Chapter 2
(November 2024)
“They took her,” the woman repeated.
Bucky’s eyes hardened. “Where?”
“I- I don't know,” she replied helplessly.
Bucky’s mouth tightened into a thin line and he turned away from the shaken group. His breath was beginning to quicken as he walked a few paces.
“Bucky!” Sam’s voice pierced through the ringing in his ears, missing the crackle of the radio. Suddenly the other man was landing next to him. “Buck?” Sam asked.
“She’s gone,” Bucky choked out.
“She’s… gone? Like–”
“Taken,” Bucky said, cutting off Sam’s morbid train of thought.
A second later, Torres flew in. “Is it all clear?” the newly minted Falcon asked.
Bucky’s jaw clenched.
“Lena’s been taken,” Sam replied for him.
Torres let out a long breath. “By the Power Broker?”
Bucky wordlessly walked away.
“It looks that way.” Sam sighed. He’d been hopeful this wouldn’t be the outcome, but would be lying if he said there wasn’t a part of him that knew this is how things would shake out. Part of him wished he could get mad. He wished he could cave into the impulse to just lose it and rage against the world as it keeps putting people he cares about in harm's way, but they would only be able to get Lena back if they kept moving. As the leader, he needed to keep it together. As Bucky’s boyfriend, he needed to keep that hope alive.
“They couldn’t have gone far,” Torres said, “I’ll notify all local units. The choppers are already out, and I’ll get our SWORD connects on the case.”
“Thank you Joaquin,” Sam replied earnestly.
“Of course,” Torres replied, clapping Sam on the shoulder. “Go check on your boy,” he said before walking away. “This is the Falcon calling for all units–”
As Torres left his line of sight, Sam turned toward the fast-departing super-soldier. “Bucky wait.” Sam jogged after him down a dimly lit corridor. “Bucky, please, just—hold on.”
“What?” Bucky asked coldly as he turned in place, coming face-to-face with the other man.
Sam took a deep breath. “We’ll get her back, Buck,” he replied in a steady tone.
Bucky’s nostrils flared in frustration and disbelief as he looked away from him.
“Buck,” Sam said firmly, placing a hand on his shoulder where metal met flesh. Bucky flicked his eyes towards him. “We. Will. Get. Her. Back.”
Bucky exhaled hard through his nose. “Sam,” he said in a shaky voice.
“I know.” Sam moved his hand to cup Bucky’s jaw. “I know.” He stroked it with his thumb.
“We have to get her back,” Bucky said firmly.
Sam nodded. “Together.”
(June 2024)
Dr. Lyn Spalding’s office was actually just a room on the first floor of her Lower East Side brownstone. It was tastefully, if not chaotically, made up of persian rugs, dark wood finishes, and framed paintings and certificates, lit by a big bay window and the reflections off of various decorative vases. Bucky liked it there, and found its smell of leather and cedar candles calming. There was something old-school about it that felt comforting, not like the bright fluorescent hellscape of Dr. Raynor’s court-approved office.
“Do you like it?” Dr. Spalding asked, snapping Bucky out of the daze he was in. At his confused stare she clarified, “The vase you’ve been staring at the last few minutes”‒she gestured to it‒ “do you like it?”
Bucky gave it another quick glance before nodding. “It’s nice.” And it was, with its antique glazed floral motif. It looked like it belonged in a museum.
“Good, I’m glad.” Dr. Spalding nodded. “But, I don’t think you came all the way down here to discuss my decorating.”
“I don’t know doc.” Bucky smirked. “You’re very good at it.”
Dr. Spalding did not respond to his needling, only crossed her legs and sat further back into her chair with a patient gaze.
Bucky sighed. “No, I’m not here about your vase.”
“Good.” Dr. Spalding nodded, tucking a silver strand of her bob behind her ear. “Now tell me why you are here. Usually we only meet once a week. This will make it twice now.”
“What,” Bucky asked, a playful smirk curling his lips, “you don’t like seeing me?”
Dr. Spalding did not respond.
Bucky glanced down at his hands. He worked his jaw over a few times.
“I met someone,” he began, “the other day after our last session.” Dr. Spalding only nodded. “Her name was Lena,” he continued. “She kind of just showed up at my apartment.” He looked up, nodding his head in a way that took his whole body with him. “She’s my sister’s granddaughter.”
Dr. Spalding’s eyes widened just enough to show a reaction, but not specify which one. “And how did you feel when you met her?” she asked.
Bucky resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the cliche. They’d been working on this for a few sessions now, identifying specific emotions. “Shocked,” Bucky replied. Dr. Spalding nodded. “And, scared,” he added.
“Tell me about the fear,” Dr. Spalding replied. “Why do you think you were afraid?”
Bucky let out a huff and scratched his chin with his vibranium fingers. “It was unexpected,” he concluded. “And seeing her brought up new memories, and I guess that was scary too.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“You’ve mentioned previously that sudden encounters with things from your past can trigger deeply repressed memories,” Dr. Spalding acknowledged, “though, this is a person you’ve never met before. What did her presence recall for you?”
Bucky looked down at his lap. “It wasn’t immediate, but that night I had a dream. I was twenty-four and just got drafted. I only had a few weeks before I was supposed to ship out to boot camp. There was a night when Rebecca snuck into my room. She must have only been ten at the time.” His brow furrowed. “She snuck into my room and climbed into my bed and woke me up. She was still so small at that age, all the Depression kids were small, and she was in near tears and she said to me ‘Jamie, I don’t want you to go.’ and I–” Bucky swallowed thickly. “I remember her falling asleep in my bed that night like she used to when she was real little.
“The only time I cried about being drafted was that night.” Bucky scrubbed a hand over his face. “I cried myself to sleep because my baby sister didn’t want me to go.”
Dr. Spalding nodded thoughtfully. “You didn’t want to go either.”
Bucky huffed a laugh and shook his head.
“And this girl, Lena, she’s Rebecca’s granddaughter?” Bucky nodded. “So,” Dr. Spalding continued, “the sudden reminder of your sister dislodged another memory of her.”
“It wasn’t just her being brought up,” Bucky replied.
“Oh?”
Bucky shook his head. “She looked like Becca,” he admitted, frowning, “or I guess what I imagine she looked like all grown up. Except for the eyes”–he gestured at his–“Becca had the same eyes as me and my mom. Lena’s were brown, kinda like my dad’s.”
Dr. Spalding nodded in appreciation of all the information Bucky felt like sharing that day. “Well, I can understand how startling it must have been to see her likeness in a stranger.”
“It wasn’t a bad kind of fear, though,” Bucky explained, “it was like that feeling you get in your stomach before jumping out of a plane without a parachute.”
“Only you get that particular feeling James.” Dr. Spalding quirked her lip.
Bucky smirked a little at her teasing. “It was more anticipation than dread,” he explained.
Dr. Spalding sat with this for a moment.
“We’ve talked many times in this room about the loss you’ve experienced, James,” she begins, “and on many an occasion you have described what seems to be, in my professional opinion, an insurmountable grief.”
Bucky’s jaw tensed.
“What you have lost, what you have been through, you are solitary in experiencing,” she continued, “and we have explored many ways for you to cope with that, but I know that sometimes it has felt insufficient.
“The truth is,” she began, taking a deep sigh, “there is no fixing it. And those tools, which are incredibly useful in dealing with the world, will never fix the root of the problem.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Bucky asked.
“Because I believe Lena’s presence might present a unique opportunity going forward.” Dr. Spalding crossed her legs and leaned forward. Looking Bucky directly in the eyes, she said, “Many studies on grief have concluded that the loss we feel when someone dies is not simply a loss of their presence, but also a loss of self. Everyone we come into contact with in our lives, for better or worse, whether we want them to or not, contains within them a version of you that only they possess;”–Dr. Spalding gestures with her hand–“an amalgamation of memories, emotions, and points of view which intersect to create a personal perception of you that only they have access to.
“Before the soldier, had you ever had someone tell a story that involved you, but that you had no memory of until the moment they reminded you of it?” she asked.
Bucky nodded. “Yeah I think so. It happened a lot more after the soldier though.”
Dr. Spalding hummed. “That situation is a prime example of what I’m talking about,” she explained. “That memory is a piece of you that the person telling the story held with them, until the moment they told that story and gave it back to you. And when we love someone, they hold innumerable pieces of you.” She smiled sadly. “And when they die, they take those with them. This is perhaps why Steve was such a huge loss, aside from the obvious reasons, because he was the last real direct line you had to your past self. He was the last to hold those particular pieces.”
Bucky let this wash over him. “Why are you telling me this now?”
Dr. Spalding shifted in her seat and continued making her point with, “Luckily the self is a renewable resource. You can keep making new memories with new people and forge bonds that give the ones you love parts of you for safekeeping. Like what you are doing with Captain Wilson.”
Bucky blushed at the mention of Sam.
“But,” Dr. Spalding steamrolled on, “they can’t replace the parts of you that you’ve lost to grief.”
“What does this have to do with Lena?” Bucky asked, frustrated.
“She carries within her a hidden reservoir of the pieces of you your sister held.” Dr. Spalding smiles softly, unfazed by his tone. “If you allow yourself to get to know her better, not only will you potentially gain a new, meaningful relationship, but you might get to reclaim some of the past that you’ve lost. You already have begun to, if your dream is anything to go by.”
Bucky sat with this, staring ahead blankly.
“This is a good thing James,” Dr. Spalding asserted.
Dr. Spalding’s words rang in Bucky’s ears even after the session was over.
He spied Sam through the front window of their favorite diner near Dr. Spalding’s home/office, sitting in a booth facing the door, looking over a menu even though Bucky knew he wasn’t going to deviate from his usual order of banana-nut pancakes.
Bucky smiled a little to himself, and let the heavy feelings that the short walk didn’t shake off slip away before entering the diner.
The bell attached to the door chimed and Sam looked up from the menu he was holding. He greeted Bucky with a smile. “There he is.” Sam set the menu down. “I was worried you got lost.”
“Spalding was giving me the number for her vase guy,” Bucky explained as he sat on the other side of the booth.
“A vase guy?” Sam asked incredulously. “What, is that code for something?”
“No.” Bucky shrugged.
“Since when do vases need guys?” Sam asked. “Can’t you just go to Pottery Barn to find one?”
“You didn’t see this vase,” Bucky insisted, “it was not a Pottery Barn kind of vase.”
“Buck, we don’t have money or space for a non-Pottery Barn kind of vase.” Sam sighed.
Before Bucky could make a better case for any extravagant decor, a waitress approached their table.
“Hi there,” she said with a bubbly lilt, “what can I get for you?”
“He’ll have the egg-cellent breakfast platter with rye toast, home fries and a coffee,” Sam responded for him before Bucky could open his mouth, “and I’ll have a double stack of banana nut pancakes and an English breakfast tea.” He handed the menus over. “Thank you.”
The waitress smiled and nodded before heading back to the kitchen.
“I don’t care how nice the vase looked in her office, you know Alpine will knock it over—what?” Sam looked over to find Bucky staring at him with a silly, almost fond, expression. A twin grin began to bloom over his features. “What?” he demanded.
Bucky shook his head. “Nothing, nothing, just–” He sighed. “I knew you were going to go for the pancakes.” What he wanted to say was, Thank you for letting me know you, and even more, Thank you for knowing me.
“Well yeah!” Sam exclaims. “Best damn pancakes I can find in this city, I’m gonna get them every chance I can.”
“I know.” Bucky smiled.
Sam quirked a brow. “You usually aren’t this smiley after a session. What gives?”
Bucky rolled his eyes. “Can’t a fella just be happy spending time with you?”
“Damn right he can,” Sam replied, “but, this isn’t about that.”
Bucky pulled a lip between his teeth. “I think I’m going to call Lena,” he admitted, “set something up.”
Sam’s eyes grew wider but he smiled. “Oh?”
Bucky nodded. “Spalding thinks it will be good for me.”
“And what do you think?” Sam asked gently.
“I think it will be too,” Bucky replied, equally soft.
Sam smiled. “Well, alright then.”