Sometimes, Bucky wished that he could become the ghost he was supposed to be. He was well on the way to being dead already, and with both HYDRA and the great and good of the world after him, he had reasoned that this wouldn't take too long.
He hadn't counted on Steve Rogers and his stubbornness, however.
also on the ao3
Bucky liked to haunt the museum at night like the ghost they said he had become, reading the sign about the man he had used to be over and over, until he could have recited it in his sleep. He didn’t sleep any more though, not since they had torn his memories from his head for the most recent time; they had left holes when they had done it, and they grew into catacombs in the hollow of his skull. This thought almost comforted him, when the lights had dipped to dimness and the only sound was the steady footfall of the night guards – at least his demons would have plenty of darkness to play in.
He had watched the fallout from what he had become on the sliver of a television screen he could see, when standing in the rain outside a café. He had killed people - that much was clear, and he could kill again and would kill again. The people who had torn his life into two and watched the pieces sink into madness were nowhere to be seen, although whether this was by design or because of Steve Rogers, Bucky couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that there were posters with his face on, plastered all over the city and the subway and the news; he was a fugitive, but he tried not to think about it. Thinking made the world seem very close and alarming, and he was comfortable to hide in the holes in his head, for the time being at least.
He had hacked his own hair off in the same way they used to, not daring to look himself in the face. They (as far as he could remember) would only cut it when it inconvenienced them; it was a novelty to be able to decide when he wanted to cut it, and at first he had taken small snips, and then had slashed chunks of it away with the same snarling rage he had felt, high up on the Helicarrier, when he had slashed at Steve Rogers with the same knife. He was glad, now, that he had not hurt him as much as he had been programmed to do.
Bucky had cut his hair and changed into stolen clothes and washed the war-paint from his face in the bathroom at the museum, and tourists and students had watched the black-and-blood wash down the sink in disgust. He had been worried that they might tell someone in authority, but the mothers had shepherded their children back to the gift-shop and the tourists had just stared, and gone back to taking photographs of themselves in the mirror. Nobody had mentioned his missing hand, although from what he had gleaned of the wars of the 21st century so far, amputees from war-zones were not rare, and were common when sleeping rough. This would have made him sad, but he had used up all his sadness on a boy from Brooklyn a long time ago.
One day – a cold morning, a month after the Helicarriers had gone down – Bucky had woken in his usual place, huddled next to a storage heater and wrapped in the remnants of his old clothing to find Steve Rogers standing over him, almost comically handsome.
“You seem down on your luck,” was all he said, as Bucky scrambled for his knife and moved into a crouch, ready to attack. Steve glanced around; a cleaner was polishing the floor down the hallway, but other than that they were alone. “I’m not here to fight you,” he said, and Bucky tried to smile but only succeeded in baring his teeth. He was no longer sure if they were pointed, or if that had been a dream; it had been hard, at the beginning when they broke him, to tell the difference; he had not wanted to look in the mirror for long enough to examine his teeth. His eyes told too many stories.
“How did you find me?” Bucky asked, warily, shifting his grip on the knife’s handle. “I followed my orders to go underground, I – I followed my orders,” and he shifted his grip again. Steve didn’t look away from his face, and Bucky tensed his muscles again, readying himself to leap.
“You were watching the news outside a coffeeshop, and so was I,” Steve said, and Bucky looked up. “I was inside, I mean,” he clarified, “with a girl. A nurse, although it turns out she is not a nurse but is, in fact, a lovely secret agent,” and he smiled to himself. “Lovely, but, well. Not my type,” and Bucky tried to laugh. He thought that the old Bucky, the real Bucky, would have laughed at that.
Steve watched him, and smiled to himself again. “You remember, then?”
Bucky looked away, laughter fading, to the poster of Captain America with its bright colours on the opposite wall. “I don’t remember,” he said quietly, and looked back in time to see Steve’s face fall. “You could tell me?” he offered, and put the knife back into his pocket, and stood up fully. Steve took half a step back, and then remembered his manners, and stepped forwards again.
“When we were at Camp Lehigh, you remember – well, you’ve read about Peggy? She was the only girl who ever looked at me when I was that 95lb asthmatic stickman, and she stayed looking at me when I got – like this,” and he gestured to his muscles. Bucky tried not to look, and Steve went on. “I found her. She’s alive, but she has dementia, and she only remembers me for a few minutes before it goes again. But her eyes are still so lovely,” and he bowed his head as if in pre-emptive remembrance.
Bucky stood in silence until the floor was polished and the cleaner had shut the door behind him, and pretended to examine the entrances and exits in the room; by this stage, he didn’t need to do it manually, but it soothed him to do so. The silence stretched. “Are you going to report me?” he said, and remembered finding Steve’s spare key hidden under a brick. “I mean,” he struggled to clarify, “that there is a price on my head and I know I killed people and I shouldn’t be alive at all – “
Steve put both hands on Bucky’s shoulders. “Hey,” he said softly. “It wasn’t you, alright? People died, but HYDRA never leave an arena without ten-dozen casualties. It’s their way, and they used you as a tool, as a blunt instrument,” and Bucky nodded, but noticed the web of bruising which extended from Steve’s cheekbone across his nose, the colour deepening in his eye socket.
“I did that,” he said haltingly, and ran his fingers across the blade of the knife in his pocket until metal scraped metal and Steve winced. “I hit you, I remember – but you were a mission, and now you’re Steve – “ and his voice had risen, and the first visitors of the day – staring at Captain America in glorious rapture – were staring at him now instead. He realised that he was shaking on his feet, and he hadn’t eaten for a few days, and then he sat back down with a thump which would have hurt, if he had regained nerve function in his body yet. “They cauterised every nerve ending,” he said almost wonderingly, and Steve shut his eyes.
“Bucky,” he said, thumbs digging in ever-s-slightly into the hollows of his collarbones, which used to be smooth skin and muscle. “Bucky, you’re safe, you’re safe,” he murmured, kneeling down to look him in the eye again. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, and nor is anyone who listens to reason and right – “
“You sound like some kind of propaganda,” Natasha Romanoff told him, pulling off her baseball cap and hunching down next to them. Bucky tried not to jump, but he remembered how he had tried to twist her skull from her neck, and the jump of adrenaline when he had shot her in the shoulder, and how her red hair had been bright as the blood he had spilled, and he flinched when she grinned at him. Her teeth were bright and even, and he tested out a response. It came out as more of a grimace, he suspected, but she kept smiling. “We need to get you somewhere safer than the Smithsonian,” she said quietly, handing him a drawstring bag. He pulled it open, and found a complete outfit. “It fits,” she added quickly. “We measured you using the CCTV footage,” and before he had time to be offended or worried, she had sauntered off, pretending to look at the dust-motes in the shafts of sunlight that pierced the room. Steve followed, equally as casually, but he did not look half as natural as she did. He thought that he might have found that funny, long ago.
Bucky stood up again, trying not to sway. “Where are we going?” he asked, and squeezed his knife so tightly that if his arm were still flesh and blood, it would have been cut to the bone. “Steve?” he said, more loudly, and Steve turned and beamed at him.
“We’re going to get you somewhere safe,” he replied, and dropped his voice so that Bucky had to strain to hear, over the sound of their footprints on the floor. “First, we’re going to Sam Wilson’s house. We have to assume that HYDRA is still looking for you; you’re an asset and not a man to them, so we need to get you somewhere that they don’t know. And from then, Stark Tower seems to be our safest bet right now,” he added, and Bucky tried to look as if he knew what that was. Steve laughed. “Tall building, ugly, has a massive “A”, which I think stands for “asshole”, but there’s no accounting for taste. It’s Tony Stark’s place – you remember Howard?” he asked quickly, but Bucky lingered at the corner as if he could hide his amnesia by huddling under a doorframe. “It’s fine if you don’t,” he added. Bucky nodded.
“I remember bits and pieces,” he explained, as they walked towards the exit. “Being told you were the enemy,” and his hand was on his knife again. “Being shown footage of you abandoning me to my fate, and I remember being found. They made me walk across ice until my feet were bleeding, and they made me walk across fire until my feet cracked. It smelled like pork scratching,” he said, humourlessly. “And they – they stuck things in my head, and I remember you betraying me and leaving me to die – “ and his knife was out of his pocket and at Steve’s throat. Steve did not move.
“You left me when I fell and you left me to die on the Helicarrier,” Bucky hissed, and blood beaded under the knife-blade. “I am a weapon and nothing more and this is my duty – “ and Steve moved like a whirlwind, elbowing him in the stomach and winding him, before smashing his hand into Bucky’s elbow joint and catching the knife as it fell. He wiped the blood away from his neck, and stepped out into the sun.
“You’re getting soft,” he said mildly, as if Bucky hadn’t just tried to saw at his throat. “Either that, or you’re hungry. You always have been grumpy when you’re hungry,” and he slipped the knife into his own pocket. “Time to go, I think,” and he steered Bucky to the corner of the street. “Natasha?” he said into his collar – and Bucky realised he must have a radio there, stitched to his jacket – “We’re ready,” and a dark car slid around the corner. It was almost silent, and black and sleek and shiny. Natasha leaned out to shove the door open, and nodded at them. The back of Bucky’s neck prickled, and he knew that danger would stalk him wherever he went, if he were to ally himself with his apparent old friend and a taciturn secret agent, but he nodded back.
“Nice neck, Rogers,” she said, and Bucky – guided by Steve – got into the car. Steve followed, and squashed himself so tightly up against Bucky that he could feel the blade of his knife through the thin cotton of Steve’s trousers. Natasha pushed her foot to the floor, and they sped off through the streets. “You’ll want to avoid looking out the windows when we stop at the lights,” she said, eyeing Bucky through the wing mirror. He dodged her gaze, and watched the world go by: gaudy lights and gaudy people, dogs, tattered fliers and tiny hot-dog stands and children with balloons and flowers trampled to the ground. Steve watched him, and pretended not to.
There were posters with his face on all over the traffic lights, so avoiding looking out of the window proved to be futile advice. There were signs labelling him a murderer, a killer, an assassin, a traitor, and he swallowed the bile in his throat and stared at his hands, flesh folded over metal. “They saved my life, you know,” he said, and watched Steve and Natasha exchange wary glances in the mirror. He ran one finger over the plates of his other hand. “My arm was lost already, and I would have bled out if they hadn’t saved me. They gave me a purpose even if it was twisted, and they gave me a name again,” and he fell silent. Steve looked at him.
“They took away your old name and burned away all your memories,” Steve told him. The car sped past hotels and a hospital and a church and a tiny bookstore, tucked away in the shadows of the corner of an old theatre. Bucky thought about the face in the posters and the face in the museum and the face in the mirror, and wondered if he were splitting in two, or three, like a hydra. “They made you into a killer,” added Steve, looking at the back of the driver’s seat as he said it.
Bucky laughed at that. “And, Captain America, paragon of virtue - how many did you kill this month? Or in the war, in Europe, when men fucked the wives and murdered the men in the same night? And you, Natasha Romanoff,” and his mouth had twisted into a cruel line, “how many have you killed, both sides of the Iron Curtain?” and she stared at him, face pale. “At least HYDRA were honest about what they did. You two are the pawns of governments who don’t care about you, and you don’t seem to care too much about them. You’re lying to yourselves,” he said, and shook his head.
“I didn’t know you cared,” Natasha said lightly, but her eyes were tight, and her fists were clenched around the steering board.
“I’m sorry,” Bucky said immediately, and his face was a mask of contrition. “It’s like worms inside my head, wriggling around and making me angry,” and he folded his fingers back over one another, as if in their cage-like clasp he could hide the rest of his humanity.
The car was silent until they got to Sam Wilson’s house. He was bounding with enthusiasm over some collaboration with Tony Stark, but when Bucky walked in, Sam tensed all over. He reminded Bucky of a dog who had seen something threaten their master; if he could have raised his hackles, he would have, and his muttering – too low for someone who had their eardrums perforated thirty years ago – was almost growl-like. His hands felt empty without the weight of a gun or a knife to flick between his fingers, and he felt as if the silences in his head were appearing before him, black spots in the centre of his vision – and as he fell, he struck his head on the corner of the coffee table, and the spots bloomed until his whole vision had gone black. He felt a sharp sting of pain, and then nothing more.
He awoke to a rhythmic beeping, and wished he hadn’t. The room was hazy, and half of him felt as though he were back in Kiev, strapped to a bed with electrodes attached to his nipples and his fingers and his dick, as though bolts were shuddering through him and singing his flesh from the inside once more, and the beeping from one reality leaked through into another, and he began to thrash on the bed. He was not tied down – he could see that, as his vision grew clearer – but still he felt the weight pressing down on his legs, and the sores that the buckles would leave on his wrists. The beeping increased until a man in a white coat ran in – Bucky shrank back, fearing his needles and scalpels – but he fiddled with the IV beside Bucky’s bed until he sank bank into the bed, eyes leaden. The last thing he saw before the darkness swallowed him was the bright red of Natasha’s hair.
When he next opened his eyes, the room stayed where it was supposed to, and he himself did not drift into memories, and he noticed that there was a guard on the door, and that he could make a weapon from the plastic water jug or the clipboard mechanism, and that it would take someone no more than two seconds to have a knife at his throat or a bullet in his belly. He lay back, and felt his head to find a piece of a gauze and a bandage. Steve was asleep in a chair next to him, sketchpad left open on his knee.
He poked at the dressing with his fingers, and they came away bloody, and a nurse – blonde and pretty – came into the room with a fresh dressing.
“You’ve bled through that one,” she said unnecessarily, as she removed the old one. Her fingers were deft, and as she worked she talked. “You’ve had a bit of your head shaved for the dressing, but it will grow back, don’t you worry! And I’ve been shaving you and washing you, so you should be feeling much fresher than you did when you came in. You can be discharged later. No more sedation, I hope,” she added, and tugged on the last piece of bandage. “Is that too tight? I’ve been on infections lately, so I’m a bit out of practice with non-festering wounds,” and he shrugged.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, and she paused to look at him, and then she left again, shutting the door behind her. He saw her speak to one of the guards, and then turn and walk down the corridor.
“So,” he said to Steve, who had woken up, sending his sketchbook to the ground with a clatter, “what next?”
