viii. COUNTERWEIGHT
viii. COUNTERWEIGHT
It is three in the morning when Happy drops them off at the tower. The lift ride to the penultimate floor is dead silent. When the doors open, Natasha is perched cross-legged on the top edge of the sofa. Somehow, she looks entirely comfortable.
“Did you post bail?” she says to Steve.
“He Captain America’d them,” Bucky says. He throws himself on the cushions below Natasha’s feet.
Natasha tilts her head, inquiringly.
“I’m pretty good at prison breaks,” says Steve. He tries for a smile, but it ends mostly as a miserable grimace.
“What do you plan to do about the records?”
“Expunge them,” says Steve, a little crisp.
“I was asking Bucky,” says Natasha.
Bucky glances at her. “What he said.”
“Some things should never see the light of day,” opines Steve. His hands are on his hips, the angle of his chin noble and brave. Ready to take on the world.
“You look tired, Steve,” says Natasha.
“I do?” Steve replies, baffled.
“Yes,” she says, pointed.
Steve gets the hint. The righteous defender of America softens into a sad old man. He leaves.
“This is your decision,” says Natasha.
Bucky listens to the door close in the distance before he replies. “Do you think Steve is wrong?”
“Morally, ethically or legally?”
Bucky frowns. “I thought I was asking an intel operative, not a lawyer.”
“An ex-assassin, and superhero,” says Natasha.
The way she lays this out for him makes Bucky smile a little. “So you’ve got some contradictions, too.”
“I chose to let an organization decide my morals for me,” says Natasha. “This would have been SHIELD’s purview, but SHIELD is gone. Anyone who might have held authority is dead or fighting from the shadows.”
“Are you telling me you wouldn’t have known what to think unless Nick Fury told you?”
“I’m saying that my relationship with ethics has been ambiguous at best,” says Natasha. “I just don’t think you should allow Steve to make this decision for you.”
“He’s the best option for a moral compass that I have,” says Bucky.
“Let’s consider this in a way that makes sense to both of us. Tactically speaking, you have a very large advantage right now,” says Natasha. “As far as HYDRA is concerned, you’re dead. If you expunge your records, you stay like that.”
“There is always a possibility that they could figure out my location from the trace.”
“If you resurface again, they will consider you an asset to be collected or a threat to be neutralized.”
“You think they might try to take me back? Recondition the programming?”
Natasha shrugs. “There are many options, none of them good. They might consider bringing you back to be too much trouble. A malfunctioning weapon is also useless.”
“And bullets are cheaper,” says Bucky.
“Yes,” says Natasha, narrowing her eyes. “Does that scare you?”
He pictures himself sitting outside in a café, feeling a rare moment of security. Then, a .308 impacting the side of his head, blowing out his skull. Splattering brain matter and blood over the table. Ending his life like all his victims, truly having come full circle. A month ago, hell even a few hours ago, he would have considered the execution a fitting end.
But he doesn’t want to die. And he doesn’t want to live in fear, either.
He doesn’t feel like he’s lying for a second when he meets Natasha’s eyes and says, “I’m not afraid of HYDRA.”
“They should be afraid of you,” agrees Natasha. She taps her chin, thoughtfully. “I have red in my ledger. I am not a good person. But I hold myself accountable for what I’ve done. In time, I may make peace with it.”
“You live looking forward.”
“I hope that if I do enough good, maybe that will balance out my sins,” she says. “The choices I make tomorrow will be better than those of yesterday.”
“How long have you been waiting for the scale to tip?”
“Long enough,” Natasha replies. She gives him a slight half-smile. “We make ourselves into who we want to be. So ask yourself: who is James Barnes?”
James Barnes is dead. The man from Brooklyn who loved to laugh, who was charming with women, who protected Steve, is gone. The only one who mourns is Steve, but the mourning is a second time over, and bittersweet. A new man has come to replace him.
Bucky flips through a bundle of plastic and paper, each card representing a piece of his new identity. Jim Buchanan steps into his shoes and takes his place. Jim has had a whole separate life. He notes the name on the military ID, social security card, driver’s licence. He blinks when he sees the date of birth—1989.
“These are forgeries,” observes Bucky.
Pepper Potts, Tony’s girl, has organised the documents. He had assumed that she would go through legal channels, but she clearly knows the path of least resistance. She eyes him speculatively. Her spotless grey twill suit uncomfortably reminds him that he is completely at her mercy.
“Everything is very well done, mind you,” says Pepper, coolly. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“No,” says Bucky, and swallows the urge to add ma’am. There is something about Pepper that makes him want to stand straight and salute.
He fingers the cash card and slips it into the pocket of his jeans. “Do I even have money?” Bucky asks, and then feels stupid for never wondering before.
“Someone made a large private donation,” says Pepper, her lips twitching. She hands him a copy of a cheque.
Sure enough, Tony’s ostentatious scrawl is on the bottom. And on the ‘for’ line…
“Sad gay hobo?” Bucky yelps. He glances at the balance and nearly shouts again. “Fifty thousand dollars?”
“Pocket change for Tony,” Pepper assures him. “He gives gifts instead of having actual human conversations.”
“That’s one way to make friends,” Bucky says, whistling.
“Tony is a good man to have on your side,” says Pepper. “As, I suspect, are you.”
“Awfully nice of you to say, ma’am,” Bucky replies. He gives her his best roguish wink.
Pepper responds with a sliver of a smile. “Have a good day, Mr. Buchanan.”
“Where do you go, when you’re not here?” Bucky says to Steve.
He is sitting cross-legged on top of Steve’s back. Steve grunts with effort as he pushes up.
“Missions mostly,” Steve pants. “How many is that?”
“Three hundred twenty-six?” Bucky says. The numbers slip from his grasp. “Shit. I’ve lost count.”
“Let’s call it a day, then.” Steve lies down, breathing heavily. His shirt is covered in sweat.
“What kind of missions?”
“Just protecting. Defending. Doing recon,” says Steve evasively. He chuckles a little. “Bringing the shield of justice the American way—that’s what Tony says.”
Stark again. Bucky frowns. “You work with Tony a lot?”
“He’s on the team, and he takes care of all the tech. And the finance.” Steve shifts. “Hey Buck?”
“Yeah?”
“You can get off me now.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Bucky stands up. Steve rolls to a sitting position. He holds out his right hand. “Help me up?”
Bucky pulls him to his feet. The metal joints flex.
“Only three hundred pushups and you’re wiped out? You’re losing your touch, Rogers.”
“Maybe if someone hadn’t lost track halfway through,” Steve says, joking. “It felt more like five hundred to me.”
“A little PT never hurt.”
Steve stretches, rolling up on his toes. He ambles over to the pull-up bar, and begins doing rapid chin ups.
“If anyone had told me that I could do these without breaking a sweat, I woulda laughed them outta Brooklyn.” He pauses mid-air to switch his grip and resumes his manic rhythm.
“A lot of unbelievable things have happened.”
Steve laughs. “Boy, that’s true. I guess my chin ups don’t really compare.”
Lick every bead of sweat from Steve’s face….
…nothing but tongue, wet and sweet
gasp into his mouth, not here...
The intensity of his own feeling blindsides him. Roots him to the spot. Robs him of what breath he has left. He shudders. He knows what Steve’s skin would taste like. Intimately. Visceral. A memory.
His reaction must show on his face because Steve stops. He leaps back to the floor, landing lightly on his feet.
“Everything alright? You look like you went somewhere for a moment.”
Bucky forces his face to remain neutral. He has tried hard to be open with Steve, but deceiving him is easier than he thought. He changes tack the best way he knows how—by drawing on the well of Steve’s concern.
“I’m all right. Just thinking of everything that’s happened.”
Like handsome, predictable clockwork, Steve’s face softens. “That gets me down too. Everything we lost.”
They stand in a respectful twenty second silence. Bucky looks over at Steve’s bowed head and wonders for the first time, what exactly they have lost.
Bucky watches Steve closely after that. At first, he feels a little delightedly like a detective in a noir film, watching body language, listening for clues. Observing the enigma that is Steve Rogers. Like an actor in a stage play, Steve is committed to his role. He stands an appropriate distance away. Never even hints at anything other than a cautious steady friendship.
Bucky even takes out the hated photographs again and looks to see if there is anything to the way his arm is slung around Steve’s shoulders. In the films, Steve’s face crinkles with genuine glee and he wonders what he is saying to make Steve laugh like that.
Maybe the feeling is just a feeling and only that, like some love sick girl dreaming up fantasies. His head isn’t on straight, anyway. It wouldn’t be right for guys to feel like that. He’s seeing something that isn’t there. Creating false memories to make up for the gap. He refuses to believe that it could be a real memory, that something might remain after all.
He can’t look at Steve anymore without wanting to kiss him.
“You’ve been quiet lately,” observes Sam.
They are back at the diner, for breakfast this time. Sam munches on a rasher of bacon. Natasha is curled in the corner of the booth, eating eggs with very precise movements of her knife and fork. Tony had ostensibly accompanied them but he is outside on his mobile phone, brokering some billion dollar deal. Or apologising to his girlfriend. One of the two. Tony is a man of extremes.
“He’s thinking of Steve,” says Natasha before Bucky can reply.
“No, I’m not,” he replies.
Natasha merely raises an eyebrow in response, like she knows this is bullshit.
“I was thinking about…something else,” Bucky finishes lamely, drizzling a dark line of maple syrup on his plate.
Natasha’s eyebrow rises to unforeseen heights. Bucky gives her a dark glare and looks as mutinous as a man can look with a mouthful of pancake.
Sam glances between them. “What am I missing here?”
“I thought I remembered something, but I didn’t,” says Bucky firmly. He points his fork at Natasha. “Stay out of my mind.”
“Stop thinking so loudly.”
“Still in the dark here,” Sam says, sing-song.
“The thing,” says Natasha cryptically.
Sam’s face smooths over. “Oh. That thing.”
He very carefully does not look at Natasha and that is all Bucky needs to figure out that someone squealed.
“You told him,” Bucky says, words sounding less like an accusation than a death threat.
“I guessed,” Sam interjects, vaguely apologetic.
“I’m not sure if it’s a memory,” admits Bucky.
“Have you remembered something false before?” asks Natasha.
“You read my file. They tried implanting events,” says Bucky. “At this point, I just assume anything I get back is real.”
“You should ask Steve,” Sam advises.
“I can’t ask him,” Bucky says, laughing a little bitterly. “Don’t you think he woulda said something by now?”
“Maybe he couldn’t,” says Sam.
“Don’t make excuses for him,” snaps Bucky. “Either he’s lying or my mind is making this up. And I can’t tell which one is worse.”
He keeps his distance from Steve after that. He sulks with rancor, broods with panache. This is a difficult feat to achieve considering their bedrooms are adjoined and there is only one bathroom, but Bucky perseveres. He keeps to his bedroom and locks the door. Only leaves to scrounge the refrigerator long after Steve has left or gone to bed. If he does see Steve, he keeps his face blank and his answers monosyllabic, distancing any previous intimacy with silence.
It doesn’t take long for this behavior to induce a faintly worried expression to permanently settle on Steve’s furrowed brow.
“Are you feeling all right?” Steve opens with one night, a week and half into the fit of bad temper.
Bucky gives a vague sort of grunt without looking up from his book. He is reading a brief history of the modern era, which is two hundred pages too long to be considered short.
“How’s the book?” Steve tries a different track. “You never used to be an egghead.”
Bucky turns a page, deliberately. “I’ve changed.”
“Are you gonna tell me what’s wrong, or am I gonna have to play Twenty Questions with you all night?”
“I dunno. Are you gonna lie to me some more, or are you gonna tell me the truth this time?”
“Lie to you?” says Steve, sounding genuinely confused.
Bucky puts all pretense of reading aside and tosses the book on the table. “You said we were friends.”
“That’s how it was. We were like brothers.”
“Don’t give me the party line, Rogers,” Bucky says roughly. “I remember it differently.”
Steve swallows. “Something came back?”
“Yeah. And I’ve got images of us doing things I know brothers don’t do. So either I’m crazier than I thought or you lied to me.”
“We had an understanding, of sorts,” says Steve, quiet. “But you didn’t remember me, and you didn’t remember you, and it didn’t seem fair to put that on you.”
“You lied, Steve, don’t try to sound noble.”
“All right, it hurt,” Steve snaps back. “The man I knew was lost worse than dead, and I wasn’t going make you love me in his place. Because you were only gonna be an imitation at best.”
“Is that what I am? Only an imitation?” Bucky breathes. “Is that why you keep me around?”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Then why say it, if the thought weren’t floating around to begin with?”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you,” says Steve, exasperated. “I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Lies tend to do that.”
“You weren’t ready to hear the truth, Bucky. When I saw you in Zurich, you had damn lost your mind.”
“So you get to decide which version I hear? I don’t know anything but what you’ve told me. Do you know how vulnerable that makes me? I trusted you to tell me the truth and it turns out you couldn’t even do that.”
“I was protecting you!”
“You were protecting yourself,” Bucky says, scornful. “I’m not the man you wanted anymore, so it was convenient to omit everything.”
“I was waiting for the right moment,” says Steve lowly, his voice tight and calm. Talking him down, like Bucky is the one who is being unreasonable. “I didn’t even know if you wanted me anymore.”
“I don’t want you,” says Bucky, defiant.
He’s a little proud of the way Steve goes pale.
“Oh,” says Steve.
He swallows.
He is silent.
Bucky looks away.
“I’m…sorry,” says Steve.
He stands up.
He leaves.