This is the End

This is the end
You will wait to find that I'm still here
And you've been waiting for the light to shine

It’s a quiet Saturday. The apartment smells faintly like last night’s dinner—warm buttery smell of the bread they cooked to crispy right on the stovetop—darkening sunlight streaking across the carpet. It’s still enough to spot the movement of dust, unsettled by Bucky sitting down again. He likes to pace while he reads, but a passage finally catches him short and he has to sit down to reread it. Steve’s pencil against his sketchbook makes a soothing and repetitive sound to keep time to. Every few minutes the sound stops, Steve turns the page, and it starts up again. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

As the setting sun bakes the room golden and stretches long orange bars from the blinds across the carpet, Bucky sits with his feet propped up on the coffee table. He beckons Steve to come hear something from the book, and Steve abandons his sketch immediately and comes to sit down so close to Bucky on the couch that their knees touch. Steve lifts his small bare feet and wedges them under Bucky’s thigh with a sweet, earnest expression on his face like a child about to be read to. Steve’s feet are always cold; Bucky grabs one with his free hand, massaging warmth back into it. The skin of Steve’s ankle is especially soft and cool to the touch under Bucky’s calloused fingers. This exchange of heat is so easy, so natural. Bucky almost forgets to savor it.

“Go ahead, Buck,” Steve says.

Bucky finds his place in the book again, clears his throat before he starts. “It cannot be seen, cannot be felt, cannot be heard, cannot be smelt. It lies behind stars and under hills, and empty holes it fills. It comes first and follows after, ends life, kills laughter.”

“A riddle?” Steve asks.

“Mhm.”

Steve shakes his head. He thinks about it, makes that cute little face he does. His tongue touches his bottom lip. Bucky wants to reach over and touch Steve’s lip with his thumb where it’s still shiny. But they don’t do things like that. Can’t, anyway. Steve’s blue eyes follow something Bucky can’t see around the room as he thinks.

“Wait, I got it,” he says. Light blooms in his blue, blue eyes like the sun cresting on the waves.

“Well,” he says, “let’s hear the answer, pal.”

Bucky wakes up to complete darkness. Panic builds like a lead weight, dragging him down into some base part of himself. The room is dark. His metal arm is whirring. He’d been fighting in his sleep, the bedsheet torn in his fist.

The dream slips away into nothing. He squeezes his eyes shut again, as if he could keep something of it, but it’s all gone now.

Through the thin walls of the hostel, a shower is going, making the pipes rattle and moan. Outside the open window, someone is singing drunkenly until the crash of a broken bottle startles him into silence. Bucky turns on his side. Nausea washes over him, battering him over and over until he can’t move, forces its way down his throat.

He dry heaves over the side of the bed, reaches for the bedside lamp and switches it on. The little ell of light glides over half the room, exposing the bare walls and dirty carpet, the blocky shapes of impersonal furniture. Chair turned towards the bed, empty, where Bucky had sat for hours last night waiting for sleep to come.

He’s more alone than he can ever remember feeling. I want to die, want to die, want to die, plays in his head like a religious mantra. He repeats it now, fumbling over the words in his mind. Die. To die. Want to. To die.

The singing starts up again outside, voice of rapture.

“Doamne, lumea s-a schimbat prea mult
Și mult aș vrea
Să mai pot să mai iubesc o data.”

Lord the world has changed too much
And I would like so much
To be able to love again.

Bucky stares out the open window, curtains fluttering around the night view. The light from the street comes back pink and foamy, shimmering almost in the humidity.

He fumbles in the night stand, finds his banged-up silver cigarette case and shakes loose a couple pills from inside. He crushes them between the metal fingers of his left hand and rolls a playing card from the bedside before inhaling. After, while he’s floating from it, he turns again and again in bed. Every position has some part of his alien body aching. His strange metal arm, which seems to dig into his shoulder blade, whirs and clicks with his movements, making him feel like he’s not alone, like his arm is a separate being altogether. His side which is badly bruised throbs dully and so does his head which is dimly afflicted with some forgotten headache.

And he wants to die, but that’s more than he deserves now. He wants to die to see him again, and he doesn’t deserve to see him again.

He reaches down with his metal hand and presses on the bruise, as if it’s enough just to remember how he got it. Those beloved hands defending himself, thrashing out at Bucky, hitting him then recoiling as if hurting Bucky hurt him too. Bucky presses harder on the bruise, until he can taste it. Hurting is almost like being close to him, almost like touching. To hurt, to remember, those blue eyes pleading with him on the helicarrier. Remember.

The other man was bigger than before but the way the fight went out of him made him feel as small in Bucky’s hands as he used to. Bucky staring down with horror into the past, wanting to extinguish that light, as the man in the red-white-and-blue let himself be struck in the face again and again with a closed fist. Barely flinching at the pain, taking it. He let Bucky tear his life away, and all the time kept looking at him with all the hope and regret and compassion of a past love. And Bucky struck him and struck him, howling at the memories to keep them back.

Bucky could have stopped then. Before the man’s neck was broken. Before he was hauling him out of the water, eyes streaming, head pulsing with the start of a never-ending headache. Sand in his mouth as he dropped the man on the bank. Dead. Broken. Bucky tore the cowl off the man and stared at him, pit in his stomach. Stared at the pale, dead face with that familiar mouth still partly twisted in a wistful, pleading smile, turning slightly blue.

He started to remember, but it was too late. Steve’s pulse was gone. Life had gone out of him with all the light in the world. Bucky had made a black hole; of course, soon he’d be sucked in too.

Siberia.

Bucky clears out the Hydra compound in under an hour, lays out the bodies of the agents. It’s become usual, routine. He takes the metal steps underground into a ghoulishly lit space with abandoned medical apparatuses pushed against the wall. The room is haunted with ghosts of an abandoned past. Taste of blood in his mouth. He thinks it’s his own blood, his own past. The memories of who he was have been trickling back like water down the drain and Bucky is in the gutter looking up at visions of himself with blood on his hands. The dead pile up and pile up in his mind and, that, he could deal with. He could stomach that. But the one dead he cannot stomach weighs more than all those other lives.

Today, the memory stuck in his head is one of Steve Rogers standing in their old apartment draped in a ratty old quilt. The quilt covers him to the floor, but his blond head is poking out and mussed with sleep. There’s a record playing. It skips over a familiar lyric and jumps ahead, launches into the wistful notes of dream a little dream of me. Steve is swaying slightly and sniffling a lot. When Bucky comes in through the front door, Steve turns to look up at him and it’s just that part of the memory that Bucky’s stuck on. Steve’s cherry red nose, the crackling breaths, and his bright brightest eyes. The way his face breaks into the prettiest smile Bucky’s ever seen and, “hey, there you are.”

Wish I were dead, Bucky thinks as he works, want to die. As he knocks over the old machines, searching for anything he might have missed. Wish I were dead. Were that I were dead that I were dead that I were—

Bucky stops with a gasp, doubling over against the wall as revulsion sweeps through him and empties him out. Shoulders heaving, he waits for the tremors to pass. At the end of it, he reaches into one of the pockets of his gear, next to a sheath of small knives, and produces his cigarette case. He crushes the pills methodically, inhales them off a shelf in the corner of the room. When his head is fuzzy, he starts his work again.

Big blue eyes, face half-turned, face fully turned to him. Smile, “hey, there you are.” Smile again, that smile. Big blue eyes….

Bucky climbs back up the stairs, shouldering the sniper, hair tied out of his face. He pulls the cowl back up over his chin, shoulders through the tight corridor onto the first level then out into the snow. In the white landscape with the flurry of sharp ice obscuring his vision, he walks as if he were blind a few steps until he gets his goggles on.

Heat signatures picked out in the thermal goggles ripple in the night landscape, bursts of RGB-color figures against midnight blacks and the cold white.

Bucky walks leaning forward against the harsh wind, foot over foot. It’s like walking up a steep incline despite the flat terrain. He makes it to a wide tree, pushes up against the bark as he lowers the sniper. Aims at a figure of splotchy yellow-red-green swimming in the snow. Shoots.

The trek across to the next compound has the cold trying to flatten him to the earth. He gets to the next building, hands outstretched.

He breaks the lock on big metal double-doors. The room inside is dark but for a singular green glow in the center. Someone rushes at him from behind but Bucky turns, lifts his gun, and aims all in a fraction of a second. Ten agents total in the perimeter, all dropped in minutes.

Bucky comes further into the room, distantly curious. Mostly his mind is producing the same images of the same man.

In a glass case in the center of the boardroom table is an erratic pulsing green light. In his fuzzy, confused state, he lifts the glass and holds it for a closer look. Gold twined around green stone in the shape of an eye, intricate little carvings in gold, the green light refracted dizzyingly through the glass like a light show. Bucky’s still staring at it when he hears a crunch of footsteps in the snow behind him.

The agent shoots. The impact sets Bucky’s teeth on edge, heat searing through his side. He grabs the gun from the agent when they’re close enough, pulls it forward and then smashes it back in the agent's face. He drops and Bucky staggers over the body before falling too. His blood stains the snow in a wide arc as he drags himself into the cover of some trees.

The goggles pick up a dozen heat signatures all clamoring for the open doors. Bucky breaks the glass case and takes the stone in his gloved hand. It’s heavy, about as big as his palm. He shoves it into a pocket where it bulges strangely, still emitting that green light around the seams of his clothes. Less of a beacon now that it’s covered. The wind blows a dozen shouts around like a faulty radio station and Bucky listens distantly, head thrown back against the bark of a tree, metal hand pressed over the gunshot wound in his thigh.

He pulls himself further into the trees before daring to inspect the wound. With his metal hand which is steadier, quicker, he tears the fabric further. It’s either risk frostbite on the exposed skin or let the wound stitch itself up before he gets the bullet out.

He jabs metal index finger and thumb into the wound, his vision blacking around the edges and panting through the pain. When he wakes again, he has the burnt shell in his hand and is laying face down in the snow. Was kind of hoping it would kill me, but I have to keep moving.

When he’s back at base—small lodge, bed, kitchen, bathroom—he strips, tracking blood over the shiny wood floors, and collapses in just his underclothes on the bed without making a fire first. He’s asleep almost immediately.

The last time Bucky remembers being this cold, Steve almost died. The apartment windows are all shut, frosted white with damp towels on the windowsills to sop up the December chill. Still, the apartment is thirty degrees at best.

Bucky comes into the apartment, shaking snow out on the mat inside the door, a bundle under his arm. He unwraps a whiskey bottle from its paper bag and goes to Steve. They’ve converted the couch into a sickbed, all the sheets taken off the bed and Steve, the tiny convalescent, tucked under them all. Bucky kneels in front of him, coat and boots still on, and opens the whiskey for him.

Terror is a black cloud in the room with them. Steve takes shallow breaths, his face like a wane half-moon, turned away from Bucky as if to save him the pain. Bucky pours a shot into the cap of the whiskey bottle and holds it to Steve’s pale, chapped lips. Steve unsticks his eyes and finally looks at him as Bucky coaxes the drink down his throat.

“Buck,” he rasps when the cap is empty, reaching up with a shaking hand to hold Bucky’s wrist. “What happened to you?”

This isn’t part of the memory. This is something else. Bucky jolts, almost drops the bottle. He sets it down on the small table by Steve’s feet.

“What happened to you? What happened?”

Bucky wakes up sore from shivering convulsively through the night. His bare skin is raw with cold, a window cracked open. If he were a normal person, he would have died in his sleep from hypothermia, let alone the open wound. He gets up, crosses to the window and closes it. Then he sits by the stove and throws a log in, lights it. He snorts the last of his pills as he waits, tremors passing through his body until the fire starts going.

He picks one of the newspapers for kindling. It’s worn, the pages curling and creased. On the front page:

Death of a Hero. Steve’s picture looks back at him, unsmiling, black and white. Underneath is a story about Captain America’s funeral. Held in Brooklyn where the American war hero grew up; thousands in attendance, a million watching the broadcast…. He tosses it into the flame which pops, a lick of orange searing up the sides, before settling again.

Bucky paces back and forth, wall to wall. At some point he uncovers his pistol which he’d placed in a kitchen drawer under a tray of silverware. He slips it in the waistband of his pants and continues his pacing.

He recites his favorite mantra—want to die, want to die.—splashes water on his face in the kitchen sink. Want to die, to die. Pacing again, the handle of the pistol cool against his bare stomach and digging into the crease of his thigh when he walks. He takes it out and puts it on his pillow. To die, to sleep, so simply….

Something catches his eye as he’s doing this, a strange light reflected in the dark window. He spies his discarded tactical gear by the bed which is radiating the green light again and goes over, searching the pockets until he finds the stone.

He feels a strange kinship to it now. Two things recovered from that place: he and it. He lays back down in bed, places it on the bedside, and watches the firelight reflected in it. The fire looks contained in the stone, rolling against the inside of it and trying to get out.

He sits up with the pistol to his temple–want to die, to die–make it quick. He pulls the trigger.

“There you are,” Steve says, looking up at Bucky from the sickbed on the couch. A small dimple forms in one cheek. His face is flushed with fever. He holds out a hand to him. “I’ve missed you.”