Bucky was a mess of half-recalled memories and half-forgotten instincts for the months that it took for Tony and Steve to reconcile and for Shuri to pull the words out of his brain. Then came the move to Avengers Tower, the readjustment to wearing American clothes and following the clock and not the sun, the barrage of therapists and lawyers and dinners— at some point he supposed he just got used to living with his mind always slightly out of sync with his body, that feeling of ants crawling under his skin.
But then he goes on his first mission with the Avengers.
It's a probational mission — he’s partnered with Hawkeye (Hawkeye can shoot arrows with unerring accuracy and make smart calls on the field. Clint Barton trips over his own dog while drinking coffee out of the pot), and is assigned to be ranged support and perimeter defense. Easy stuff that he can do half-incapacitated, which in fact he had done before with a broken leg and several cracked ribs. Except that this time, he shoots the giant six-legged alien on the shoulder instead of the head and then takes another three shots to bring that thing down, which then gives four other aliens a chance to rush the perimeter. Barton takes out out three, one shot each, and Bucky jumps onto the last one, figuring that if his sniper rifle needs recalibration, at least his arm doesn’t. Except that something is off, there, too — he lands on the thing’s mid-back and has to crawl his way up to break its neck.
The others chalk it up to first mission jitters, but Bucky knows better. Something about his body feels … off. Like trying to run with a rock in his shoe, or fighting without the familiar weight of his arm.
At first he thinks it’s the new arm, but he’s *fine* in the training sessions. The same gun that flubbed during the mission shoots perfectly at the range. It must be something else, then. Something buried deep in the muscle memory of the Winter Soldier.
Bucky doesn’t remember much of his missions as the Winter Soldier — HYDRA considered that a liability — nor does he particularly want to delve into the memories that HYDRA allowed him to retain. But if he wants to perform well enough to make amends, to protect Steve, and to hold his own with the Avengers, he would have to.
Bucky has a place for the Winter Soldier — it’s an unused weapons locker down at the shooting range. At a previous visit he had subtly adjusted JARVIS’ cameras to skirt around it, and he had ensured that it was registered to a Stark Industries employee who never visited the gun range. At 2am, it is a quiet, safe space. Bucky tucks himself into the locker, closes his eyes, feels the metal enclosing him, and becomes a weapon once more.
The mask, clamped against his nose, cheekbones, and jaw, making it difficult to speak. He takes slow, steady breaths of the thin, filtered air to ease the lingering scent of ejaculate on his face.
The metal band, tight against his right wrist, its periodic electric pulse a reminder that he is not to sleep, not to lapse. He counts the 72,000 seconds between each shock, and adjusts his grip accordingly.
The heavy weight of the plug in his sore ass shifting with each tiny movement of his hips. The slight tightening of his glutes before he leaps in pursuit of his target, the chafe and stretch of it as he runs.
He keeps his breath shallow and even until he makes it back Sam and Steve’s suite and slips back into his room. JARVIS probably saw him, but it’s okay. Machines can be trusted to be discreet, even if JARVIS is not wiped as frequently as he was. He steps into the shower, another small closed box, and turns on the water. His body registers vague surprise at the heat of the water and the gentleness of the stream, and with that, his body slows comes back to himself. The numbness of the memory is gone, and he almost welcomes that sense of ants under his skin, the constant feeling of vibrating that is as normal as the weight and pull of his arm. He is Bucky, not the Winter Soldier.
After the shower, he walks silently to precisely five feet from Sam and Steve’s door, and sits. If he strains his ears, he can hear their soft even breaths that indicate deep slumber. At three in the morning, the two are probably tangled around each other. In a few hours, as Steve wakes, he will start tossing and turning until his breath suddenly picks up into alertness. He would then apologize softly to Sam for hogging all the blankets, and Sam will make that cute huffing noise. That is usually Bucky’s sign to retreat back, into his room and put up a pretense of sleep.
In the meantime, however, he can keep vigil.
He doesn’t want to return to the body of the Winter Soldier. But he wants to keep watch over them, not just here, but also on the battlefield. Bucky slowly traces a finger over the markings on his body, the ones that he generally doesn’t want to see or acknowledge. The ones that make him hesitate to get too close to Steve and Sam. Maybe he shouldn’t run from this. Maybe he can never stop being, in some part, property of HYDRA. His mind. His body. His actions.
Training his body to forget the instinct of the mask and the band and the plug will take too long. He needs to meet it halfway. Bucky tells himself that he’s not returning fully to being the Winter Soldier. Just enough that his body follows his guidance on the battlefield.
Steve and Sam’s room is still silent. Bucky waits until he hears Steve turn, once, in his bed, and resettle. Good. Not a nightmare, then. He returns to his room and spends the next hour browsing the internet, until he finally find the appropriate objects — a metal wristband on a website that had words like “earthing” and “aura”, and a metal butt plug of the appropriate size and weight from a website that had a lot of photos of men in leather. With a bit of dithering, Bucky decides to forego the mask — the others would get suspicious, and hopefully two out of the three will be sufficient to refocus his body.
* * *
The metal band arrives the next day in the afternoon. The moment he snaps it around his wrist, he feels his heart rate pick up and his breathing even out to precisely 15 breaths per minute. At precisely the 20 minute mark, his entire body tenses, braced for an electric shock that doesn’t come. That’s when Bucky takes the damn thing off and stores it in his mission go bag, as far away from his bed as possible. It will serve its purpose, but he doesn’t want it haunting his sleep.
That night, he still automatically jerks awake every 20 minutes for a full three hours before he resorts to sleeping in front of Sam and Steve’s door. When Steve trips over him in the morning, he shoots Bucky a worried look. Bucky makes his escape back to his bed before Steve can talk to him. Later, he finds breakfast on a plate outside his door.
It takes a few more days for the butt plug to arrive. The metal feels hefty in his hand, cold to the touch. Bucky briefly wonders how he’s supposed to insert it when his hole hasn’t been slicked with cum from the pre-mission fucking.
”He’s always so tight when he’s fresh out of the ice.”
“Yeah, that’s why I always wait for thirds or maybe fourths — let someone else pave the way.”
“Good thing Rumlow likes making him bleed, huh?”
“Well he can have that. For me, it’s all about post-mission, when we pull the plug out again… tight but not too tight, slick but not sloppy.”
Oh, so he’s *supposed* to bleed.
His hole doesn’t seem to want to give. As he looks at it in the mirror, it seems so small, and the plug so big. No matter. The plug is metal, but so is his arm. He grips the base firmly between two metal fingers, takes careful aim via the reflection in the bathroom mirror, and then *pushes.*
His body remembers how to breathe around the silent scream, just as it knows how to stretch around the intrusion with just enough blood to ease the way.
After he wipes away the blood and straightens up, it feels… surprisingly okay. He feels more alert in his body, present in a way that he didn’t know he could be. The ants under his skin feel … quieter. Sleepy, perhaps.
He wears it to dinner and finds it easier to track the conversation around the room. Each shift of his seat brings him back to the present, to focus on the moment at hand.
And then he makes the mistake of wearing it to bed.
He’s being tugged along on a leash, crawling on hands and knees towards somewhere with loud music. The carpet is thick, for which he feels a vague sense of gratitude for. The plug is heavy and jostles with movement. He has been blindfolded, and can only crawl where he is lead. The plug grounds him. As long as it’s in him, that means other things can’t be. But soon enough, the leash stops tugging him forward. He is guided by a few touches to crawl onto a soft raised platform, and then he hears the soft click of the leash being secured to something metallic. A gentle tug confirms it. And then hands are coming, spreading his cheeks and removing the plug. Other hands are running through his hair and prying his mouth open, and he feels something against his hole. The music thrums as more hands are touching him, voices laughing as someone is thrusting into him and someone else is putting a metal circular ring in his mouth. His body trembles from the overstimulation and all he wants is to have the plug back, to be back in his cold quiet cell where he can be leashed to the concrete floor instead.
Bucky wakes when his body hits the carpeted floor of his bedroom. Not concrete, but at least not the plush softness of the bed. The plug is still in him, and it feels too much, too wrong. He yanks it out with a sick “pop” and spends the next ten minutes breathing heavily.
He thought he’d locked the Winter Soldier’s memories away in that unused weapons locker. He doesn't want them here with him, in the dark, in his bedroom. He has a hard enough time sleeping as-is. But he supposes he’s brought them back with the wristband and the plug. Bucky sighs. Of course there would be a price.
Bucky drags some blankets over to sit outside Sam and Steve’s door. Knowing that they’re safe and happy on the other side stills his heart enough to properly review what happened. He needs the wristband and the plug to fight like the Winter Soldier. But the wristband and the plug have upset the balance of things, made it hard to sleep as he’d done the past few months. Now there are too many demons in the quiet darkness of his room. He needs something to restore equilibrium. Regrettably, he can’t fall asleep here in the hallway again — Steve would give him more worried looks, and Sam might even set up an emergency therapy appointment for him.
So he needs to find a way to make the darkness more palatable. How did he sleep, when he wasn’t in cryo?
The leash to the floor, his memory helpfully provides. And he didn’t need to go to the weapons locker to unlock that one.
Bucky returns to his room and lays down on the floor, metal arm cushioned under him, and feels his heart rate dropping into a calm approximating sleep.
When he hears Steve and Sam bustling about outside, he gets up, and uses his computer to order a leash from the same website with the men wearing leather. After some research, he adds a bottle of lube to his order. Then he shoves the plug back in his ass, wipes up the resulting blood, and heads out to greet the lovebirds.
* * *
They’re mid-breakfast when the Avengers alert pops up. It’s a swarm of unidentified *something* attacking all the bridges. Outside, Stark zooms by and Sam is already running toward his wings. Steve grabs his shield and raises his eyebrows at Bucky. “Wanna stay or come with?” It’s only a local threat, and one that mostly needs air power. Steve’s probably just going for the ground control. But it doesn’t hurt to have some eyes higher up, and it would be a good test to see if his newest acquisitions work. Bucky nods. “You hitch a ride with Sam. I’ll take the roofs and be there in 10 minutes.”
Steve flashes him a fierce smile and then Sam’s bustling by and then Bucky’s alone.
He is already wearing the buttplug. The wristband is waiting for him in his combat pack and the moment he snaps it on, counting is suddenly so much easier. Every action measured to the pace of his breaths and heartbeat. 30 seconds to finish putting on his gear, 10 seconds the check in on the comms. 10 seconds to launch himself off of Avengers Tower, three intermediate landings and a short climb later, he is at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge in precisely 8 minutes and 42 seconds.
The rest of the mission goes equally smoothly, and Steve claps him on the shoulder afterward, thanking him for the spotting and shooting out the machine giving subsonic directives to what turned out to be direbats. No one notices when his entire body tenses at the the 20 minute mark and 40 minute mark.
That night, sleep continues to elude him.
* * *
The package with the leash and the lube shows up two days later. Sam and Steve remain curious but respectful about Bucky’s orders, and Steve even commends Bucky on the growth of his autonomy, which sounds like he’s parroting something from Sam. Bucky nods and then retreats into his room. If only they knew that he was doing the opposite of moving away from the Winter Soldier.
The lube works as described, and significantly reduces the amount of pain in buttplug insertion. Bucky calculates the rate of regular buttplug use with an average of two dollops per insertion and sets up a recurring order four bottles per month.
That taken care of, Bucky sits on his bed and tries on the leash. After some adjustment, he gets the collar to the right length. There’s some initial buzzing in his ears as he buckles the collar on, but after that, it rests easily around his neck, and surprisingly, Bucky feels another part of him settle. Just as the buttplug makes him more able to remain present in his body, the collar seems to anchor his breathing. He’s not counting the seconds the way he did with the wristband, but rather, he finds himself drawing slow, calming breaths. It dims that background hum of his body that makes him want to scratch at himself.
So far, so good. Then it's time for the leash itself. It clips on easily to the D-ring in the collar, and Bucky stands in front of the bathroom mirror, looking at the lead dangling from his collar. The weight of it at his neck, the way it drops down toward the ground … Bucky finds himself lowering to the bathroom floor, until he is sitting cross-legged with the leash dangling loosely.
This feels … right. Everything seems slower, more sedate. Bucky stifles a yawn — must be the recent lack of sleep catching up with him. He manages to pull the buttplug out before curling up and dozing off on the bathroom mat.
Bucky wakes from his nap refreshed, with his healing taking care of the minor cricks and pains of falling asleep scrunched up on the bathroom floor. This is the first time he's slept well since that first bungled mission. As Bucky stands, he feels the way the collar and leash pulls him into a calmer space. He wishes he can clip the lead to the couch while he reads, but this is something that he is resolutely not showing Sam and Steve. He hates how settled his body becomes when it's in the gear of the Winter Soldier, but if that's what it takes to be functional as Bucky Barnes outside of his bedroom, then he'll take it. The moment he takes the leash off, his heart rate immediately goes up and the buzzing under his skin returns with a vengeance. The re-insertion of the buttplug helps ease it a bit, but Bucky still feels a wave of regret as he slides the collar and leash under his pillow. “Tonight,” he promises himself, before heading out to his regularly scheduled therapy appointment.
After the therapy is sparring with Steve, followed by making dinner with Sam, and then Sam declaring that it was his sacred duty to “show you two grandpas the evolution of cat memes starting with the late 90s.” Bucky sticks it through Ceiling Cat and Long Cat and Grumpy Cat but finds himself fading despite the nap he had. So he makes his apologies before Sam starts talking about a fat cat from someone’s dream, and retreats to his room.
Finally, in the space of his own room, Bucky pulls out the leash and puts on the collar, and feel himself calming instantly. Then he goes through his nightly routine of teeth brushing, face washing, and the removing and cleaning of his buttplug. He sets it on his nightstand for ease of insertion in the morning, along with the newly acquired lube, and then sits down on the floor.
It feels wrong, somehow, to be still wearing clothes, so he shucks off his t-shirt and underwear. It's okay, to have the scars of his body revealed in the privacy of his room. Who is around to taunt him? They're just another part of the Winter Soldier, and he's decided that his bedroom is a safe quarantine for the Soldier. The leash sways gently from his neck, already lulling him to sleep. Bucky looks around -- what’s left is tethering the leash to something. The leg of the bed should work. Bucky leans over, ties the other end of the leash there, then pulls back to…
The Secretary is tugging on his leash, leading him toward the bedroom. “Come on, it’s bedtime.” He crawls forward, careful to keep the lead slack — the Secretary doesn’t like feeling resistance, even if it’s accidental. The hardwood floor transition to a lush blue rug that his hands sink into and muffles the clicks of his metal hand hitting the floor. He waits obediently as the Secretary toes off his shoes. Sometimes, the Secretary just gets him leashed to the bed and goes to sleep, but given that he had left the Soldier’s plug out on the coffee table, the Secretary clearly has plans to make further use of his hole tonight. Would the Secretary want him on the bed or on the floor? The Soldier looks expectantly. The Secretary points at the foot of the bed and hands him the leash. The floor, then. The Soldier dutifully attaches his leash to the foot of the bed — the Secretary never stoops to such menial tasks — then waits for further instruction. That comes in the form of a foot against his head, and a command. “Lick.” What is he supposed to lick? The Soldier looks around in a brief panic before his eyes settle on the Secretary’s shoes.
“Jarvis.” The Secretary says before tapping his ass gently, ”Up.” The Soldier raises it so that he is standing, bent over, presenting his hole for examination. The leash keeps his head within a foot of the floor, but the Soldier is flexible. The Secretary slips a finger in, feeling the slippery cum from earlier in the evening. “Vital signs unstable.”
The Secretary is displeased. The Soldier doesn’t quite understand the terms, but he knows that when the Secretary is speaking in that tone, bad things will happen. The Soldier wishes he can beg, can say something to ease the Secretary’s displeasure, but he knows he’s to remain silent unless commanded otherwise. So instead, he tries to empty his mind of all thoughts as he feels the Secretary add a second finger, then a third, and then, uncomfortably, a fourth. Finally, the Secretary withdraws a bit and then says, “I’m going in.”
There is a loud crack and then a spray of light into the room.
“Bucky? BUCKY? Are you all right?”
Bucky blinks, taking deep ragged breaths. The carpet under him is beige, not blue. He is in Avengers Tower, not the Secretary’s estate. And Steve and Sam are …
Fuck.
He looks up to see Steve and Sam standing slack-jawed in his doorway, Steve holding a crushed doorknob in his hand.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” Bucky says weakly.
Steve turns to look at Sam, then says drily, “What it looks like is you triggering yourself into some sort of panic attack or dissociative episode by leashing yourself to the bed. So what is it, actually?”
“It’s…” Bucky unclips the leash from his collar and leans more properly against the bed. At least they're not commenting on the scars on his body, so he supposes he can save that conversation for another day. They've already seen everything, but probably don't yet grasp the full scope of his slippage back into the Winter Soldier. Bucky can work with that. “I’m trying different sleep aids. The leash worked during the day, so I figured it’d work tonight, but…” Bucky shrugs. “I guess I shouldn’t pull on the leash.”
“What do you mean, during the day?” Steve asks, at the same time that Sam says, “What else have you been trying?”
Bucky sighs. Well, so much for limiting the scope of he conversation. If he’s going to have this conversation, he should at least be dressed for it. He pulls on his discarded clothes which thankfully hides his scars, and wishes he could find an excuse to slip his buttplug in to ground himself. Then, sitting *on* the bed this time, Bucky heaves a sigh. “All right, ask away.”
Steve gives Sam a look, and Sam nods. “I’ll go get us some tea.”
After Sam retreats from the doorframe, Steve says softly, “Bucky, can I come closer?”
Bucky squares his shoulders, bracing himself for the inevitable questioning and reprimands. “Nothing stopping you.”
Steve shuffles in and carefully sits down next to Bucky. No questions, yet, just Steve's calm presence. Bucky finds his body relaxing, not having to look Steve in the eye. After a moment, Steve asks softly, “So. Having trouble sleeping, huh?”
Bucky shakes his head. “You don’t know the half of it, pal.”
“So tell me.”
Steve isn’t on the other side of a door at the end of the hallway. And Steve isn't yelling at him in righteous indignation. Instead, he feels the heat from Steve's body, next to him, anchoring him. It's like the nights they spent on the Belgian forests, where Steve looked too big and too tall, but everything he did said 'I'm here, Bucky' and 'We're in this together.' Bucky takes a deep breath and tries to organize his thoughts. “I think… my body is used to certain things, and feels wrong without them.”
“Things like collars and leashes, Buck?”
“Yeah, among other things.”
Steve’s jaw twitches as he visibly decides to set that part of the conversation aside. Instead, he asks, “How does it feel wrong?”
“You know, just … antsy. Distracted. Can’t focus right. Craving for something more, but not knowing what it is.” Bucky picks at a loose thread on his pants. “The plug and the leash makes it better, mostly.” How does he explain the inevitable minefield of his mind? “Sometimes it gets bad, but that’s like, 30 minutes out of 20 hours. Small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.”
Steve huffs a sigh beside him. “So you only sleep four hours a day, huh?” Steve turns to look at him, an eyebrow raised. Before Bucky can demur, Steve picks up his hand. “Well, that’s something you’ll need to work on with your therapist.” Bucky sucks in a breath at the contact, the feeling of Steve's hand against his.
When Steve starts to knead Bucky’s hand gently, moving from palm to fingertips, Bucky can’t help a full-body shiver. Why does it feel so god-damned good, but also so god-damned much? “Mmm.” Steve says quietly. “You’ll have to consult the experts, but I think you might be touch-starved.”
Bucky swallows, throat dry. He’d respond, but Steve’s hands have moved back up his palm and is moving towards his forearm, and it’s gone from the initial feeling of too much to waves of pure bliss. Steve said 'touch starved.' Is that what this has been? Has he just been staving off the desire for touch with the plug and the leash? Was he's too used to hunger to even recognize that he's starving? Each touch from Steve sends waves of warmth across his body, and Bucky finds himself leaning into Steve. Is this what being full feels like? Steve, meanwhile, continues conversationally, “I felt like that my first year out of the ice, you know. Felt like I was about to vibrate out of my skin. Didn’t know what I was feeling until I stumbled across the words ‘skin hunger.’” Steve pauses, lips twisting int a facsimile of a smile. “After that, I made an effort to make friends.”
Bucky can only nod dumbly.
Steve shakes himself from whatever morose thoughts he’s having. “Hey, Bucky, can I hug you?”
Bucky nods again, and then suddenly Steve’s are around him, wrapping him up in warmth, anchoring him to here and now.
“Oh, is it hugging time?” Sam pokes his head in, carrying a tray with three mugs of tea. “Awesome, good job, Steve. I love it when I don’t have to do the emotional heavy lifting and just get to swoop in for the hugs.”
Steve laughs and makes room for Sam to hug Bucky, too.
After a moment, Bucky manages to gather enough wits to hug them back, drinking in the touch and the warmth, body anchored for the first time to the people he loves.