They’ve taken him to a house in the suburbs. It’s big, and there’s light in every room, and more lawn in every direction than one family knows what to do with. Steve had looked almost embarrassed during the introductory tour. They have a very comfortable couch. All the chairs are upholstered and soft. Lying in his bed, in one of the guest rooms, is like floating in warm water. There’s a chest at the foot of the bed filled with nothing but extra blankets and quilts and pillows for his use. He wouldn't be surprised if he put his hand to one of the walls one day and found it padded. In a section of the backyard walled off with latticework and vegetation, there’s a pool. It’s been there for years. Nobody denies the obvious.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing here.
There’s a part-time nanny slash housekeeper slash bodyguard for the children, who keeps him company sometimes. The children act like nothing ever happened. Maybe to them, it really didn’t. They’ve adapted to his presence. They call him Uncle. His sisters each call at least once a week and his mother visits every day and stays for hours. He wanted to move in with her, and she wanted him to move in with her, but one of the conditions of his release was that, at least for the foreseeable future, he remains in the custody of the one person alive who is a physical match for him.
As if not being a physical match for him ever stopped Them. But then again, it’s just a formality. A way to keep up some pretense that anyone had even the slightest clue how to handle his situation in a way that was both legally and humanely satisfactory.
It all feels too good to be true.
He’s warm and rested and well-fed at all times and he knows his name and everyone he loves is here and he hasn’t laid eyes on anything worse than a scraped knee or a kitchen knife in months, and – maybe he’s finally managed to die. Maybe something went blessedly wrong during a procedure or right in a fight and he’s been dreaming all this time, comatose until the end of his wretched days. Time passes in a haze of warm light, peace and comfort, and kind voices and children’s laughter. If that isn’t his father’s heaven, he doesn’t know what is.
A haze of light.
Kind voices.
Worried voices.
"He’s been like this for almost an hour," his mother says.
What? he thinks. Like what?
Steve sticks his dumb, handsome, married face in his field of vision. That’s one thing that’s less than ideal: the marriage thing. The fifteen years of marriage thing.
"Hey pal, can you hear me?"
I’m not deaf, he thinks, frowning.
"Oh, there you are," his mother says, because apparently he said that out loud, and he finds his face being turned gently toward her. "You scared me, honey. Are you okay?"
Her concern is palpable, and more real than anything has felt in – did she say an hour? It feels like forever. How long has he been living here again?
"Honey, can you tell me your name?"
"Geeze, ma," Bucky says, the quip coming instinctively. "Is your memory going already? At least I had an excuse."
He isn’t really feeling it, though. Like the impulse came from somewhere very far away, and he didn’t say the words so much as heard their distant echo. And maybe it shows.
"Is something the matter, Bucky?" Peggy asks. She has her coat folded over one arm. Steve is still wearing his. They look beautiful, both of them, and as young as he remembers them from the war, and more radiant than even that. Fifteen years of loving each other has kept them hale and healthy. They show no sign of the slow, ignoble deaths Leviathan told him of.
(Drowned in the Arctic; hanged for treason; a chair sparking and crackling with electricity, over and over and over.)
He feels his mind and his world trying to pull back into focus, but all it’s bringing him is sinking disappointment.
"This isn’t real, is it?"
They ask him what he means, why he would think that.
"It’s too easy," Bucky says.
What, being here? Going from where he was to here?
"Not the way I would describe it," Steve says.
"I agree it was quite the ordeal," Peggy says. "One I would prefer never to repeat."
They’re trying for lighthearted; his mother isn’t. "I thought it would be the death of me, the amount of effort it took to get those suits and stripes to do right by you. I thought I’d gotten you back only to lose you to a complete mental breakdown halfway out the door."
It’s like a bucket of ice water. "I didn’t even do anything."
"Yes you did." His mother’s voice is so soft it hurts. "You were brave and strong and you came back to us. Remember?"
The thing is, he thinks he does. But even with reality all back where it should be now, that knowledge is still locked behind a white curtain in his head, and nothing good ever lies behind white curtains. "That’s not –"
"It is not nothing, Bucky Barnes," his mother insists. "It was a whole hell of a lot."
Not enough for THIS! he thinks. He looks around Steve and Peggy’s living room, the modest display of wealth and confident lack of want, the lives being lived here, the love infused in everything – and he feels abruptly, disgustingly unclean.
"I need to take a shower," Bucky says, standing. "And then I’ll help make dinner, okay?"
He doesn’t need to take a shower. But the familiar discomfort of ice-cold water is grounding; makes him feel like maybe this improbably perfect haven isn’t so incompatible with the rest of his world after all. It’s long minutes before he puts the waterproof sleeve over his left arm, turns up the heat, and finally steps under the spray fully.
"Will you be okay?" his mother asks after dinner as she puts on her coat, no nonsense.
"Yes, mom."
She sighs and caresses his cheek with the backs of her fingers. "Where did you go? It was like you disappeared."
"Just got lost in my thoughts," Bucky says. He was never in a habit of lying to his mother, and Leviathan didn’t change that, no matter what else they warped and twisted about him. "And then my thoughts got lost in thoughts, and... everything went blank for a while. Like a snowman disappearing in a snowstorm."
Winifred Barnes makes a little noise, and her son tries to assure her, smiling slightly: "It wasn’t as creepy as it sounds." Instead it just breaks her heart a little further.
"Hey." She turns her hand and cups his cheek. "I want you to be okay, Bucky. For real, not because you don’t want me to worry."
"I’m fine now," he insists.
She gives him a long look. "Okay." She presses a kiss to his cheek. "See you tomorrow."
"See you tomorrow," he echoes, and she walks away.
For a few moments, Bucky watches his mother’s straight, strong back retreating as she makes her way down the garden path. She’s moved out of Brooklyn for him so he won’t have to readjust to society without his family. Bucky has to stay with Steve and Steve won’t not stay with his wife and daughters and Peggy has to stay in DC for her job, so Winifred has done the obvious and unthinkable and come to Bucky. Permanently. At least for now.
In a couple of seconds, she’ll turn into the street with all its nice gardens, and the white picket fences, and the elderly neighbors from diagonally across the street walking their dog together. A couple of houses down, a car has just pulled up, and another one of the neighbors opens the passenger side door for his wife and the baby she holds in her arms. It’s fifteen years of peace and prosperity and everything he used to dream about, before the war and the torture and the killing, and before he loses his grip on reality again Bucky blurts out "Mom!" and bolts after her.
By the time she has turned around, he’s wrapping his arms around her and burying his face in the familiar scent of her hair. Fifteen years forgetting everything and that’s stayed the same, takes him back straight to being a boy little enough to cling to his mother and believe with all his childish heart that she can fix anything.
His nose closes up with tears that aren’t quite falling. "It’s real, right?"
"Yes, sweetheart. Yes it’s real." His mother clutches back as tightly as she can. "Me, Peggy and Steve, the girls, all of it. You."
"They’re not gonna take it away?"
"Never."
"And it doesn’t matter that I don’t deserve it?" he whispers.
She shakes her head. "You’ve deserved to be happy since the day your father and I made you. That will never change."
"Even if I haven’t earned it back?"
"Oh," she says; it sounds painful. She extracts one of her arms from beneath his to pet his hair, just this side of forceful and desperate. "There’s nothing to repay, sweetie. Nothing, nothing, nothing. If anything, we all owe you." She draws back a little to look him in the eye, tears clumping her lashes together. "Because you came back. They took you away from me, and from the girls, and from Steve, and there wasn’t a day we thought you dead that I didn’t feel like I’d died with you. But you came back to us. And even more –" Now she’s crying openly. "– you came back to you. Here –" She taps his forehead. "– and here." She taps his heart. "They took away everything you had inside to make you do those horrible things, and it still wasn’t enough. You got yourself back and you stopped them."
Bucky sniffles and looks away. His mother laughs wetly and swipes a knuckle below his eye.
"Oh, that’s about time. I was starting to think you’d forgotten how to do that."
"Mooooom," Bucky whines with a little laugh of his own.
"Well, you know how I feel about the subject," she says, looking smug to have coaxed that smile out of him. "Men in this country, I swear. And don’t listen to that limey girl of yours either, they’re even worse."
"Uncle Bucky?"
Mother and son turn in unison.
"Mom says because I ate all my vitamins and finished my homework..." little Eleanor begins to say – but then Bucky wipes his eyes, and hers become almost comically wide with dismay, her mouth falling open. "Uncle Bucky, don’t be sad!"
"I’m not sad, Lenore."
"But..." she says, eyeing his damp sleeve doubtfully.
"It’s okay, sweetheart," Winifred says. She rubs Bucky’s back. "Sometimes crying is just a way to wash off the sadness. Like a bath."
Eleanor looks between the two of them hesitantly. "Did it work?"
Bucky laughs. "Yeah, I feel much better."
"Okay. Good. Mom and dad don’t want you to be sad." More shyly, she asks: "Then will you help me build my model?"
His mother looks at him quizzically, and Bucky nods.
"Go ahead then." She nudges him, smiling fondly. "See you tomorrow. I love you."
"Love you too."
And with one last kiss to his mother’s cheek, he takes little Eleanor’s hand and follows her into the house.
Later, when the kids have been put to bed and the nightcaps have been poured, Peggy and Steve shoot him a few last looks but very tactfully do not try to breach The Subject. Bucky is grateful. He’s going to need a little more time to articulate how much they, and all the things they do, mean to him.