The asset has dreams.
Bucky. His name is Bucky. And he has dreams.
After he pulls his mission – Steve – out of the water, he runs. He can’t risk someone coming for him, not when he’s tasting something close to freedom for the first time. So he runs. He hitchhikes out of DC, away from the cold sterility of government buildings, and, as if on instinct, he ends up in New York. He sells everything he has on him, which isn’t much, and drags himself down to the docks (again, on instinct) with his arm covered to offer his services to working people who don’t ask too many questions. It’s not much, but it’s enough to pay for a tiny old apartment that reminds him of home. Whatever home means. It’s more than enough.
Every night, he gets into a bed that is his, and he has dreams. The lines between his dreams are too blurry for him to know what’s good and what’s bad, so he starts calling them warm and cold dreams. The cold dreams come more often. They involve little handfuls of snow being pelted in his face, snow that he later lies in, bleeding. They involve freezing Hydra labs and unheated apartments alike. The warm ones remind him of something sweet and chocolaty, of fire and sweat, of needles jamming into his arm, of sitting with Stevie under the shade of a tree.
Actually, maybe he does know which ones are the good ones. The good ones involve Steve. His Steve, the skinny one that he remembers, not the one who’s been stretched beyond recognition. That Steve sometimes appears in the bad dreams.
Sometimes he wakes up screaming. Sometimes he doesn’t recognize where he is. Sometimes he breaks what little he owns and spends the rest of the night trying to piece it back together. But every so often, he’ll wake up smiling, his limbs heavy and his heart beating evenly. He tries to hold on to that feeling. It never lasts as long as he wants it to.
The horror of the dreams bleeds into the daytime, and when it becomes too much, he locks himself into his apartment and hides, hoping that no one will come in and that he won’t be able to break out. He refuses to hurt someone again. He doesn’t remember much about Steve, but he remembers that he was supposed to protect him. He can’t stop seeing his bloodied face under the metal fist.
Most days, Bucky feels completely lost, but he only tries to fix it once. His legs take him further and further into the city, and he finds an apartment with a fire escape. What little is left of his mind tells him that this is home. He goes in. The inside is so familiar that Bucky feels like someone’s stolen the air out of his lungs, but everything’s… wrong. There are strangers milling around inside, running their hands over the things that must have been his, his and Steve’s. There are plaques on the walls and everything’s too clean. Bucky flinches when he notices a guard staring at him, and it’s only then that he realizes he’s crying. The apartment is so close to what it’s supposed to be, so close to something Bucky could recognize. But something about it is broken, twisted, and wrong.
He barely remembers who he was before, and he doesn’t know what he is now. But he does know what he wants. Mostly, he wants to be left alone. But at night, when he wakes up, no matter what kind of dream it was, he finds himself hoping that Steve is looking for him.
Steve has dreams.
They’d been bad enough after he’d been taken off the ice. Now, they’re almost unbearable. Still, he bears them. He bears them because he’s starting to think they’re the only way he’s ever going to see Bucky again.
He and Sam hear word of a suspiciously Winter Soldier-like accident in Romania, so they catch a flight because they have nothing else to hold onto. No Bucky, just an angry stranger with a bomb. Natasha goes to Budapest for unrelated reasons, but she promises him that she’ll look. Why Bucky would be in Budapest, he has no idea, since she refuses to tell him what she’ll be doing there. But like he usually does, he trusts that Natasha knows what she’s talking about. Maybe she did, but even she comes back empty handed. They don’t stop after that: they go to France, to Germany, to a small city just past the US-Mexico border. They search for months with nothing to show for it.
Then, Steve has an idea. It’s a shot in the dark, and he feels like he’s trying to hold onto sand, but there’s a chance that Bucky went back to New York. It would make sense. A man who’s lost most of his memories going back to something that might feel a bit familiar. Steve hopes New York is still at least a little familiar to Bucky. He hopes there’s something left. Plus, getting there would be much easier than getting to Romania.
Since they don’t know how long they’ll be gone and they’re essentially cutting off all income by going, he and Sam settle for the cheapest motel that they can stomach. But the bed is comfortable enough, and Steve has dreams.
His dreams are awful. He dreams about the file that Natasha gave him, which he’s starting to call the Bucky Folder. Sam tells him that he shouldn’t read it as often as he does, and he’s right, but Steve reaches for it automatically. He needs answers, no matter how much they horrify him. They make him want to go back a few months so that he can burn SHIELD down all over again. They make him want to cry. Over and over and over again, he sees or hears Bucky fall off the train, and he remembers what Sam said to him at the VA. It’s like I was up there just to watch. He dreams of growing old with no answers and no Bucky. Even worse, he dreams of repeating what happened the last time he found Bucky. He thinks it would be easier to lose him forever than to find him void of any of their memories together, of any recognition behind his blue eyes. One night, he finds himself thinking that he was more content when he thought Bucky was dead. He spends a week beating himself up for giving that thought any real consideration.
One night, heaving on the brink of sobs, he tells Sam about Bucky. He can’t hold it in anymore and he isn’t sure he wants to. He tells him everything about who Bucky was to him, who Steve’s selfishly hoping he still can be, and he feels hot tears roll down his cheeks. He waits. Sam has to do something; even if it’s something angry or violent he can’t just sit there in silence and watch as Steve comes apart. What Steve doesn’t expect is a hug, wordless and unprompted, followed by simple understanding. He’s really starting to like the future.
Steve starts to feel afraid every time the sun goes down. A long time ago, right after he got taken off the ice, he found out that he could stay awake for two straight days before his health started to decline. He pushes that number as hard as he can, drinking coffee that doesn’t help and going for runs to keep his mind sharp. He finds that while he’s awake, it’s easier to remember the good. He goes to Coney Island and finds the specific place where Bucky rubbed his back while he vomited. He goes back to their old apartment, the one that Bucky pressured him into living in because he didn’t want Steve to be alone. It’s been turned into a museum, which means it’s been mostly unchanged. Well, except for one thing. Whoever bought it added a second bed. He’ll probably complain about it later, but he has other priorities right now. He stands outside for two days, from its opening to its closing. If he was Bucky, if he was looking for his own memories, he would come here. Then again, maybe Bucky’s already been here and Steve missed him. Or maybe Bucky’s not in New York at all.
He goes to the five cent theater that they went to to watch The Wizard of Oz. They charge seven dollars a ticket now, which is robbery, but one day, they actually do show The Wizard of Oz. They call it a “timeless classic,” which makes him feel ancient. He is ancient. He sits there in the theater surrounded by the very young and the very, very old, and remembers the way Bucky gasped when the screen went technicolor in 1939.
He finds that his memory is incredibly reliable, and that it’s surprisingly easy to retrace his steps– their steps– and he feels more grateful for the serum than he ever has before.
During the day, he searches, and he remembers.. At night, he bleeds memories and fear. Only one thing stays the same from night to night. Every time, he wakes up wondering if, wherever he is, Bucky’s dreaming too.