Chapter 7
Time passed very slowly, trapped in the vault.
After Bucky admitted that he—or rather, the Bucky of Steve’s past—wanted Steve to live, he sat quietly against the wall with his brow furrowed for some time. Steve wanted to talk to him, he wanted to know how much Bucky remembered or how he was feeling, but he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to spook Bucky, either. Maybe, he thought, if he stayed quiet for long enough, Bucky would share on his own.
That theory did not seem to be paying off. Eventually, Steve slipped into a light doze, and when he woke up, his ankle felt less painful and Bucky’s face had gone blank and vacant again.
Steve shifted uncomfortably against the wall—the concrete was hard against his back. He started to stand up, only intending to move around and regain some feeling in his legs, and Bucky looked over at him.
“Need help?” Bucky asked, his voice hoarse.
“Sure,” Steve said. He pushed himself up against the wall and Bucky walked over, positioning himself on Steve’s left side to support his left foot. After only a moment of hesitation, Steve slung his left arm over Bucky’s shoulders, and a moment later, Bucky’s flesh arm came around and gripped Steve’s back.
Steve felt his breath catch in his throat. This was the first time he’d touched Bucky—really touched him, not while trying to kill each other—in more than sixty years.
“Take it easy,” Bucky muttered.
Steve tried to put his weight on his left foot and it immediately buckled underneath him. Bucky grabbed his waist, keeping him upright.
“Idiot, I said take it easy.”
Despite the pain in his foot, Steve couldn’t help but smile.
Slowly, like a perverse three-legged race, Bucky guided Steve around the perimeter of the small vault. The second time they turned, they were facing the small metal cage in the corner. Bucky didn’t stop so Steve didn’t either, but it felt ominous, walking towards the metal bars. When they were halfway across the room, Steve felt Bucky give a full body shudder.
“Buck?”
He didn’t answer, but he had stopped moving.
“You ok?”
Steve felt so useless. He was standing next to Bucky, he literally had his arm around his shoulders, but Bucky looked like he was miles away in his head, and Steve didn’t know how to help bring him back from whatever horrible things he seemed to be remembering.
“Bucky.” Steve shook him a little, and miraculously, Bucky’s eyes refocused and he glanced at Steve.
“Yeah, I was here,” he said, his voice low. “Early.”
And then he kept walking and Steve had no choice but to keep going too. They turned well before the bars of the cage, and only a minute later, Bucky was lowering Steve back to the floor in the corner.
“Do you… want to talk about it?” Steve asked, after Bucky went back to sitting out of Steve’s arm’s reach. Steve wasn’t sure if he was supposed to read into that, but his left side tingled as if it was missing Bucky pressed against him.
“After the war,” Bucky said, staring forward still, “they were forced to move around while the Soviets settled and the Americans started planning for the next one. They brought me here for—tests.”
Steve involuntarily glanced at the stains on the ground and didn’t have to wonder what kind of tests Bucky was subjected to. Steve bit down the urge to apologize again, knowing it would only antagonize Bucky. But still, the guilt and shame boiled inside him.
“You just remembered now?” Steve winced as soon as the words left his mouth. He shouldn’t have asked—
“It’s flashes,” Bucky said. “I don’t—it’s not remembering, really, but I’ll see something and it’ll echo. Enough to know.”
“Like on the bridge,” Steve said. “Is that what happened when I said your name?”
Bucky looked at him, finally. “The bridge?”
“The bridge in DC. You jumped down from the overpass and we fought, and I pulled your mask off, and that’s when I knew. I said your name, and you froze for a moment.”
This time, Steve saw the moment Bucky remembered—his eyes were blank one second, and the next they widened a fraction, clouding with what might have been a faint display of emotion Steve couldn’t identify. “They wiped me after that,” he said. “I was malfunctioning. Experiencing echoes.”
Steve flinched. That meant on that helicarrier, Bucky really didn’t know who he was. It was like that last fight on the bridge hadn’t ever happened for him.
Steve felt nauseous.
“Remembering isn’t a malfunction,” Steve said quietly. “It’s a good thing, a sign you’re getting your memories back.”
Bucky seemed to hunch further into himself, his shoulders creeping up and his flesh hand tightening for a moment. “Not my memories,” he muttered.
“What?”
“James Barnes’s memories. James Barnes is in my head.”
“Buck—you are James Barnes.”
This time Bucky’s entire mental arm rippled, like a little wave moving up to his shoulder and back down again. He didn’t say anything.
Steve remembered when the arm did the same thing on the helicarrier to push out the shield and thought, for once, maybe he shouldn’t push it.
“So what did you do after you pulled me out of the river?” Steve asked, trying to build a timeline in his head.
“I needed supplies. Needed to disappear.”
Well, he definitely succeeded on the disappearing front.
“Where did you go?” Steve asked.
“I didn’t go anywhere,” Bucky said. “I disappeared.”
“But—what country were you in,” Steve said. He tried not to think about how this felt like the highest stakes debrief with an uncooperating operative.
“United States. Didn’t leave DC.”
Steve gaped at him. “You didn’t—all this time, you were in DC?”
Bucky nodded. He was still staring straight ahead but Steve saw him glance towards the corner where Steve sat for a moment.
“Why?”
“Easy to disappear in the chaos,” Bucky said. “Knew the bases were deserted already, handlers were dead or fleeing.”
“So you stayed in DC to avoid Hydra?”
“And to get intel.” Bucky’s eyes glanced over at Steve again.
Steve frowned. “Where’d you get intel?” He thought Natasha and Maria got everything out of what was left of the SHIELD office, and anyway, Natasha dumped their files on the internet, so they were searchable from anywhere.
Bucky huffed a small breath, as if he was annoyed at all the questions. “Smithsonian.”
“The—” What? What did the Smithsonian have to do with—oh. Steve’s heart did something funny in his chest. “Did you, uh, find what you were looking for?”
Bucky shrugged his real shoulder slightly.
“You can, uh, ask me any questions if you want,” Steve said. “If you want more information about what you—or, uh, what James Barnes was like.”
Bucky didn’t respond. Steve wasn’t really expecting anything different.
It was artificially quiet in the vault. Bucky didn’t make any sound and Steve could feel the emptiness pressing down on his ears. His ankle still throbbed.
Well, since they were stuck down there, Steve figured he might as well fill the silence.
“We met when we were little kids,” Steve began. “I was five, you were six. It was a couple’a weeks into school and I was on my own at recess—I was smaller than most other kids and my lungs rattled every time I tried to run after them. My ma sent me to school one day with these little cakes—we never had all that much, but at those times there was enough to go around—and some of the bigger kids saw that I had them, and, well. Anyway, they had me backed into a corner where the teachers couldn’t see, and my nose was already bleeding, and then you showed up behind them. You threw out a line, I don’t even remember what it was, but either it scared the hell outta them or they thought you were gonna get them in trouble, ‘cause they scattered.
“And there I was, brushing dirt off my pants, when you came over to me. We were about the same height at the time,” Steve smiled a bit at that, “and you introduced yourself. You said your name was James but your pa called you Bucky. I told you I didn’t need any help, that I coulda handled those kids on my own. You just smiled and said ok. And then, I dunno, we were friends. I guess you never quite know how people become friends, but from that point, we were.”
Steve shrugged a little, his eyes averted from Bucky. It was strange to try to explain how he met Bucky, how they became friends and what they meant to each other, especially to Bucky himself. He didn’t think he was doing a very good job.
“One night you brought me over to your house. Your ma brushed the dirt outta my hair and then told me I was staying for dinner, and I ate so much I thought I was gonna burst, and my eyes were drooping. Your ma said I had to stay over for the night, I couldn’t walk home in that condition, so we took the cushions off the couch and the blankets off your bed and pretended we were camping in your living room. And later, after baby Alice was born when your house was fit to burst, you would come stay at my place to get away from the noise sometimes, and we would share my bed because ma and me didn’t have a couch.”
Steve looked up and Bucky had actually turned to face him, his flesh arm leaning against the wall. His eyes were looking at somewhere above Steve’s ear and unfocused.
“Buck?” Steve asked softly. “Do you remember?”
Bucky’s head jerked to the side in a rough approximation of shaking his head. “Cold,” he said. “I remember the cold.”
Steve frowned. Natasha’s file had said Bucky had been kept in cryogenic storage between missions, sometimes for years. It shouldn’t be surprising that he’d remember the cold of the cryo chamber first, but it was still disappointing.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “I know you were—”
“Your feet were cold,” Bucky said.
Steve’s breath caught in his chest.
Bucky’s eyes focused for a second and darted towards Steve’s face before flitting away again, as if looking for confirmation.
“Yes,” Steve said, his voice stronger now with hope. “I was cold all the time, growing up. And when we shared a bed, I would tuck my feet between yours—you hated it, you always squirmed away, you said I had blocks of ice attached to my ankles.”
“Not enough blankets,” Bucky muttered.
Steve laughed a bit. “You must be remembering when we got our own place. You were seventeen, we’d both dropped out of school by then and my ma had passed a few months earlier. I couldn’t afford to stay in the apartment, so you offered that we could pool our money and get our own place. And we did, but it was a tiny little apartment with a barely working radiator and only one bed. So we piled up all the blankets we owned on top of us when we went to bed, and you always said there’d never be enough blankets in the world to warm my ice-cold feet.”
Bucky nodded hesitantly.
Steve had an idea. “If—if some things trigger your memories, what if—I mean, is it ok if I bring some things up and maybe that’ll make you remember?”
Bucky moved in a way that might’ve been an eye roll. “Don’t think I could stop you.”
Steve grinned. “Ok. Ok, great.” He thought about it. Better to choose something innocuous, he thought. “Do you remember me drawing?”
Bucky looked like he was thinking for a moment. Then he shook his head. “Doesn’t work like that,” Bucky said. “He had lots of memories of you. It’s all—” Bucky waved his hands in the air.
“Oh,” Steve said. “You mean, if there’s too many, nothing specific comes to mind?”
Bucky nodded, although he looked uncertain still.
“What about…” Steve tried to think of something very specific. “What about outside of Belgium in 44? We—I mean, the Howlies—stormed a Hydra base and afterwards we missed the rendezvous.”
“And the—the one with the hat pushed you into the river?”
Steve smiled wide. “Yeah. Dum Dum was annoyed that I read the map wrong and he pushed me, I lost my footing and fell straight into the river.”
Bucky’s nose wrinkled. “And you smelled like the Hudson the whole walk back to camp.”
Steve laughed. “Yup. You threatened to burn my uniform if I got in our bedrolls with it on.”
Steve shifted a little bit, dragging his leg across the ground so he was facing Bucky. “How about when I tried to make you a cake for your nineteenth birthday?”
Bucky’s brow was furrowed. “You forgot something. It didn’t rise.”
Steve felt on top of the world. “Yes! I forgot the baking powder, and it came out of the oven like a big, wet glob. And you insisted that it still might taste good, even if it didn’t look right, so we tasted it.”
“It didn’t taste good,” Bucky guessed.
“No,” Steve laughed. “It tasted terrible. I think that was the last time you let me do anything in the kitchen, I was always hopeless.”
Now Steve was on a roll. “What about the time when—”
“Stop!”
Bucky jumped up from the ground and started pacing in front of Steve.
“Bucky—”
“I’m not your Bucky,” he said, through gritted teeth.
“What?” Steve was shocked, he thought they were making progress. “You’re remembering things,” he said. “Things that you couldn’t’ve learned from a museum. Doesn’t that prove that you’re James Barnes?”
“It doesn’t matter who I was,” Bucky said, still pacing in a tight circle. “You don’t listen. I’m not him. I’m not who you want me to be.”
“And who do you think that is?” Steve said, getting angry. He wished he could stand up too.
“You think that I’m—I’m some hero, the guy who always had your back,” Bucky said, his voice tight with anger. He spun around to glare at Steve. “You don’t know what I’ve done, you don’t know who I’ve killed—”
“And you think I haven’t!” Steve yelled. “You think I haven’t killed anyone? You think I haven’t changed from that kid I used to be!”
“You’re good,” Bucky said. “What I’ve done—”
“What you did, you did because you were brainwashed,” Steve snarled. “They took you out of your own mind, and they had to do that because you wouldn’t work for them otherwise. But I—I woke up from the ice and signed up for Hydra, Bucky!”
“Don’t you turn this—"
“I followed orders and went where I was told and that whole time I was working for Hydra, working towards their mission, and I didn’t even know!” All the self-hatred that Steve had been bottling up since he’d found out that SHIELD was Hydra was spilling over the surface. “You didn’t have a choice! But I walked right into their offices and said yes, sir.”
“That’s not—”
“Don’t you lecture me, James Barnes, about morality. Don’t tell me about how you’ve changed. You have blood on your hands? Fine. So do I.”
“Steve—”
“Bucky.”
“I killed Howard Stark.” Bucky took a shuddering breath. “He was your friend, and I killed him. I killed his wife. I killed so many innocent people.”
“It wasn’t you,” Steve said.
“It was my hands,” Bucky retorted. He had stopped pacing and was now standing in front of Steve, staring down at him. “It was my body. Steve.” He sounded almost like he was begging. “You can’t absolve me of this.”
Steve didn’t know how to answer that. It was hard to think past the chorus of I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry it’s all my fault I’m sorry sorry sorry going on in his head.
Bucky heaved a sigh and sat down again. “Tell about what you used to draw.”
“What?”
“You said you used to draw a lot. Tell me what you drew.”
Steve recognized the distraction for what it was. “Um, I drew a lot of what I saw around me. The Brooklyn Bridge, the street in front of the apartment, the neighborhood cats. When I got to be decent at it, sometimes I’d get hired for small jobs in the area, like the grocery store and the hardware store, to make signs for their new products.” Steve hesitated, “Do you remember?”
Bucky shook his head.
“That’s ok,” Steve said, willing himself to believe it. “I also drew how I felt sometimes. When they had me on the Spangle Circuit—”
Bucky's eyebrows furrowed slightly.
“Oh, after I got big, the higher ups didn’t know what to do with me, so they made me a propaganda tool, essentially. That was how the whole ‘Captain America’ thing started, they put me in a costume and made a stage production around me. I traveled the country and sold war bonds.”
“Doesn’t sound like you liked it,” Bucky said.
Steve snorted. “Yeah, you could say that. Once I relearned how to hold a pencil—that took a couple of weeks, scared me half to death that I’d lost the ability to draw entirely—but once I could again, I drew a lot of dancing monkeys.”
Bucky’s lips twitched up in what was almost a smile. “What else did you draw?”
“Well, I drew you.” Steve felt his face grow hot against his will. “Um, and the other Howlies too, during the war. You know, the whole ‘hurry up and wait’ thing left plenty of time for that.”
Bucky nodded. “What did I do?”
Steve was more pleased than he’d admit to hear Bucky refer to himself in the first person again. “You mean when we had down time? Um, sometimes you’d tell stories. You’d do that for me when I was sick or for your sisters, so you were really good at it.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Made up stories,” Steve said. “You’d tell us about the future.” Steve laughed a little at the irony. “Or you’d tell us about—um, new inventions that people would make, and how we’d be able to fly around the entire world one day.” Steve had almost brought up Howard and only just managed to stop himself. He was sure Bucky noticed, but he didn’t say anything.
Bucky didn’t ask him anything else and there was silence in the vault for a few minutes.
“Bucky?” Steve asked, timidly.
Bucky looked up at him expectantly.
“Um, can I ask you something?”
Bucky shrugged. “Go ahead. Doesn’t mean I’ll know the answer.”
“You said you were in DC after the helicarrier fell. Why—why didn’t you come find me? Or at least let me find you?”
Bucky was quiet for a minute and Steve was sure he wasn’t going to answer the question, but then he spoke. His voice was soft but he sounded sure of himself. “I didn’t know anything,” he said. “I mean it, I didn’t know my own name. I didn’t know I had a name to know.”
Steve swallowed roughly.
“But somehow, I knew you. I knew you were important, at least, even though I didn’t know why at the time. And I knew pain. I knew Hydra, if they got me, would erase you from my head. And it would hurt. The chair—” Bucky’s voice broke and he had to swallow and steady himself. “For a long time, it was all I knew. The mission, the chair, the ice. And then after you… I couldn’t go back to that.
“I needed intel. I saw your face on an ad and I went to the museum. Day after day, I tried to stay away but I kept coming back. I knew things, somehow, that the museum didn’t know. I knew which facts were wrong. I could hear echoes of the events described in the museum, as if they had happened to me.”
“That’s how you figured out who you are?” Steve asked.
Bucky gave a dry laugh. “Yeah.”
“Bucky, please. You hid so much from me back in the war. I didn’t know—I should have pushed but I didn’t, so I didn’t know about the serum, I didn’t know what really happened at Azzano. Please, tell me what really happened.”
Bucky shook his head. “It ever occur to you that he—that I kept things from you to protect you? Things you didn’t want to hear?”
“Buck—” Steve choked out. His face was wet. He didn’t realize he’d started crying. He wiped at his cheeks impatiently.
“Fine. You want to know? Here it is. They had me on some heavy shit,” Bucky said. “Drugs to keep me complacent, functioning, all that. Then the drugs were gone. Wasn’t a pretty picture.”
“Oh,” Steve said. “Detox.”
“Yeah. I holed up in an abandoned warehouse for a few days. I met the man, your friend James Barnes. The guy’s a real asshole sometimes.”
“Um. You hallucinated… yourself?” Steve asked.
“No,” Bucky said, exasperated. “I hallucinated the Bucky of your childhood. The one you remember.”
That was not what Steve was expecting. “And did that—help?”
“It put some stuff into perspective,” Bucky said, shrugging. “But mostly he just whined that I should go find you.”
“So why didn’t you?” Steve cried. “Bucky, I could’ve helped! I could’ve—”
“I was scared, Steve!” Bucky yelled. “I just learned that I was a person, that seventy years ago I lived a life and then they took it all away from me. They wiped my memory and used me to kill people, and—and I just did it! I did what they said, I didn’t question it, I didn’t fight—”
“You couldn’t!” Steve was yelling too now, and their voices were echoing in the metal vault. “That wasn’t your fault!”
“So what do you think, Rogers, that I was a boy scout before the Russians found me? That all the bad in me was put there by Hydra?”
“What are you—”
“I was killing people far before Hydra got a hold of me.” Bucky’s voice was low and deadly now. “The US army put a rifle in my hands and pointed me at the enemy and told me to shoot. And I didn’t question it, I didn’t fight.”
“That was war, Bucky. Things are different now, no one would make you—”
“No one would have to.” Bucky said, quietly. “You saw what I did, at the last Hydra base. I did that with no orders. I killed all those people because I knew if I didn’t, they might kill you.
“I lied, before. When I said the world doesn’t revolve around you. That’s what I learned in that dingy old warehouse, dry heaving my guts out with three Bucky Barneses standing over me. My world has always revolved around you.
“Why didn’t I come find you? I was scared, Steve. I just learned I had been controlled for seventy years. I didn’t want to be controlled ever again.”
Hot tears were pouring down Steve’s cheeks now. “How could you think that I—that, that I would ever—”
“Love can make people do some pretty crazy shit,” Bucky said.
“Love? Bucky, what are you talking about?”
“Your Bucky Barnes was in love with you,” he said simply. “And when I came into myself, I found that the love was still there—love with no basis, mind you, built on basically no memories. The only thing I had ever done with you was pummel your face and try to kill you, but sure enough, the love was sitting in my head, locked behind—”
“Bucky, stop,” Steve cut him off. “Just stop. Look, I’m sorry that’s what—what the old Bucky’s in your hallucinations told you, but that’s just not the truth. You were never in love with me.” His voice was raw, desperate. “And I don’t know how that gets to—”
“If you don’t think this is love,” Bucky said, “what do you think it is?” His head was tilted and his eyes were clear—he looked more like the old Bucky than Steve had seen so far. “You said earlier you never knew why I stayed by your side. Well, what would make me always want to stay? What is it that made me follow you back into the war? What is it that broke through seventy years of conditioning?”
“Bucky—”
“And what about you, Steve? What does it take to disobey orders and fly across enemy lines to mount a one-man rescue mission against an entire Hydra base? What is it that made you drop your shield on the helicarrier—you dumbass—and let me almost kill you? What drove you to beat up a lowly defenseless Hydra agent in Scotland because he might know my location?”
Steve’s face was burning. “Please, Bucky—”
“It doesn’t matter what you call it, Steve,” Bucky said. “But if there’s one thing amnesia is good for, it’s some fucking perspective. And whatever way you define it, you and me pal, we’ve loved each other for a long fucking time now.
“I didn’t come find you, Steve, because I wanted to find myself first. But the joke’s on me—turns out, Bucky Barnes has never been anything without Steve Rogers.”
Steve’s head was spinning. He didn’t know where to start. He vaguely thought he might be sick. He took a deep breath. “I want to get one thing straight. Please.”
Bucky nodded.
“You were not in love with me. I can’t—you can’t think that, I can’t let you think that, ok? You went out with half the girls in Brooklyn, Bucky. You took them dancing and came home late at night with lipstick smeared on your face, ok? You didn’t—there was nothing between us, you have to understand that.”
Bucky shrugged. “He liked flirting, Steve. He liked going out and having a good time. And then at the end of the night, he liked coming home to the apartment he shared with you, he liked sharing a bed with you.”
“But—”
“We loved each other, Steve. The old me and the old you.”
“But we never—”
“You think because we didn’t fuck each other, that can’t be love?”
“I—”
“Mind you, Bucky Barnes did want to fuck you, but that’s besides the point.”
Steve flinched. “What?”
Bucky laughed a little at the expression on Steve’s face. He reached out his flesh arm and put a hand on Steve’s forearm. “It’s ok, pal. Rethinking through everything you thought you knew can be a lot. I should know, I do it once a week these days.”
“Jerk,” Steve muttered. He still wasn’t sure what to do with everything Bucky had just dumped on him. “So, so what does this mean?”
“It means stop putting yourself in harm’s way to get to me,” Bucky said, his voice serious. “I’m right here, punk. No need to beat Hydra agents to a pulp or storm strongholds without backup looking for me.”
“And, after we get out of here, you’ll stay?” Steve asked. He was aware that he sounded like he was begging, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Because, Bucky, I was drowning without you. I—I was going through the motions, I think. I wasn’t—it wasn’t really living.”
Bucky scooched on the cold floor until he was sitting next to Steve, and finally, finally, slung an arm around Steve’s shoulders. Steve let his head fall onto Bucky’s shoulder.
“I know, pal. I know. I’m not going anywhere.”