He didn’t want to tell Sam, but having that shield here with them was doing things for his nerves that he didn’t like. It brought about too many memories.
Dread boils in his stomach as an image flashed in his mind, of angry eyes and rippling muscles in the heat of battle, of hands— that were not Steve’s— holding the shield up high. Nothing Bucky does can stop the memory of the shield splitting that poor man’s face— the martyr, now, as they’re calling him.
With that kind of thing, Bucky’s learned, it take years to dull the shock. He’ll be seeing that image behind his eyes for a while.
Mostly, it makes him sad, because that shield was only ever used for good by Steve. Sam should have never given it up.
But he’s given Sam his grievances about that, and he knows there’s no point in being angry anymore. Besides, the shield is back in their possession. Bucky’s always kind of aware of where it is; right now, it’s leaned up against the door, like some sort of symbolic protection.
He looks over, to where Sam is sleeping in his makeshift cot. He can’t see much, just that he’s there, and asleep. Sleeping on the road is a lot easier in theory, Bucky thinks, shifting uncomfortably against the concrete that his sleeping bag lays over. It’s always like this for him.
He sighs, leaning back and shutting his eyes, trying to forget about his headache and the rigid cement beneath him.
He falls asleep slowly, letting his mind wander— but being careful not to let it go too far.
Because in his sleep, he’s the winter soldier. That’s his secret, the one he doesn’t tell anyone. That the soldier is still roaming around in there somewhere, even if the serum doesn’t respond do the words, and Bucky’s afraid he’ll always be there.
In his his dreams, his body moves about, and he watches the soldier, fearing the glint of the metal arm, afraid of what he might see himself do next. It’s exhausting, even in rest.
He cocks the gun, pointing it forward, and he has a sick feeling in his stomach because he knows who’s in his line of fire. He’s seen this dream before.
And yet, he has no control of how it ends. He feels himself pull the trigger, the bang and recoil and all of it, and then all of a sudden he sees Steve’s battle-weary face, and it sends a dull terror through his veins. He gasps sharply, bolting up out of the thin excuse of sleep.
The sudden movement must have been loud, because Sam stirs. He looks over at Bucky, who’s now sitting upright and trying desperately to catch his breath in time.
“You good?” Sam asks, voice groggy.
Bucky inhales deeply, steadying himself. Tired eyes stare across the empty room. “Yeah,” he says breathlessly, “sorry.”
“Another nightmare?” Sam asks. He’s always straight to the point; Bucky figures that’s the counselor in him, Sam’s job before he got dragged into all the avengers’ nonsense.
He has to process Sam’s words, because his mind runs a little slow. Another nightmare?
Just like every night, Bucky wants to say.
“I’m fine, I just—“ he reaches for the steel water bottle next to him, but his movements are stiff and jerky, and he knocks into it, and winces as it tumbles across the room, loud in the silence of night. “Shit.” He inhales, but this time it trembles.
“Bucky, I—“
“I’m sorry,” he interrupts, and he’s not really paying attention. The sound of the gunshot still rings in his ears, and there’s nothing he can do about it. It felt like he was already losing control.
“Where are you going?” Sam asks, bewildered.
It was only then that Bucky realized he was standing up. That sticky feeling was back in his lungs, and for some reason a lump settled in the back of his throat.
“I don’t know,” he whispers. “I need fresh air, that’s all.”
They had set up camp in some abandoned townhome, in the outskirts of some small city in Austria. At least, he thinks it’s Austria, but his memory’s gone foggy.
He makes his way down the old, creaky stairs, until he’s standing in the main room. It’s dark, but not terribly; the street lights cast a warm glow.
This building is old— Pre-America old, he thinks, as he looks up at it from just inside the front door. They had added new features, sure, like fire escapes and sliding windows, but the structure, the bones, are ancient.
Still standing, though, Bucky thinks bitterly, just like himself.
For some reason, he just can’t shake the visions in his dreams, because every time he shuts his eyes now he becomes the winter soldier. It’s harrowing and exhausting. It makes him think that maybe, just maybe, being alive isn’t worth this pain.
Nothing he does distracts him enough, no matter how far he walks or how much fresh air he brings into his lungs, because he still knows that the second he closes his eyes he’ll see everything he never wanted to again. He can’t run from the shadows that still live inside of him.
He sits on a curb, shivering in the cold of the night, and traces the patterns of the cracked stone beneath him with a twig, movements in tune with his breathing. This time the sick, sinking feeling in his stomach feels chemical, and he doesn’t quite know how to describe it. It feels like this is how he will always feel.
The little notebook in his left pocket seems to burn through his skin, because he’s always aware of its presence. The names scrawled in there, the people he’s wronged, will forever be burned into his skin, into his memories, maybe for the rest of his days.
“You shouldn’t stay out here too long,” Sam says, from up the sidewalk. His hands are stuffed in his pockets.
Bucky doesn’t even turn his direction, he just stares down, stiffly, at the little ridges in the concrete that his stick traces.
“I’m not afraid of the cold,” he mutters, thinking back to the feeling of safety, of relief, of when the Wakandans put him back on ice. It meant he couldn’t hurt anybody anymore.
Sam pauses, almost like he’s starting to notice something is different. “Rough night?”
“Something like that.”
Sam sits down next to him. “I’m here to talk, if you need. If you want.” It’s a kind gesture, and Bucky’s grateful.
He nods, looking up at the dark sky. “I know,” he says. Sam is a good friend. He can’t really find anything else to say, because of that chemical cloud, the one that settles right behind his eyes. He’d do anything right now to clear it out, to talk to Sam, to process his emotions, but he can’t. He doesn’t know how.
Instead, he feels sharp tears well up in his eyes, and the lump in his throat swell in size. He inhales sharply.
The exhale was replaced with a shattered sob. He presses the back of his hand shakily against his mouth, eyes growing blurry with frustrated tears. He squints upwards, looking across at the street. He hasn’t felt this bad in a long while.
“It’s okay,” he hears Sam say. Bucky wants to tell him that he’s fine, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels chemical again, and that scares him, more than a lot of things, because it means he’s not really in control anymore. And he can’t lose control again, not ever. He’d rather be dead than lose control.
He shuts his eyes tight, like maybe that will block some little part of the world out, so that maybe he can recover from this one.
He feels that twisted, sick feeling he felt when he saw Steve on the bridge, when he knew he knew him, from somewhere, from some past life, he just couldn’t remember. That terrible feeling of not being able to remember.
And then, all of a sudden, it was Steve’s face behind Bucky’s gun again, and then flashbacks of poor soldiers with their faces blown full off, like he’d seen in the war. Like he’d seen as the winter soldier. Bloody skulls with no skin left, still screaming— the literal living dead. Disfigured faces, and the cold, empty look of death. Those images, they’re the ones that you never forget, no matter how much therapy they put you through or all the things you do to forget.
Bucky holds his face in his hands now, maybe for a half an hour, and he’s not so much crying anymore, but that might just be because he’s too exhausted to cry. Too numb. He feels drying tears on his cheeks, stinging ice-cold in the freezing night.
He just focuses on breathing steady, and when he finally glances up he knows how much of a wreck he looks. He doesn’t really want to meet Sam’s eyes.
“What’s going on?” Sam asks gently, and Bucky appreciates the softness of it all.
He sighs, rubbing under his eyes again. “I don’t know.”
Sam is patient, and just sits there half-expectantly, like he wouldn’t mind if Bucky wasn’t ready to share, but is willing to be an ear to listen.
Bucky’s unsure wether he should tell Sam his thoughts, because they’re already so jumbled inside his head that he doesn’t know much sense they’d make at all in word form. But he figures he should probably take his chance, to at least say it all out loud, and then maybe it might be a little bit clearer.
“I’m losing control,” he says shakily, after a minute. “I can’t, Sam. Not again.”
“Losing control?” He echoes.
“It feels chemical now, I… I feel like I’m losing control again.” I feel weak, he thinks, but doesn’t say. He knows how vague his words sound.
In 1940, he could be admitted to a mental institution for this, for talking about feeling crazy. The societal discord within him seems to tear at the seams.
“Chemical,” Sam echoes. “Like being under?” He means being the Soldier.
“No,” he breathes. “It’s different. I’m still me, I just don’t feel… right.”
“So… like depression.”
Bucky winces at how harsh of a label that is. Labels for these kinds of things never made much sense to him. He starts to think that maybe he’s a victim of his time.
Or maybe labels make it all feel too real.
He swallows. “It’s, like, here,” he says, pointing to his forehead, “and I can’t think that well. I can’t stop the memories.” He can feel his voice shake, and it’s then that he knows how wrecked he is. But there’s nothing he can do.
“Memories?”
“You know the ones,” he breathes, staring at his hands, focusing on the little lines and ridges, anything to keep his mind from slipping back into those visions. “I— I mean, there’s nothing I can do about it.” It feels good to talk through, and he thanks Sam for being that outlet.
“What does that mean to you, losing control?”
“Just… I mean, I’m prone to stuff, right? If this all gets bad enough I’m at risk for suicide, for schizophrenia.”
Sam nods. Because he knows. He’s seen the darker side of service; he’s lived through it.
“The good thing here is you’ve recognized it,” he murmurs. “That’s step one.”
“If you say so,” he responds numbly.
“It means you want to get better,” Sam presses. “Don’t you?”
It takes a while for Bucky to process that one. To imagine a life where he isn’t the winter soldier when he closes his eyes. “Yes,” he says finally.
He’s suddenly aware of the piercing cold, and guilt nags at him. But he isn’t quite ready to go inside yet; he needs some time to breathe, and to think, so he tells Sam he can go inside if he’d like.
Once he’s alone again his eyes focus back on the cracks in the sidewalk, tracing them over and over again. The repetition seems to ease his anxiety.
He thinks about Sam’s words, and how getting better might be far more attainable than he’d originally thought, or originally seen in the world he’d grown up in.
He thinks about the sleepless nights he’s endured, terrified to let himself drift away, terrified to feel his eyes open as the Soldier the moment he flips the switch. Exhaustion creeps into his bones. Nobody can live like this, not even with super-serum in his veins, and it’s then that he decides he’ll do what needs to be done.
—
The door creaks when he pushes it open, and his eyes adjust to the dark room, noticing dim screen light of Sam’s phone reflecting on the wall.
“You’re still up,” Bucky murmurs.
“Waiting for you,” Sam says plainly.
“You didn’t have to.” I can take care of myself, he wants to say.
“Didn’t want you to do anything stupid. You understand.”
Bucky swallows. He means suicide. Bucky’s reminded he’d seen much of that at his time at the veteran’s clinic.
“I’m fine,” Bucky reassures, quietly. He doesn’t think about how he’s probably trying to convince himself, too.
Sam hesitates, sitting up. “Is this how it always is?”
“What do you mean?”
“The dreams, the not sleeping…”
The room is dark, and Bucky flicks on a lamp in the corner. It casts a warm glow that makes him feel a little better.
“I sleep,” he says. He doesn’t say that he doesn’t sleep well.
“The dreams, then,” Sam says, exasperated.
Bucky wants to fight, to push back, to make this an argument even when he knows it doesn’t need to be, because that’s all he’s ever known. He knows revenge, he knows anger, and spite.
But he looks at Sam, and he knows he can’t do that. He just wants to help.
Bucky swallows, sitting down on the stiff excuse of a bed. He looks at the pillow, studying the folds and creases of the sheet.
“It’s been getting better,” he says, but he knows it’s not the full truth. He has to glance back at the shield, sitting in the corner in all its former glory.
Sam follows his gaze. “The shield.” He looks back at Bucky. “Are you still mad at me? For giving it up?”
Bucky sighs. “You had no way of knowing.”
“And yet…?”
“It’s messing with me,” he murmurs. “I keep seeing that— that poor kid. The anger in John’s eyes, and the blood.” Everywhere.
Sam watches him, quietly, with a comforting presence. It reminds Bucky of Steve.
“I know,” Sam says softly. And Bucky knows that he does.
They sit there and talk for a little while longer, about nothing in particular, but it takes Bucky’s mind off of his problems, if not for at least a little while. The air feels lighter somehow, like every little thought isn’t so crushing anymore, like he can breathe a little easier.
The conversation didn’t help his dreams, nor the fact that he thinks about the soldier during most waking moments. But it did give him hope— just the tiniest peek into a world where he might be free again. And maybe that was all he needed, he thinks.
When the TV flickers on, when he’s back at home, there’s a news bit about Sam. The new Captain America. From the outside, Bucky never noticed how well the shield fits him, how effortlessly he holds it, and himself, in the face of so much opposition. And in that moment, as Bucky gazed at the old TV screen, and the news anchormen and the photo of Sam, he realizes that Captain America had always been a figure of hope. And that’s exactly what Sam gave him— hope.