I think that was just me,” Bucky said, words coming slowly, like he was testing each one for its truth before setting it down.

“And now, sad.”

Bucky nodded.

“He had good reason to be afraid.”

Bucky nodded again, mind a swirl of disorganized thoughts, body buzzing with unease.

“I mean, the reasons he had to be afraid are… woof!  You had to work hard to find a way to carry that without hurting yourself.”

“I would have been fine,” Bucky shrugged, and Addo gave him that look she gave him sometimes.

“You would have been miserable.”

Bucky chuckled and nodded along.  It was as much of a concession as he cared to give.

“Are you ready to find out what the source of that sadness is?”

Bucky shrugged, feeling quieter than usual.

“I think it would be good to have Steve’s support in this.  How can you get him ready to be there for you when this blister pops?”

“Does it have to?”

Addo chuckled, and it was nice.  Even when she was giving bad news like this, she was just so different from all the people who he’d been around in the past.  She was like nobody Bucky had ever known, like nobody and like herself, and Steve had thought maybe it was a bad idea because they both had some preconceptions about women and about Black folks, what with coming from the twenties and all. 

It probably helped, actually. The army had still been segregated when they joined up, and HYDRA had been fairly homogeneous—Nazis weren’t particularly well known for racial desegregation and inclusivity, after all—and he wondered if it would be weird to bring it up with her that he was glad for that because it meant she was so far removed from the people he’d known. The people who’d… hurt him. Bucky wondered if it would be weird to tell her how glad he was that Steve had let him choose her.

“Even when you’ve been really miserable, you’ve still been curious.  It’s something I really like about you, you’re not… okay, you’ve said before that you’re afraid of knowing some of these things, but you don’t let that fear stop you from being curious.”

Well damn.  There she went being all appreciative before he could, and using that to disguise the fucking hammer.  She was right, though.  He didn’t know how to leave well enough alone.  He’d followed the soldier, he’d insisted on looking.  This wasn’t something happening to him; Bucky was doing it to himself, and he probably wasn’t going to stop.

“I think it’s reasonable to be afraid that there could be fallout if you figure this out,” she said, “but I also think you won’t be able to let it go until you know.”

By the time their time was over, Bucky’s annoyance hung gentle in the background.  She’d focused on supports and self-care, and it was probably important, even if Bucky didn’t really want to think about it.

“Talk to Steve, yeah?” She smiled, so sunny, like she wasn’t burdened.  Like Bucky’s burdens were light to her.  Like some brightly patterned emotional supersoldier.  

Or like a teacher.  With a smile, she’d gone and assigned him goddamn homework.  Fucking slippery, that one.  He left with a grumble and a reminder card with their next appointment even though it was a standing appointment and he got the text reminders.  How on earth could she slip a whole assignment in at the end without him hardly noticing?  Incredible.

“You’re not my only,” Bucky blurted over dinner, then cringed.  It was the worst way he could have broached the topic with Steve, but here he was.  Here they were.  Here Steve was, staring at him over the table, something unreadable in his expression.  Or maybe it was perfectly readable, but Bucky couldn’t make himself look up from his plate.  The carrots were an accusation.  

“It’s just… I’ve been remembering things.”

“Yeah,” Steve’s voice was soft, soothing like those nights when he would hold Bucky after nightmares, when he would wrestle Bucky’s hands away from his face before he could gouge through his skin, before he could rip out his hair.  Steve didn’t touch him anymore, and the absence was a wound.  “The doctors said that would probably happen, that you’d probably recover some memories as the brain damage heals.”

Bucky nodded.  

“I think I loved him,” Bucky forced himself to say it, even as something in him screamed and nausea rose, every signal of his body screeching to turn back, to pull his hand off the fucking stove.  “Volkov.  He was everything I had for so long.”

“Did you and he…?” Steve didn’t need to finish the question.  Bucky had no answers.  Thinking about Volkov was like staring at the sun, so he shrugged guiltily and forced himself to inhale a little.  

“Lebedev and I did.”  God, he felt so dirty saying it.  

“As in Aleksey Lebedev?  Red Guradian Aleksey Lebedev?”

Bucky watched his hands, but he could feel Steve’s comprehension in the ratcheting tension at the table.  Volkov had been a nobody, but Lebedev had been a hero, a household name.  He’d been somebody.  Volkov had been a jailor, but Lebedev had been a nominally free man. What did Steve make of that?

For a long while, Steve didn’t say anything, and the air was thick with silence.  

After a while, he cursed quietly, still a shock after the Boy Scout Steve had been before, and looked at Bucky with stormy eyes.  He didn’t ask any questions, and Bucky didn’t volunteer any details. 

The silence between them grew thorns, an impassable bramble in the kitchen.

“Don’t ask this.” 

The words were familiar, their echo had rung through Bucky for the last week, and he regarded the Winter Soldier.  He wasn’t as big as Bucky remembered; he wasn’t the looming monster anymore, shrunken in on himself, weary and wary.  

“I don’t hate you,” Bucky said, and something about it felt truer once he’d said it than when he’d first thought it in therapy, when he’d first written it down in the dumb journal Dr. Addo wanted him to keep.  The Winter Soldier’s eyes grew wide, and the water that ran constantly down the castle’s inner walls poured faster.  

“Don’t hate me,” he repeated, and maybe he was parroting, but it felt like a desperate bid for Bucky’s mercy.  “Don’t ask this, just…” his mouth moved, but the words didn’t reach Bucky for several moments.  When they did, something twisted in his chest, something knotting painfully in his throat and squeezed in his heart.  “…love me.”

“I do love you,” he said, and he had no idea where those words came from, but the taste of them in his mouth brought tears to his eyes.  “That’s why,” he swallowed.  The walls were waterfalls.  It was a miracle they weren’t knee deep in water by now.  “It’s why I need to see what’s behind the door.”

The flight had been a nightmare.  There were things the asset could manage on a fully functional body that simply became unmanageable when the body was too injured, and flying was one of them.  There was an irrational, animal terror that seized the bones and organs when there was a risk of falling, and the awful, shitty little plane Lebedev had found had a hole in the floor.

“Floor is not what makes plane fly,” Lebedev had said, insisting on speaking in English even though his English was middling at best and the asset’s Russian was near-perfect.  It was like Volkov, and that similarity alone made Lebedev unbearable.  If his insistent English wasn’t enough to make the asset hate him, the flight sure was, and if the flight wasn’t, then the landing was.  

The flight and landing had broken something in the asset.  Too long without maintenance, too long without a properly trained handler, too long without a chance to remember its place, and the asset had become glitchy.  When the plane landed, the stupid body had collapsed on the ground, grabbing up dirt under its fingernails, and shaken and shaken and shaken.  It was beneath the asset’s near-perfection (never true perfection, though, because there was always fault to be found, to be excised through pain or obedience).  It was beneath the asset, yet when Lebedev’s stupid hand landed on the twitchingly tense back, when it rubbed long, slow passes there instead of grabbing or striking or hurting… 

“I land here,” Lebedev said, “Because the girls see you fly, and they do not see you cry like baby.”

Girls.  Fuck.  When was the last time?  Silk stockings and milky skin, downy hair and goosebumps, and blood everywhere and the handlers laughing quietly among themselves, and the asset didn’t—Bucky couldn’t—but they wouldn’t let him stop, and if he didn’t listen, something terrible was going to happen.  Something terrible was going to happen again.

Bile, thin and hot, and the asset coughed.  The body shook, and Lebedev’s hand wasn’t helping (its absences would be death).  Once he began, once he realized he could, Lebedev wouldn’t stop touching the asset.  A hand on the back, the shoulder, the arm.  It was familiar.  It was a pale, freckled face and a name at the edge of the asset’s tattered brain, a whisper of just a little further, soldat, hands bared in the cold to touch the brow, fingers that tangled with fingers.  Daniil.  The name was a lightning bolt of displaced grief, disconnected from any knowledge or memory.  There had once been a Daniil, but not anymore.

Exhausted from the flying and the terror, the asset allowed Lebedev to lead the way.  Time slipped.  A stove was lit in a room with papered-over windows.  A home, abandoned.  Bread, not yet gone hard, and three bowls of something on the table, spoke to a recent, hasty evacuation.  It was dark enough.  Nobody would see the smoke. 

“This flying was not so good for you, I think.  I do not tell the ladies,” Lebedev assured as if that was in any way useful.  “You are handsome enough, you land with one engine…” The tips of Lebedev’s fingers traced a fireworks starburst pattern on the asset’s back, and the horror deepened because one of the engines had been out.  

“Very strong,” Lebedev continued, as if nothing he was saying was horrifying in the slightest, “Very brave.  You fuck through this village like Rasputin.  Songs will be sung.”

A choking cough shook the body at that, surprising because the airway wasn’t obstructed.  Lebedev… riffed (and wasn’t that a strange thing out here with this wrecked plane awaiting rescue?).

“Eternal Soldier,” Lebedev chuckled, warm, “I can joke about this?  Or did you know him?”

Madness spilled from the asset’s mouth with the bitter sweetness of nostalgia.  “Oh, Grigori.”  It was easy, and that must mean something had broken, because the asset was supposed to be better than this.  The floor was worn, and the wood stove cast warmth into the room even as it heated a pot of water.  “I taught him how to please the ladies.”

It wasn’t true.  For all the asset knew, it had been passed from handler to handler since the dawn of time, but there was something about Lebedev’s laughter that was like the best drugs.  Morphine for the spirit, it soothed away the jagged distress of the fight and the flight and the sense that something terrible would happen.  Vodka splashed from Lebedev’s flask, filled just this night from a bottle stolen from the home they occupied.  The bottle sat on the table, a long thread of buffalo grass lying in it.  

“Do they know, Soldat?”  Lebedev asked, suddenly sober.

“Know what?”

“That you are still alive in there?”

Stovelight clung honey-warm to Lebedev’s cheeks, his hair like caramel, his cheeks rough with such stubble that it could almost pass for a beard.  The asset was… alive.  Without his gloves, Lebedev’s hands were bare.  They were skin and nail and a dusting of hair on the backs of them, coarse-looking, worn away where his watchband sat.  Dirty fingernails, blackened from oil or soot, from trying to rescue the plane.  Their approach set some animal instinct in the asset panicking, frozen as a palm moved to cup the asset’s cheek.  This was allowed.  Handlers were allowed to touch the asset any way they wanted.  There were handlers who used touch as a reward—it wasn’t against regulation.  It was fine.  

The asset drew a long breath.  Whatever Lebedev wanted to do was allowed.  A punishment would be warranted for the cowardice and for questioning orders before boarding the plane.  There were appropriate tools in this kitchen, though the asset preferred not to deal with the mess associated with knives or burns.  A traitorous corner of the asset’s ind preferred not to be punished at all, but that was vestigial.  It wasn’t useful.  

Lebedev waited out the fear, and on its tail, the asset shivered.  Lebedev’s eyes were soft, warm like the sound of… It was impossible that the asset could remember it, because the asset had been like this since the beginning, but he could imagine so clearly the sound of a mother’s voice raised in song, a forgotten hymn floating on the voices of a congregation, the sense of being surrounded and safe.  It was silly.  Lebedev was nobody’s mother and the asset didn’t have a mother, and it wasn’t like that at all, except the feeling was so big.  

“You are not like yourself, I think,” Lebedev said, and the asset frowned.  “Soldat,” he said, “I wish you had a name.”

He sounded so sad, and the asset hated it.  Handlers weren’t supposed to… no… that wasn’t it, was it?  There was no protocol around whatever this was, but the asset hated Lebedev’s sadness.  Lips parted to speak, as if something like the asset could possibly offer anything to somebody like Aleksey Lebedev, but before a foolish word could escape him, Lebedev’s lips pressed to his.  

He tasted like vodka and cigarettes and his lips were dry and gentle.  Gentle like the rest of him, undemanding like the rest of him.  His hands didn’t tear or throw or grab.  Rather they rested, one cupping warmth to the asset’s jaw and one trailing down the human arm to paint tingling lines along the back of the hand.  This pilot, this handler, this honey-soaked man with his gentle hands and mouth and eyes, with his hair that caught the firelight, with his beard that sparkled roughly and tickled harsh against the asset’s skin, was breaking something in the asset.  Something that was tempered by violence, strengthened through beating and rape and torture, and yet something that crumbled under the barrage of feather-soft kisses, the claim that the asset was alive—he was alive. 

Lebedev had a gravitational pull around him, and the asset was a body like any other body in the solar system, so he succumbed to the pull, and he leaned in, yielding ever more to the kiss.  He wanted this, he realized, and that was perhaps the most shocking thing the asset could remember at all, because when was the last time he’d wanted something like this?  How could he want it?  But he did.  Comfort unfurled around him, the uncurling leaves of ferns in the wet forest.  

“A little love,” Lebedev murmured, voice scratching like velvet, soft like his beard.  “Morning comes so quick, and yet night—it goes so long.” 

Something about the offer was ancient and familiar, though the asset could find no specific memory of this.  A yearning was there within him, like a pitfall trap suddenly uncovered, something waiting to swallow him.  How could he have lived with this hollowness, this need, and not known?  And Lebedev’s words came to him again, you’re alive in there, and he felt like a seed, like a hidden sleeping life called to waken by the softening earth and the promise of sun.  

“A little love?” He asked, unsure.  The warm nervousness in his breast was alien.  A weapon didn’t hope, but the asset thought that maybe he hoped.  

“A little love,” Lebedev repeated, his thumb tracing the exposed strip of skin at the asset’s wrist.  “But only for this man who wishes it.”

Lebedev’s brown eyes were a mirror of the asset’s longing.  There was a warmth that was gathering in his body, in his belly and thighs and stomach, that was distantly familiar.  The asset’s body sometimes became aroused, but it was always in the midst of other things, never undiluted like this, never gentle like this.  The asset was a weapon, and weapons weren’t meant to have wishes, so the desire that struck him through was wrong.  There shouldn’t have been room in him for desire, but he pressed his cheek into Lebedev’s palm and parted his lips on his next exhale, and waited.  The metal arm whirred and the stove popped on damp wood.  Lebedev’s lips met his.

The words other handlers used for the asset were diminutive.  They were meant to make him small, to humble and humiliate, to reassure handlers that he was nothing beneath their might.  Lebedev, though, was a terrible handler.  His words were worshipful.  In his eyes, the asset was strong and beautiful and worthy of every praise, every gentle touch, every pause and hesitation that made room for the asset to pull away—and they weren’t a test.  They weren’t a trick.  When, by accident, the asset flinched back from hands sliding to his waistband and stopped, wide-eyed and caught in his insubordination, Lebedev didn’t punish him.  

Lebedev was… such a strange thought, but he was a romantic.  His rumbling voice told of the fae beauty of the stars when flying above the clouds, of rockets that would take men into space, perhaps the moon.  The world dared not intrude on the amber peace they inhabited, warmed by a wood stove in somebody’s abandoned kitchen.  The asset did not hope, because weapons did not hope, but Lebedev did.  He hoped that Kruschev would right decades’ wrongs, that the Communist party would finally divorce itself from war and deliver on the promises of kindness and fairness and dignity to all people, that he would be selected as the first Soviet cosmonaut over the competition.  He pressed no further, content to let his warmth leech into the asset where they touched, and the asset didn’t want anything because weapons didn’t want things, but if he could want, he would have wanted this.  

The asset did nothing by accident, and so it wasn’t an accident when he leaned more heavily into Lebedev, when knees made room between themselves for Lebedev’s thick thigh.  Wantonness had never been punished, but this wasn’t that.  This wasn’t the electric performance of desire for men who would reward the asset with drugged oblivion.  This was the tenderly terrifying knowledge that Lebedev would touch the asset if the asset asked.  

Breath grew faster, and Lebedev’s hands were strong and warm, his eyes softly worried.  

“James,” the asset managed, and the name was foreign in his mouth, but he had seen it in enough places.  He knew that whatever he was now had been constructed from Barnes, James Buchanan, Sergeant, 32557038, and the asset offered the intelligence for reasons beyond his ken.  He offered the intelligence because it made something soft and painfully alive stir in its chest.  

He offered it because he wanted the tender surge in Lebedev’s big body, the soft-edged joy and longing.  The hungry mouth that joined his and couldn’t stop the spill of whispered kindnesses, the hesitating hands that waited, always waited, for the asset’s say.  The foreign feeling of skin against his skin, of a body pressed to his body, thick curled hair on a freckled chest, a scar from a gunshot wound, the feeling of somebody alive under his palms and lips.  

“James,” Lebedev’s hands pulled him back, and the name wasn’t his but it was something.  A rough thumb smoothing over his cheek, Lebedev’s concern… he was crying.  “They will assign us together again.”

The asset nodded and kissed Lebedev.  He was only here because Kolyakov had kicked it—not as bulletproof as he’d thought himself.  They’d never let him work with Lebedev again without a real handler.  Lebedev was a terrible handler, and the asset pressed himself close for the feeling.  He let Lebedev kiss away his tears and slide his hands over his skin.  He bared himself to the lamplight, suspended in its amber.  Lebedev had crooked teeth and a scar on the inside of his lip, and his body was warm and alive—

“Please!”  

It was nobody.  It was no voice.  It wasn’t here, but it was everywhere, and suddenly the dream was empty.

“Please, no more.”

The hallway swallowed Bucky, and in it the Winter Soldier knelt in ankle-deep water.

“Why?”  Bucky demanded, and he wanted to go back!  He wanted to be back with Lebedev, because Lebedev had been the kindest thing in this awful place, and now the Winter Soldier wanted to hoard these memories.  It wanted to swallow all the goodness, and Bucky wanted to hate it, but… 

But, what?

The door was open.  Light like a summer afternoon spilled through, and the Winter Soldier cringed from it.  How was that worse than the red or starry rooms?  How was it worse?

“Please don’t ask this of me,” the words emerged from the Winter Soldier’s mouth with a crackle, and they fell loudly in the corridor.  “They loved me.”

Bucky stared at the Winter Soldier, and he thought of Lebedev.  The Soviet Union’s Red Guardian.  The asset’s guardian.  

The Winter Soldier’s grief was breathtaking, lancing through Bucky with a suddenness and force that left him gasping.  The castle was drowning.  The memory was a hole through Bucky.  

 Aleksey Lebedev died in a plane crash in 1961. 

Chapter Text

He didn’t tell her everything.  He couldn’t, but he did his best to paint a picture.  Lebedev in his campy, pompous, outward-facing Red Guardian getup, entertaining Soviet soldiers with heroic tales; the way he’d give Bucky ration-and-a-half because he knew Bucky would heal faster that way; his targetless grief and anger and betrayal when Gagarin was chosen over him for the space program.  He tried to show Dr. Addo the man who had loved him—the man he had loved.  

“I was still pretty fucked in the head,” he smiled, recalling the night, “But Lebedev was talking a big game and I was well-fed and strong at the time, and I was good—I mean I was fucking good—so I snuck around, there was a little bloodshed, and half-way through one of his stories, I made it back with a Howitzer.”

Dr. Addo nodded a moment, but Bucky could tell she was confused.

“It’s a big gun,” he clarified, and Addo made a little sound of understanding.  “It’s a big enough gun that it’s on wheels and you have to tow it.  So, I bring the thing back and pull his ear, because it was his birthday, and he turns around and you should have seen his face.  See, right down the barrel I wrote… basically it meant ‘gift for Aleksey’ except I used a... diminutive of his name.”

“What’s the diminutive version?”  Dr. Addo asked, smiling along with Bucky’s fondness.

“Ok, so when he let people shorten his name, it was Aleks, but I wrote Alyoshka, which is… it’s more… it’s what you’d call a little kid.”  The memory was warm, tinged only slightly by the knowledge that it was Lebedev’s last birthday.  

“You don’t often speak in such detail,” Addo observed, neutral in that way that she got when she was about to pull the pin on something.  Her blink was the click of a landmine.  “How does it feel to discuss this with me now?”

Bucky curled back into his chair, feeling suddenly sulky and annoyed.  “Worse now that you ask,” he groused.

“Why do you think it gets worse when I ask you about it?”

What the fuck?  What the actual fuck?

“I don’t know, okay?”  Bucky snapped, “You’re gearing up for something.  You’re going to say something shitty about him, and I don’t want that!”  

Bucky paused a moment, surprised by his own reaction, by the intensity.  Lebedev had been a handler.  He’d just been a handler.  There had been dozens, and Lebedev hadn’t even been particularly competent.  

“I don’t want that,” he repeated, like saying it twice would protect him.

Addo took a deep breath, and Bucky thought it was deeply stupid that his body wanted to copy her when she did that.  Here she was, spangled in bright yellow gingko leaves that made her pantsuit hard to look at for very long, waging psychological warfare from across a desk.  She nodded after a moment, like she’d made a decision, and Bucky stared at the paperweight she’d given him to hold today.  It was smooth, clear glass, and it had a flower inside of it, also made of glass.  He liked it better than the shark.  

“We’ve wandered close to something that part of you wants very badly to protect,” she observed, careful, gentle.  If everything in this cheerful, greenery-infested little office didn’t feel so damn threatening, Bucky might have even read her as kind.  “Part of you seems to know that something is wrong, though.  That if we keep going, we’ll stumble into something that could be very destabilizing.”

There that word was again: protect.  He could almost see the Winter Soldier, afraid but still trying, saying, don’t ask this of me.

“What ‘shitty’ thing do you think I would have to say about Aleksey?”  She asked, and Bucky found himself unsure.  What was there to say?  

“I don’t…” Bucky glared at the paperweight.  The orchid inside had little freckles on its petals, and somebody had to have put those there.  Somebody had to curl each petal into shape.  Somebody had to make it look like that, and then they had to freeze it in place so it would always be the way they wanted it to be.  “You said Volkov used me to learn English, but he didn’t.  You said he was part of the machine, you said that he wasn’t…”

”I did say that,” Addo agreed, and Bucky was still angry.  Usually, she said something like that and he got less angry, but not this time.  “I did say that.  Daniil Volkov was one of the only sources of stability and kindness in your world for several formative years.  He benefited from your relationship, and he was complicit in harm done to you.  Both of those things can be true.  It can be true that he was part of a system that did immense harm to you, and that the kindness he showed was both real and important.

”Do you believe that love doesn’t count if there is knowing harm?”

Bucky stared at her, his mind empty and crackling with static.   The paperweight was cool in his hand.  Did Volkov know?  Did Lebedev?

”He didn’t… Aleks… He wasn’t a handler.”

”No,” Addo agreed, “He wasn’t.  Would it have been different if he were?”

”He never would have been allowed.”

“If a real handler had been kind to you the way Aleksey was,” each word was stacked delicately, stones in a cairn, “Would that love have meant less?”

“Steve doesn’t know.”  

Why did he say that?  He wasn’t supposed to… He… The paperweight was smooth, and Addo didn’t say anything.  She let the quiet settle.  The dark-leaved plants breathed, and Dr. Addo breathed, and Bucky tried to breathe too.

“Don’t,” Bucky whispered into the listening.  

Addo said nothing.  

The silence deepened.  

“It’s not about Steve.”

Dr. Addo nodded, her face grave.  

“What would it mean,” she chose each word, pulled each one from her thin bag of meaning, before setting them before Bucky. “If Aleksey Lebedev’s love for you, and your love for him, was both imperfect and important?  If it was real and meaningful, not despite its imperfection, but because of it?”

The words trembled in his chest.  They were a shudder in his soul.  

“Your relationship with Alekesy was marked by a steep power imbalance, and, from what you’ve shared, it seems like it was rich and meaningful, a rare source of joy and reciprocity.  He was complicit in a system that tried for decades to erase your humanity, and he saw you as a person deserving of care and kindness.  He had absolute power over you such that you would have had no recourse if he wanted to hurt you, and he chose not to use that power in ways that hurt you.”

Something in Bucky was shaking apart.  Something thin and rusted, succumbing to the elements and entropy, and he wanted to grab it and protect it.  He wanted to wrap himself around it like the Winter Soldier, he wanted to say those words—don’t ask this of me!  Why did it feel like this?  

His breathing was faster than it ought to have been, but he could feel himself hanging on every word Dr. Addo said.  They were salvation and damnation all in one.  He wanted to believe them.  He had loved Lebedev—he still loved Lebedev—so this should feel good, shouldn’t it?  She didn’t hate him, she didn’t think he was just like Ivanov or Kolyakov.  She understood he was different, so why did it hurt so much?  Why couldn’t he stop thinking about Steve?

Why couldn’t he stop thinking about Steve?

“Bucky, can you find something blue in the room?”  Addo’s voice was barely audible over the ringing in his ears, but he latched on to it.  He could do that.  He’d seen… He picked up her mug, the one she kept pens in, and passed it to her.  It was blue with little white flowers, and it looked like somebody had made it for her.  

“That’s very good.  Can you name five things you can see?”

He didn’t want to.  This felt shitty, but there was something on the other side of it that scared him more, that was worse than this.  His heart was a shiver in his chest.  

“I hate your jacket,” he gritted, and Addo huffed a quiet little laugh, all warm and approving.  

“That’s good, four more.”

He hated this.  He hated everything.  

“Your mug,” he said, “and the flamingo.” It was the worst pen he’d ever seen.  He hated that this worked on him.  “This,” he held up the paperweight.  It wasn’t as cool now, he’d been holding it long enough for it to match his body temperature.  “Your lunchbox,” he pointed at the shockingly drab insulated bag, alien in Addo’s otherwise flamboyant office.  

“That’s excellent.”  Her voice was still soft.  It had been a while since she’d had to talk to him like this.  “How are you feeling right now?  Can you give me a thumb?”

He held his thumb halfway between horizontal and down, and Addo nodded and drew a long breath, and Bucky felt himself pulled like gravity to follow.  His thumb drifted up a little, and Addo nodded and repeated the breath.  

“What just happened for you?” she asked once Bucky finally chilled the fuck out.  

He almost wanted to brush it off and say nothing, or even the novel, I don’t want to talk about that, which she would always respect.  He almost did… But he was a dumb motherfucker and a glutton for punishment, so he said, “Why does this make me think about Steve?”

She smiled a little sadly at that, like the answer might be obvious if Bucky’s head wasn’t always so far up his ass.

“At a surface level, you care or cared deeply for them, and they hold or held power over you.”  Dr. Addo said it like it was simple, and Bucky thought that it couldn’t really be that simple.  “It seems like, with both of them, you grew out of some of HYDRA’s imposed vulnerability as well.  The way you talk about the… playful nature of your relationship with Aleksey in particular makes it seem like he created space for you to grow.”

“He didn’t know.” Bucky looked at his knees.  “He never knew what they… what they made me.”

“Steve does.”  It sounded simple.

Sometimes the things that Addo said were simple like bullets.  

“Yeah,” Bucky tried not to sound resentful.  “Yeah, he knows everything.  He knows… He knows things I don’t know, he read everything when I was… at the beginning, when I was in the hospital and…”

The whole time was one long smear of terror and absence.  What he remembered, he remembered like a story told to him, like something he’d tried too hard to picture.  

“Had you been able to choose, would you have chosen to let Steve know those things?”

Bucky put the paperweight back on Addo’s desk.  He didn’t want to feel its warmth.  

“I should, right?”  he asked, “Because he only wanted to know those things so he could help me.”

“Maybe he loved you enough to make himself read through those terrible things out of a desire to help you, and he chose to read intimate and personal information that you weren’t ready and didn’t consent to disclose to him.”

Bucky looked at the clock.  He looked at the red bird on the minute hand, didn’t even bother trying to figure out how much of the session remained, because if he needed to call it, Addo would let him.  He wondered how birds got that red and forced himself to breathe.

“It wasn’t like he could ask me,” Bucky defended, but it felt flat.  A copy of a copy of a copy of dissent, purple and sweet and dusty like an old mimeograph.  “I wasn’t right in the head, and I couldn’t… I didn’t understand what was happening.  The chair fucked with my head really bad—Steve said he sent you the file on—”

“I didn’t read it.”  

Bucky’s eyes flew open. He stared at Addo, damn the awful gingko jacket.  She’d chosen yellow lipstick and eyeshadow to match the jacket.  Who the fuck was this woman?  Why did that hurt so much?  It was a fucking…

“It was really long…” he offered, because it was.  It was long and awful, and whoever had translated the Russian had done an okay job, but they’d intentionally skirted around some things, and Bucky was really glad for that because it meant Steve didn’t know, and also kind of pissed for reasons he couldn’t fully understand.

“You didn’t consent to disclose that to me.”

Well, yeah… but it was just information, right? It wasn’t like… It wasn’t… It was just knowing. But it wasn’t. It was more than that, and Bucky knew that.

“I couldn’t read it,” Bucky admitted to his hands.  “He said it might help me remember, but… I just… He wants to help.  I was fucking awful in the beginning, and he was trying everything to help, you know?  I mean, nobody did more for me than he did, and I… I mean, I shot him and I beat the shit out of him, and then… I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with him when I pulled him out of the water, but the… Is it crazy if I think prison was better than the hospital?”

For a moment, Addo looked both totally unsurprised and deeply sad, and Bucky wanted to take it back.  He felt exhausted.  Too tired to put up a fight.  He felt like he might just sink to the bottom of this mess and drown.

“I’d like to ask some questions about Aleksey Lebedev if that’s alright,” Addo said, tossing a life preserver in the nick of time.  Bucky nodded way more enthusiastically than he would have fifteen minutes ago, and Addo smiled at him like she had his back.

“First, how long were he and you together?”  

Bucky counted back.  Kolyakov had died in April… “Two and a half years,” he offered tentatively, “Maybe a little more or a little less.  It was supposed to be a couple weeks at the most, but my… ah, my ‘performance’ under him was good enough that they figured, hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” 

“You’ve interacted with some very safe people and some very unsafe people,” Addo said, and Bucky snorted at the phrase very unsafe people.  Yeah.  Nice.  Ivanov would have loved being neutered down to ‘very unsafe person.’  “Where, on that spectrum, do you think Aleksey fits?”

“Do we count the times I had to be his copilot?”  Bucky joked, then laughed, because Lebedev had always been so good about that.  Bucky hated flying, and Lebedev loved it, and he’d drone on about the stars while Bucky tried not to look or think or exist, and he’d… He was always good to him after.  

“I didn’t think he was safe at first, because he was just such shit as a handler, and sometimes the shit ones were… You know,” Bucky admitted, “but once I got to know him?  God, he was the safest person I knew—He is the safest person—”

No?  No, that wasn’t true, because it was Steve.  It was Steve, because Steve had literally always been there for him, since they were kids.  Forever.  Steve had been so goddamn safe he’d let Bucky try to kill him, all noble heroic self-sacrificing and shit.  

Steve was the safest person…  What the fuck was wrong with him? 

Addo was leaning forward, passing the dumb, floppy little shark toy over to Bucky, and he realized he was worrying the plates in his arm with his nail. Not hard enough to hurt yet, but still.  Fuck.  He’d thought he’d quit doing that.  

The shark rattled, its weird body made of nesting cups amplifying the slight tremor in his fingers.  

“Except for Steve.”  He forced himself to say it because it was true.  Lebedev had been the best thing in his life in the last sixty years.  Except for Steve.  

“What do you think made Aleksey feel so safe?”  Addo asked, like Bucky hadn’t said anything about Steve, which… They weren’t talking about Steve. 

Bucky tried to think of something, but it was slippery.  Lebedev had just… It had been like they were just themselves.  No past, no future to speak of.  Lebedev had talked about his dreams sometimes, but when Bucky had no answering dreams, he’d been content to ramble.  There had been times, especially early on, when Bucky would goad Lebedev into fucking him and using him, and Lebedev had gone along with it and let Bucky have his privacy in his own head, let him feel his body and the rhythm.  It was all very practical and pragmatic.  Even the couple times Bucky had wanted Lebedev to rough him up, to smack him around a little, had been met with good-natured indulgence.  

“You don’t have to tell me, but do you think you know for yourself?”

Bucky nodded.

“Do you think it would be different if he hadn’t read it?”  Bucky asked, and cringed at how childish the question sounded.  It wasn’t different, and Steve had read it.  That was just the way things were.  

Addo gave him a discerning look.  “You know better than me what’s in that file, but when Steve sent it to me, he let me know it was compiled from documents the Avengers collected from HYDRA bases and labs for intelligence purposes.  To me, that meant that whatever was in it, it wasn’t likely generated for therapeutic purposes and likely contained graphic, voyeuristic records of torture.”

“Well, when you put it like that…” Bucky huffed, “Yeah.  You could say it wasn’t generated for therapeutic purposes.”

Addo hummed and gave Bucky a look, and he returned it with a shrug.

She took a deep breath and leaned against the back of her chair. “Well, it’s always nice to be vindicated in a decision like that,” she said, and Bucky thought that it was almost like her saying ‘I told you so’ to Steve. Some petty little part of him kind of liked that.

“The guy who translated the Russian did his best to make it less… what did you say, graphic and voyeuristic?”  Bucky chuckled again, but it wasn’t really all that funny.  “He really did try…”

“To not only have all that recorded,” Addo reflected, “But to have some faceless, nameless translator try to sanitize it…”  

Bucky nodded and swallowed.  Yeah.  She got it.  He didn’t want to talk about it, but it was nice to know that she got it.

Several silent moments passed, and Bucky’s attention relaxed from laser-focused on the knick-knacks on Dr. Addo’s desk to more of a flashlight beam.  He knew she did this on purpose, these moments of just existing and listening to the clock with its weird birds on it and the sound of the HVAC rattling a little through the register.  She’d explained it, too, because she liked him to know things.  It was crazy to him that it could work, though.  The magic didn’t stop being magic just because he understood the trick.  

After a while, he sighed and leaned back in his chair.  The shark was quiet in his hand.  Addo appraised him for a moment, then checked the time and nodded.  

“So, earlier,  you said some things,” she observed, “It seemed like my critiques toward important people felt like attacks. Is that accurate?”  

Bucky nodded, not so much because he felt that way now as because he had felt that pretty strongly about Volkov.  

“We ended up talking kind of a lot about Steve today.”  She was inching in to this sideways, and Bucky wondered if she thought he was going to blow up about it.  He didn’t feel like he was going to blow up about it.  Something in him still felt pretty unsettled, but not in that ticking-time-bomb way it sometimes did.  

After a moment, he realized she wasn’t sneaking up on some big revelation.  She was going to make him do the big revelation.  Well, the joke was on her—Bucky had no grand revelations.  Just mundane, banal shit, but he was more than happy to prove why he shouldn’t be trusted with the big reveals.

“Nothing’s changed,” he said.  “I still love him—He’s… I mean, he’s everything to me.  And I don’t want somebody perfect, I want Steve.  I just want things to be good, and… Things aren’t, but I know Steve would try to make things better if he knew.  I know he would.”

“I believe you,” Dr. Addo murmured, but not like she was sad.  Not like she thought Bucky was out here blowing smoke up his own ass, because he for sure knew what that sounded like from Addo, too.  This was a little less familiar.

“It’s just… it’s like he sees the file before he sees me, but that’s not because…”  Bucky searched for the words, staring at the holes in the monstera leaves like they might have answers.  “He’s so careful, you know?  He’s so careful with me, and it’s because he loves me, and I love him so fucking much, and Lebedev was never careful with me like that, so why did I feel safer with Lebedev than with Steve?  It’s ‘cause I finally cracked, right?  Like, it’s gotta be the brain damage or the torture or the… I don’t fucking know, but it’s gotta be me, right?”

“You brought up Steve seeing the file before you, and immediately pivoted to him being careful,” Addo observed.  “You mentioned that Aleksey Lebedev didn’t know your history, and that Steve is always cognizant of it, and that Aleksey felt safer than Steve does now.  Is there a connection?”

“You should feel safer if somebody gets you,” Bucky countered, irritated by the comparison even though he’d been the one to make it.

Addo made a thoughtful sound at that and watched Bucky for a moment. She was lining up another shot. Jesus, hadn’t she poked enough today? Bucky tried to brace for it.

“Do you think the file tells its reader anything about who you are or what your suffering meant?”

“No.”  The word jumped like a reflex, surprising Bucky, but not Addo.  “It’s just… It’s like you said.  It could have been about anyone, and it was just about the things they did and the… I only looked a little—I couldn’t really… but they didn’t even have Daniil's—Volkov’s—name in it.”

“So.  If Steve is seeing the file when he looks at you—”  There it was.  There she went, lining up her shot.  Bucky almost hated her.  “Then, is he really seeing you?”