Ghosts upon Ghosts upon Ghosts

Bucky was for some reason standing in the middle of the Delacroix docks.

Equally inexplicably, in a hiss of steam, he then appeared on the Paul and Darlene. He grabbed the wrench out of Sam’s hand and the steam cleared, like a telescope coming into focus, revealing at last with perfect clarity: Bucky on his parent’s boat.

And so Bucky was there, helping him fix the Paul and Darlene. For a moment Sam had the strangest feeling, like this must be a dream.

How long had he spent looking for this man? Chasing him like the sun chases the mist in the morning, only for him to melt away?

Bucky was looking at the engine of the boat, frowning thoughtfully. Could it be some other person, standing there? Shouldn’t it be?

But no. It was Bucky.

---

They drove across America, chasing trails that had long gone cold.

"Hey look at that" said Sam in Mackinaw City, the city below them as they drove over the highway, the swoop of Mackinaw Bridge just visible in the distance, "Did you see that? That was a giant hot dog."

"Wow," said Steve.

Sam pulled off at the next exit, just before the bridge, and Steve asked him where he was going.

"The giant hot dog, man, where else?"

"Do we really have time for that?"

"It's a giant hot dog Steve. Of course we have time for that."

Steve said nothing, so Sam added: "You've got to do something fun every once in a while."

This finally got a reaction. Steve sighed, and said in a morose tone of voice: "That's exactly what Bucky used to say."

---

It was October. The hills, stretching out in every direction, were ablaze with colour. They were at the base of a waterfall, somewhere in the wilds of Northern Ontario. Mist sprinkled the air.

Steve looked at the waterfall and sighed.

"What?" said Sam.

"Nothing," said Steve.

"Nothing," repeated Sam, "Really. I recognize that sigh."

Steve was silent. He stared at his hands for a moment.

"It's just..." he said finally, "Bucky would have loved this." He gestured to the waterfall. "He loved waterfalls."

"Waterfalls." Sam said doubtfully, "You see a lot of waterfalls in Brooklyn?"

"Well," hemmed Steve, "No. But we used to talk about going to see Niagara Falls someday. I'd seen paintings of it."

"Aright," said Sam, and added this to his ever-growing list of things he knew about Bucky - the man had apparently loved waterfalls.

By now, he knew quite a lot about Bucky.

---

Bucky was the soldier from a nightmare that would not quite go away.

Bucky was a list of kills accumulated across decades and insinuated lines in a forgotten musty file.

Bucky was an exhibit in a museum and a character in a movie and a letter written flippantly in a book he had once read long ago.

Bucky was the cold steel of dog tags in his palm and a long series of empty places someone maybe once might have been.

Bucky preferred his eggs over easy. Bucky's favourite flavour of ice cream was Rocky Road. If given a choice Bucky would ask for cream in his coffee but he usually drank it black, out of expediency. Once when he was young Bucky had wanted to learn the trumpet, and to accomplish this he had embarked on an elaborate scheme involving cosying up to a girl whose uncle played at New York's third most unpopular jazz club. The plan had worked - in so far as the uncle agreed to let him try the trumpet and Bucky had taken the golden instrument into his hands and blew into the mouthpiece as hard as he could - but not a sound had come out! Thus ended his jazz career, aborted before it had even begun.

"It's funnier when Bucky tells it," Steve concluded. Sam nonetheless laughed, and tried to explain to Steve the fine art of the embouchure.

Overall, Sam was glad that Steve was talking about Bucky. It was obvious to anyone who talked to Steve at any length that the man had not had time to properly grief the loss of his friend - the loss of a lot of things, actually. Talking about it, Sam thought, would help. This grieving process, however, was made slightly more complicated by the inconvenient fact that Bucky wasn't actually dead. Except that he was, in a way. Except that he wasn't. His memories were gone. But were they? How much did he remember? How much of that person was left? It was impossible to tell.

"You know he's not going to be the same," Sam had warned Steve, "Even if he did remember everything. You can't go through all that and remain the same."

"I know that," said Steve, "I know that. It doesn't matter to me if he remembers or he doesn't remember, or if he never remembers me. I don't care - he's still Bucky. I want to help him. That's what he always did for me."

And he proceeded to tell Sam a story about how Bucky had cared for him when he was sick, skipping school every day to sop up the sweat from his forehead, keeping vigil day and night over him as Steve mumbled feverishly in great pain.

This story, as Sam was learning, was highly characteristic of Bucky, who was an extremely kind and selfless person. And funny, and brave, not to mention intelligent - Bucky could have been a doctor or a lawyer except he had to drop out of high school to help support his family, Steve told him. His sisters all loved him. He was the three-time borough welterweight champion. He was a great dancer. When Bucky had been six months old his parents had entered him into a "Most Beautiful Baby" contest and Bucky had won first prize. His picture had been prominently displayed in the Brooklyn Eagle for the entire world to admire, which the world did, because Bucky was very admirable.

Good grief. Sam wanted to help Bucky as much as the next guy. But for goodness sake! Brooklyn's most beautiful baby was beginning to get on his nerves.

---

"And just like that," said Sam, "we're supposed to be cool?"

He was staring straight at Bucky. Bucky, whom they had finally found. The boy who could have been a doctor or a lawyer, if only he had a chance, but he hadn't had a chance - instead they had made him into a murderer.

"What did I do?" Bucky asked hoarsely. After his first, brief initial struggle against the industrial press, he now sat with a disconcerting stillness, his body twisted awkwardly. He looked up at them awkwardly, hair falling over his face still dripping of river water. He looked smaller than Sam had expected. But maybe that was because of the size of the room – so big and empty, dwarfing them all.

"Enough," answered Steve.

"Oh God," sighed Bucky, resigned. "I knew this would happen. Everything HYDRA put inside me is still there. All they had to do was say the goddamn words."

It was the most Sam had ever heard him speak.

The funny thing was he sounded normal, really.

---

"I knew this would happen," said the man sitting across from Sam, his voice ragged and bone-weary They were sitting in a private room at the VA. Light spilled in through the window, falling across the desk, the papers and the pens and all the other markers of bureaucratic sensibility. "I just..."

He had gotten black-out drunk. He had sworn to Sam, in the company of his peers, that he would never drink again. He didn’t like the person he became. Yet it was difficult; his injury you see, the pain got too much sometimes.

"I know," said Sam, “I know.”

The man had awoken to find his house in disarray, remnants of a wild series of inebriated antics evident, the kind that college students laughed about and retold like local legends: tools scattered about, the dishwasher miraculously fixed somehow, a carton of milk in the hamster cage and the hamster in the fridge.

"And your wife?"

"She took the kids to stay with her parents."

Sam said: "I think that's for the best."

“Oh God,” said the man.

The hamster, of course, was dead.

Bucky's voice was ragged, like he had just woken up from a particularly wild bender, like it could be just another day at the VA. Bucky looked like any of them; a tired soldier confessing, light streaming into the room.

So it was normal. He sounded normal.

But nothing about this situation was normal.

"What words?" demanded Steve, "What did that man say to you?"

Bucky explained.

---

There was great evil in this world.

---

Steve looked at Sam, who nodded.

They took his arm out of the press.

"Does it hurt?" said Steve. "The arm, I mean. Can you feel... anything?"

"Yeah. Sort of. Pressure." Bucky said. He rolled his left shoulder back once, twice, then placed the metal arm stiffly in his lap where they could see it. "I can feel if I'm touching something."

Steve reached out then, as if to touch it. Then he thought better of it. His hand dropped down to empty air. Then, quickly, as if to give himself no time to think, he put his hand on the metal. Bucky stared at him. Steve moved his hand down the arm. It was corporeal. Their fingers intertwined. They all stared at it - steel and flesh intertwined.

"You're really here," said Steve. His voice full of wonder.

---

But for the most part, they kept their distance.

Steve stood far away. He stood by the door and coolly asked questions.

It was easier this way, Sam thought. There were no procedures for this, or protocols. It was so far beyond any of their experiences and all they could do was pretend it was something that was - that this was an interrogation, a briefing, a meeting at the VA, a thought experiment, or...

A mission.

That, they all knew how to deal with.

Simply a problem to be solved.

---

Bucky talked. He answered all their questions promptly and thoroughly, the sullen silence from the centre completely vanished under these unexpected new circumstances. He seemed almost eager, answering the questions with an unquestioning obedience that was in some ways worrying although there was no time to unpack any of that right now. There was no time for anything. The fate of the world could be at stake.

There were other Winter Soldiers.

Bucky described it all in detail.

Sam watched him all the while.

---

Sam's first impression of Steve:

"Who the hell is this guy?" he had thought, as he got out-lapped again and again by the reflecting pool in DC, "Captain America?"

That was the thing about Steve - it was always immediately and startlingly obvious who he was. He looked exactly like Captain America should look. He looked exactly like the person you would expect Captain America to be – yet somehow more so. When confronted with the real thing, the cartoons suddenly seemed nothing more than gross caricatures. Faced with the actual man, the actors in the movies who had played him seemed nothing more than actors, hopelessly pretending to be someone they were not. Because in the stories Steve was brave and fearless but in real life he was brave and fearless and kind in real life, which was actually quite different and moreover more difficult, and manifested itself in different ways than in the stories and yet when you saw it happen you couldn’t help but think “yes, of course that’s how Captain America would act”. Of course that’s how he would look, how he would be – because he’s Captain America.

And yet sometimes Sam still got the sense that he didn't really know who Steve was - that even Steve didn't know. That maybe Steve was just going along with the character the world had constructed for him. If Captain America had never existed, would he have become someone else entirely? Who would that person be?

“What do you want to do?” Sam had asked him once.

There had been no answer.

But this Sam knew Steve had wanted: he had wanted to find Bucky. If Steve was anything, he was obvious. And here was the long-awaited moment.

But Steve still kept his distance. Playing - like the courts - at impartiality.

---

Steve was Captain America was Steve.

But the man that was with them in the room - who was he? He was Bucky Barnes and he was not. He was the Winter Soldier and he was not.

The role of James Buchanan Barnes fit over him uneasily (unlike Steve, Sam thought the actors in the movies made a far more convincing Bucky than this one), but neither did he fit the role of the legendary assassin, the cold, unyielding soldier who had so dispassionately tried to kill them earlier.

If he had been that soldier, he would have spoken dispassionately. But he didn’t – he had expression. Frustration, fear and resignation, all flashing over his face discreetely. But neither did he speak like Sam imagined Bucky should have spoken - lazy and slangy, the way he did in the cartoons.

He didn't do a lot of things. Bucky's primary characteristic seemed to be that he wasn't.

He didn't speak loudly. He didn't always meet their eyes. Occasionally he would struggle to find some particular word or phrase that suitably conveyed his meaning, although for the most part he did not struggle for words at all – he spoke smoothly. Like a normal person. Except he kept watching them out of the corner of his eye.

He asked them once for a cigarette. When they denied him this (they didn't have any) he leaned back with a feigned nonchalance. "Damn," he said, and fell deep into thought. He didn't respond to Steve's next question. At last he broke the silence to ask them something about a package.

"You remember," Bucky said, "Right, Steve?"

"I'm not... What do you mean?" asked Steve.

"I mean... In Italy. My parents. The packages."

"Oh!" said Steve, and laughed, "The 500 cigarettes."

"Yes."

“I remember!”

Bucky hazarded a brief smile. It hovered over him uncertainly, like he wasn't sure it belonged there. And then the next moment it had vanished entirely. He answered the rest of their questions as rotely as a mission debrief.

---

When viewed as a mission, as a problem to be solved, everything became easier. It became nothing more than a list of boxes that needed to be checked.

Allies. Provisions. Food. Transportation.

They checked them, one by one. Dotted their Is and crossed their Ts. They arranged everything. Sam made his calls. Steve made his calls.

Captain America (and company), saving the world once again.

---

Then came the moment after, when everything had all been arranged and there was nothing to do but wait.

Sam's footsteps echoed against the emptiness of the warehouse. The air seemed to billow in the evening shadows around him, vacuous and vast. The concrete floor was grimy, in places covered by mysterious liquid. He could hear Steve and Bucky whispering to each other in the other room. "Yes, I know but - " Bucky was saying. They fell silent as Sam entered.

"Oh," said Sam, "I’m sorry. Did I not get invited to the slumber party?"

He had meant it to be a joke; only somehow it had come out a little catty.

"What?" said Bucky, who looked confused. He probably didn't even know what a slumber party was.

"Sam." said Steve, who did know what a slumber party was.

Sam exhaled.

He was supposed to be in Louisiana right now. Sam had promised his mother he would come for the annual fish fry. With guests this year, he had said, optimistically. He was always such a stupid optimist. When the accords had come up, he told her they wouldn't be able to make it. She told him: next week, then. You and your friends or just you. He pictured the Paul and Darlene sitting on the waters of the dock, the waters of the bayou rippling in the wind, the town gathered together and laughing over the sizzle of fish, and then he shook his head, and he was, once again, in a dark warehouse in Germany. The place he had chosen to be.

"Yeah," he said, "Sorry. Are you ready?"

"I'll get the car now."

Steve stood up, casting one final glance at Bucky. Bucky smiled up at him encouragingly. Already he had gotten so much better at smiling. It was now almost convincing. He learned fast. No wonder he was considered such a prodigy.

But as soon as Steve turned his back, the smile faded away. Bucky fell silent and flat, staring into the middle distance of the room without expression, absolutely, terribly still. He didn't look at Sam, who was also there in the room watching him. Bucky didn't acknowledge Sam's present at all; he acted like Sam wasn't even there. Like Sam hadn’t sacrificed so much to be there. Like maybe he didn’t even know who Sam was.

"Hey" said Sam, “How you doing.”

Bucky just sat there, staring at the wall.

"I'm Sam,” said Sam, “By the way."

But Bucky just sat there. And Sam felt a chill run through him - because Bucky looked like before. He looked like the soldier.

But then Bucky blinked and it was like a computer shedding its screensaver – he turned online again.

"Um," he said, "Did you say something?"

"Oh nothing. Just making conversation."

"You don't need to," said Bucky, pointedly.

"Thanks for that," said Sam, "You know, I don't think we've ever been formally introduced."

"You're Sam."

"And you're Bucky."

"Then we don't really need to introduce ourselves, now do we."

“I guess not,” said Sam.

Steve came back. They got in the car.

They drove to the airport in silence.