“Желание, pжавый, семнадцать—”
Zemo is trapped behind a thick pane of plexiglass and Bucky flits around its edge, close enough to watch it fog against Zemo’s breath, smudging the lines in his face until he inhales and it clears. Under his gaze Bucky tenses—holds himself like he’s ready to take flight and Zemo’s caught his ankle by the teeth. He’s a rabid animal contained only by the force of his environment and a high tech jail cell, because he isn’t tame, despite whatever act he puts on.
Sick fuck.
“Those days are over,” Bucky states curtly as Zemo plants himself in front of him
“I know. I just wanted to see how the new you reacts to the old words,” he says, and he tilts his head to look him up and down like he’s trying to find a weak spot. Bucky’s own fontanel where the structure of his skull hasn't been fully constructed.
“Something is still in there.”
Something is about to be in your face, and it’s my goddamn fist.
As compelling as the thought is, Bucky stuffs his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket and latches onto the rough material to keep himself calm instead.
You have rules, idiot. Don’t do more damage then you need to and don’t leave fingerprints. Don’t touch anything if you can avoid it. Be civil.
It’s infuriating that Bucky has to be the one to do this. To be the one given the knife to strip back the layers, peel the skin. Get to the pulp of a rotten fruit no one wants to eat only to break it out of it’s skin.
Zemo calls him desperate for coming to him, and Bucky knows he’s right.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Later—when Bucky has a chance to return to his apartment—he digs through his closet to a small box trapped between his stock of toilet paper and the inflatable air mattress he’s never used. The waxy plastic is coated in a thin layer of dust that erupts around him in a powdery snow when he moves, and filtered through the white light of his phone camera, it hangs in the air. Bucky’s suddenly dizzy with how much it reminds him of the old war bunkers stuffed under the ground.
He wonders if they’ve been turned into museums now. Some place for people to ogle at the space he had fought to survive in. If they’re fitted with wooden signs engraved with dates and descriptions and small children sitting in replicas of their beds.
Bucky yanks out the box he needs before he can let himself think too hard about it and sits down on the hardwood floor. There’s no use in wondering about things he doesn’t know. It’s how he’s survived, and it’s never been productive, and it won’t do anything but force him into a stupor that’ll make him feel gross after.
So he reaches his hand in and pulls out his old dog tags from the jumbled mess of post cards and scraps of paper (all dated until they suddenly cut out near the end of 1943 (when he and the rest of the 107th were captured and forced to break from active duty)), and puts them on for the first time in five years.
Steve’s are in there too. He plucks it from the rest.
The thing is withered, rusted around the edges and dented from a stray gunshot, but it’s Steve’s and it’s also all he’s got left of him. Bucky hesitantly takes the chain in his hand and detaches one to clumsily clip it onto his own. They lay on top of each other, and those lay on top of his heart.
Holding them to his lips, he says something like a prayer.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Days after Zemo’s out, Ayo comes for him, and Bucky can’t do anything but let her.
He's been expecting it, sure. Carried in a stiff jaw and rigid shoulders hunched up in a way that’s just a little unnatural, because Bucky knew exactly what he was doing, and maybe that’s the worst part. There was no mind control, no torture, nothing etched in his brainwaves to scramble himself under a layer of programming.
“He is a means to an end,” he says roughly in Wakandan, thick and accented. Bucky is not a part of them. Cannot assimilate.
Ayo stares him down and circles him like he’s prey and she’s the hunter. At this moment, they are not equals. At this moment, Bucky is not the same person to her as he used to be. “Eight hours, White Wolf,” she spits in English. “Then we come for him.”
Eight hours.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
It’s been ten.
Bucky lets the rough edge of his dog tags bite into the meat of his enclosed fist as he tries to ignore Sam’s impossibly obvious staring.
He closes his eyes, exhales slowly. Lets the metal grow warm in his palm. The fan above their heads in the small space they’re tucked into rattles with decades of wear, like the screws could come undone at any second and send the thing hurtling down on them with blades spinning fast enough to cut. The image is brief, but Bucky likes to imagine the thing killing him, and his solution to shake it out of his head is to chase it down with a newly opened bottle of whisky. The burn it leaves in his throat is as grounding as it is uncomfortable.
He must have done something wrong back then if he'd given Sam any reason to get on his case (as if the fact Bucky’s openly clinging to his ties to the war isn’t concerning enough). Maybe he’d been too obvious in the quiet moments after Zemo had escaped and the Dora Milaje had left them, because after his arm had been detached by the same hands that had given it to him, Sam had asked, “Did you know they could do that?” and like an idiot he’d said no. And he couldn’t do anything but stare at the prosthetic, the scraped floorboards under it, and privately in his own mind come to the sick realization he had never really owned a single part of him.
Bucky bites back the snappy remark he wants to throw at Sam to get him to look away and brings the tags closer to his lips, the same way he’d done after first taking them out. Thumbing the letters stamped into T304 stainless steel (or maybe it’s nickel. Copper. Monel. They never really told him before they sent him off with a shiny new M1 Garand), he recites the number on his from memory.
3… 2… 5… 5… 7… 0… 3…8…
As he mouths the words against it, his lips just barely make contact.
Close your eyes. Breathe. Do it again.
3.. 2.. 5.. 5.. 7.. 0.. 3.. 8..
Again.
- 2. 5. 5. 7. 0. 3. 8.
Despite how much Bucky wishes he could take some of this nervous edge off, the drink he’s been nursing will never be able to get him drunk.
Christ, he wishes he hadn’t been so obvious—and he wishes he could go back and punch himself for his own stupidity—because what kind of person let’s a trauma counselor know that when Ayo had cut him down, there had been an sharp tilt in his vision as he registered that the part of him that was gifted came with a code they could unlock? That they still thought he was unstable. Dangerous.
They own the arm by law. Can take it any time. Can melt it down to make into spare parts if they wanted to because it isn’t his. The Winter Soldier has the rest of him because that is his (and it is him) and he can try to make amends as best he can but he’ll never really fix anything, no matter how much Sam argues against it. So what the hell else is left for him to claim?
He drinks.
Bucky was stripped of his name thirty years before Sam was even born. Maybe that bit of knowledge fucks with him just a little (fucks with him a lot), because while Sam was being born in a hospital countries away, Bucky was given the name of a killer and ten words to set him off his leash.
He downs the rest after he lets the chain drop from his grasp to lay flat on his chest, glaring at the now empty bottle he sets down beside him. It trembles in his hand, and that’s another thing vibranium can’t do.
The tags rise as he breathes. He doesn’t move to tuck them back in. Sam follows the drop from fist to sternum that Bucky would’ve otherwise missed if his gaze wasn’t so goddamn heavy.
He takes a breath, then another before closing his eyes against the whirring stream of air from the fan.
32557038
Bucky wonders if Sam hides his tags under his clothes or if he even wears them at all.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
His fist catches the underside of Walker’s jaw the second they’ve found their way out of view of the cameras. He staggers up, drawn taut, muscles tense and shaking with the adrenaline that hasn’t worn off yet from his stunt in the courtyard. The punch has the force of weeks of brewing anger behind it, enough drive that it pops something out of place.
“What the fuck did you do?”
Walker crashes into a loaded crate in the warehouse they’ve squeezed into. Prod him once and he springs to life, hands wrapped around the symbol he’d stolen and a fist already raised by his head to fight back. Catch himself before he falls with feet spread hip wide to distribute his weight. Military trained stance. There’s something fisted in his hand that Bucky elects to ignore in favor of another punch to his ribs.
Walker kicks him down, straight in the jaw. He clambers up and it continues. He hits the power box. He tastes copper.
The current veins into his body, an honest to god deep fryer for his brain, and Bucky’s barely even realizing he’s being fucking electrocuted before he’s shutting off the opened gateway to memories of HYDRA and the subsequent memory wipes. Then of mission reports, then mouthfuls of rubber to keep him from breaking his teeth, then leather straps around wrists to chairs, and then doctors haloed over him against fluorescent lights. Out of the corner of his eye Walker’s smudged into the background, poised over Sam.
Once he isn’t convulsing on the floor, the metal arm spasms so violently he has to slam the other hand on the joint just to get it to stop acting against him. When that doesn’t work, he just tucks it close to his chest, ignores the bile in his throat, ignores the stabbing pain lingering throughout his system, and scrambles up to slam into Walker before he can bring the shield down into Sam’s skull.
The thing he’s holding in his free hand goes flying out of reach. And whatever it is, it’s enough to get him to go after it instead of them. Sam uses the distraction to push him back and his arm snaps seconds later. They each move quick to grab Walker by the shoulder, and Bucky kneels heavily onto his non-broken hand. Sam on the other hand doesn’t have to do as much and favors planting a shin onto Walker’s thigh. His left arm hangs pitifully at his side.
But if he wasn’t pissed before he is now. Walker screams in fury, attempting to free the hand trapped under Bucky, frantic.
“Get the fuck off,” he screams (his vocal cord will tear if he keeps that up), and when Bucky looks over to whatever could be so important, catches the faint glint of metal on the floor, he actually does get the fuck off. It doesn’t really register in his head that he’d just lost his grip on the guy trying to kill them until after Bucky’s already stumbling back.
His heart throttles to his throat. Those are tags. Bucky is suddenly hit with the memory of Walker rushing towards Lemar’s fallen body. He had taken something off him then when Karli—
Shit.
Those are Lemar’s tags.
He looks back to Sam but he’s still holding onto Walker so Bucky rips one of his hands off without thinking. The hard metal plating of Sam’s armor is cool and sharp where his fingers wrap around.
“—the hell are you doing?” Sam yelps.
He doesn’t know. Walker takes the opportunity and starts tearing away, but Sam stops him with a well aimed punch to his broken arm that causes him to lean over and retch. Gross.
Sam rips out of Bucky’s grasp. It leaves a thin line cut across his palm and he sucks in a sharp breath between his teeth while Sam stoops down to Walker, attempting to stop him before he can get up. They don’t have cuffs with them, but there’s a rope back in front of one of the concrete columns. Sam says as much, and puts in a request for Bucky to fetch it while he gets Walker back under control.
“Don’t do that shit again.” he says, voice gruff. Although he doesn’t threaten violence Bucky takes the hint, shakes out his hand and nods.
Stumbling to it, his own tags are searing into his skin under the layers, new cut stinging. Electricity is still charging it’s course through his system, because being a super soldier doesn’t mean shit when his nerve ends are frying.
“Sam,” Bucky says tight lipped, and the hunk of vibranium attached to him jerks with aftershocks that almost send the rope flying when he gets back. The air is stale and it tastes like dust, and wood, and something vaguely like pollen. “Sorry, I don’t—“ I don’t know why I did that.
But Bucky snaps his mouth closed. Shut up. Don’t make excuses, we don’t have time for that. Sam looks on at him with an impatient click of his tongue.
He swallows. Ignores the voltage stinging his system.
“Sorry.”
It’s over only a few moments later. They win. Sam gets the shield, and Bucky drops Lemars tags onto Walker's chest. He’s the first to exit the warehouse, careening away and stumbling out of the area before he does something stupid because shit, today has been a lot. He leaves Sam with the shield and the lunatic, and his arm doesn’t stop twitching.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Bucky catches his thumbnail between his premolars and tugs. He blinks twice, chewing it down to the bed until it bleeds (a nasty habit he’d picked up after his first therapy sessions), and it runs from the space between his skin and his cuticles. The blood slips between his lips until he’s forced to suck the wound to keep it from dripping down the length of his forearm.
Two minutes pass. Sam sits on the obnoxious, orange velvet couch across from Bucky’s seat pushed up against the wall. The room they’re in is miles away from the cop car that had taken Walker away. The world outside and this cheap hotel is only separated by a thin wall shelving a bar stocked full of drinks Bucky can’t even recognize.
“You’re gonna get an infection like that,” Sam snaps before promptly reaching over and yanking Bucky’s thumb out his mouth.
The taste of copper stains his tongue when it’s pulled away and he says, “I don’t get infections.” Batting his hand from his own (and Sam moves back to avoid the gross mixture of saliva and blood that’s waved at him with a disgusted expression), his face twists and he sticks it back in. Don’t say it — “Looks like John can’t get any either.”
Idiot.
Bucky taps his foot. One. Two. Three. Four. Vibranium arm twitches.
“He took the serum.”
“I know.”
“And that kid he killed. Video’s gotta be all over the internet right now.”
“I know.”
“What do you think is going to happen to him?”
Sam stands from where he was seated with an aggression Bucky can feel like an incoming tropical storm; barometric pressure headache beginning to pulsate between his eyes. “Don’t care.”
He stalks halfway across the room before turning back, and then he does it again. He’s pacing in some rhythmic pattern that rings from the contact of his steel-toed boots against the linoleum.
Perhaps Bucky isn’t in a place to judge but it sure looks like he cares.
Sam turns to him then and Bucky raises a hand defensively. “Besides, we gotta talk about what the hell you did back there. Buck, you can’t just tear me off a guy that just killed someone in front of us and then tried to kill us. You need to tell me if something is wrong right now, because I can’t have you pulling something like that again.”
Bucky drops his arm. The motion jerks the port of his shoulder where the arm connects. “I know, Sam. And I don’t need to tell you shit, I already have a shrink,” he says stiffly. Pauses. Corrects himself with a short, “… had.”
To be honest, he’s still not entirely sure if he’s convinced that the whole thing isn’t a crack science.
And Court mandated therapy sessions were closer to a chore that Bucky had to force himself to do rather than something he even partially enjoyed anyways, meanwhile everyone else got to live their lives. Sure, he needed something like it (he would’ve preferred something a little more active), and sure it might’ve helped a little but it’s a bit difficult to heal, better yet believe in it with the threat of legal action dangling over his head if he missed a session.
Even now that he’s out, Bucky doesn’t feel like he’s getting better. At least, not like this (and as if the whole fight wasn’t proof enough). He’s just a wound scabbing over seconds from getting scratched off. Knees scraped on concrete. A stitch popped open.
Sam stalks over to the bar. Pours himself a shot while sitting down heavily, sloshing the drink over the rim. “What this is,” Sam points between the two of them, half exasperated. “It isn’t me offering my service as a shrink, and I want you to remember that right now. That’s not my role in all this. If you need, I can give you the name of another trauma counselor I know, because I do want you to get better, really, Bucky I do. Right now though, all I need from you is to know if your head is screwed on tight enough to continue with what we’re doing. This is bigger than either of us.”
Sam tilts his head back and tips whatever is left into his mouth before slamming it back down. “And that saying, hell of a job Raynor did anyways.” he grunts.
Bucky shoots him a look. “And that’s supposed to mean?” He asks carefully. There’s an edge to his voice that he knows Sam doesn’t miss, notched between a warning.
Sam barks. “It means that she didn’t do shit for you. Therapists can mean well but it wasn’t going to do either of you any good if you weren’t good for each other.” He shrugs with a hint of annoyance and goes in for another shot. He wipes his mouth of the sticky residue.
“I mean, If the one session I had to sit in on was any proof anyways.”
Bucky sneers. “Yeah well. I’m not asking for you to poke around up here, same way I didn’t ask Raynor. The rest of my life is left to be decided by the government anyways. Is Bucky good enough to release into the wild? Is Bucky stable enough to interact with others without trying to kill them? I guess forcing me into mandatory therapy sessions with a retired officer is their way of keeping me in line.”
He picks a loose thread at his knee, jean fraying and scowls. This isn’t the first time he wishes he could get drunk off his ass right now.
They lull to a quiet. The silence is biting. Bucky shifts uncomfortably, because he doesn’t like feeling that Sam knows something he doesn’t. Perhaps he read it in the way he spoke, given something up with the lilt in his voice. His thoughts spread out in front of him for Sam to take and harbor close, analyze, hold up in sharp magnification.
The sudden sound Sam makes when he goes to pour another shot makes Bucky jump, heart thrumming in his throat. Sam reaches across the counter and plucks another shot glass from the small stack behind the bar. When he sets it beside him, stains ringing the walnut countertop from years of use, he leaves the bottle of vodka next to one of the larger ones, and Bucky recognizes it for what it is. An open invitation.
Sam rubs a tired hand across his face. He starts to speak, slow, careful, like he’s holding back from snapping at him. “Your tags. Can I see them?”
Bucky purses his lips. He rips out a thread in his pants and it leaves a new run going horizontally from the hole. “Depends on what you plan to do with them.”
“Just come here.”
He does.
He also tries to explain it before Sam can say anything more, but his voice catches while he tries to speak, so he doesn’t try again. Instead, he sits on the cracked leather of the worn barstools and lets Sam reach out palm up. They don’t meet each other’s faces, and Bucky fingers the silver around his neck.
It’s not as if giving it to Sam will do much to make things clearer. Bucky’s an amalgamation of what he was and what he is now: Quick to action, quick to flirt; bitten nails and world wars; hair cut back down to fit in uniform. Still a killer.
Besides, Sam specializes in war counciling. He’s familiar with the ins and outs of veterans with shell shock (no, that isn’t what it’s called anymore, remember?), but he doesn’t know all of it. The war was horrible. It was cold, and gruesome, and loud, but it wasn’t HYDRA, and Sam isn’t familiar with that. Bucky knows he will never be able to understand Sam’s experience’s in the same way either. They’re both too different. Circumstances too different.
He still slips it off and drops it into Sam’s open hand anyway. Maybe it’s more aggressive than he means for it to be. Maybe not.
Bucky understands that the way he’s lived his life isn’t comparable with anyone else’s. There’s no one else like him. Not Sam, not even Steve. Sam is good. Better than him. Bucky will never be fully able to understand what he goes through.
Sam takes it. Wrapping his fingers around it, he brings it into his own field of vision, and Bucky is just remembering that he’s never told Sam that one of the tags isn’t his.
He pauses for a moment, scanning the thing before he flips one of the tags and sets it down. He picks it back up. Bucky chews the inside of his mouth.
“This one is Steve’s,” Sam says in surprise.
And Bucky just shrugs as if it isn’t something he had chosen to do, and as if he wasn’t the one to attach it there. “Yeah. That one's Steve’s.”
Tracing the numbers stamped into the thin steel, Sam takes the other one and flips it around, holding it up to the washed out amber lighting the bar. “And this is yours?” He asks. And Bucky wants to roll his eyes because obviously it’s his, why else would he have it? But he doesn’t. Instead, he nods and then takes the vodka to pour into the shot glass before the condensation can leave its own ring on the table.
A beat later, Sam nudges him with his elbow, sinewy and sharp. Bucky looks over. “Here.”
In his hand are Bucky’s tags, and bundled close next to them are someone else’s. They’re cleaner, he notices, and less damaged. They look far newer than his.
Bucky sets the bottle down and takes them both from him. He holds the new one in his left hand and slips his own back on with the right.
“Those are mine,” Sam says after a moment. Yeah, Bucky thinks. He’s aware.
When his tags are safely stuffed back into his shirt, Bucky picks up Sam’s and holds close to his pupil. He reads the numbers and attempts to commit them to memory. “Yours sure are a hell of a lot nicer.”
Sam laughs for the first time since they’d fought Walker. Something about it eases the awkward air around them and Bucky sinks into the countertop. “Well, yours are—what? Seventy years old? I’m surprised those things haven’t disengagrated yet,” Sam says in amusement.
“Anyways, I never really held much value to these things,” he sighs and waves a nonchalant hand. The lines around his mouth are drawn in, deep. The way years of making the same expressions carve out rivers on flat planes. He’s aged well for a normal person. Bucky’s aged as strangely as a super soldier can, he supposes.
The first time he’d noticed the years of wear in his own face, he was out at a local diner (60s themed) sparking up a conversation with the pretty waitress taking his order, apron wrinkled like she’d put it on in a hurry. There was a mirror in that place, he remembers. It was thin, rimmed the middle of the walls in between checker tiles and coats of pink paint.
Then he caught a glimpse of himself. Shut down because he couldn’t recognize who he was. Freaked out the waitress and left before ordering anything. The memory is ill-defined, distorted, but he recalls shoving himself into the nearest public restroom and spending the next hour in front of the mirror in silence, pulling at the lines, the droop in his eyelids.
“They always made me feel like I was being branded,” Sam continues, and Bucky makes a face, then takes the shot he’d poured. “Made me feel like I wasn’t anything more than a serial number and someone easy to lose. I don’t ever carry them on me, hell, I couldn’t even tell you where they were. The ones you have are just a copy that Sarah made me wear for all this shit. The original ones might be stuffed into some drawer at the house, though. Never been one for keepsakes but she insisted.”
Sam bites his lip before turning to him, tapping a finger against his bicep. “But you obviously don’t feel that way. So, what’s your deal? Why do you keep them on you?”
Bucky opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. He knows why.
“I got scared. Needed a reminder,” he mumbles. Whether Sam realizes he’s talking about Zemo and what he represents to him or not, Bucky doesn’t want to explain. He’s not there. Not yet.
Sam raises an eyebrow. “Reminder of what?”
Bucky’s back to picking the ever growing hole at his knee. He tilts his head back, jugular curved to the ceiling. “Everything. Before it all went to shit.”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Pulling the trigger on the unloaded gun stings the air with an empty shot.
The sky glazes blue, banded by peach and champagne, and there’s a tight group of pigeons pecking away against the sunlit ground that scatter in a tumult of grey-blue feathers when the bullets he drops gunshot to the ground. The marble monument columns towards space.
Bucky doesn’t think Zemo expects it to be empty, but he turns to him in the dusk anyways, just scared enough to flinch. He knows this is his end. A hair’s breadth from death. Or Jail. He guesses the Raft can count as both.
Yet he allows Bucky to cross his name off his list, like it’s an exchange for the past few weeks of freedom. Or maybe it’s his atonement. If his last payment is letting Bucky make amends, maybe, ironically, in the sort of fashion Zemo’s always tended to sport, this is his way of trying to make his own peace before he’s left to the hands of the Dora Milaje.
“I hold no grudges for what you thought you had to do,” he says. “Goodbye, James.”
You don’t get to call me that.
He steps aside, and takes his place beside the Dora. They tell him not to come back. Not for a while. Not until everything calms.
Bucky likes to think this is his own way of cinching the wound. Of shaking Zemo off of his leg so the torn skin—sunken teeth marks—can finally scar over, and he can let go. He doesn’t spare him a goodbye.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
“If it’s not one thing, it’s something else,” Bucky spits while they hurtle towards the chaos crowding the streets. “You’d think after finally getting Zemo off our asses we’d have some peace and quiet.”
Sam grabs him by the elbow and turns him sharply around a corner, drywall blown out and spat across the cobble. Bucky thinks there might have been something under it—a small animal or just an object—but they’re going too fast for him to tell, and they’re already too far gone to turn around and check. He bites his tongue before he can let the concern slip and pushes forward. Vibrations ripple in his ears, a mix between his feet pounding on the ground and his erratic heartbeat.
“Yeah, well,” Sam gasps and they turn another corner. “It’s all part of the gig. People who do our job don’t exactly get breaks.”
And isn’t that the truth. If he were still going to therapy he thinks Raynor might’ve had him draw up a list of pros and cons about the whole thing, standing in front of a whiteboard with the cap stuck between his teeth while she sat and scribbled in that obnoxious notebook of hers. Does he suit domesticity or the familiarity of battle? Is there a part of him that can’t settle? Does he like the adrenaline? Or does he like buying flowers at corner stores to put in vases on his dining room table?
Yeah, pick his brain, Doctor.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
They catch each other in orbit right as Walker douses a car off to the left of him in gasoline.
Bucky thinks of hair caught on sparks, fire swallowing bodies. Limbs adhesed together with sticky, melted skin, and something pulsates between them when Walker’s eyes darken with mutual understanding; Bucky knows that he knows now. Neither of them have ever kept their tags for identification sake.
He lunges forward while Walker scrambles back and throws himself against the hot, bolted door. His tags jostle under his shirt and the chain sticks to his neck, slick with building sweat.
Burning bodies reek. Bucky’s been around enough of them to collect a small list of facts he keeps tucked at the back of his head with the rest of his memories as the Winter Soldier: Carbon, warping heat, smoke clouding lungs and bits of muscle and fat will float around, poison the air. Soft tissues will contract, blood will singe, and organs will shrink until they’ve shriveled into a small mass of what they used to be, and the birds will pick out their bones.
Everything here is going to be covered in soot.
Bucky grabs the bolt holding the door shut and yanks.
The bastard has run off somewhere (he’s making himself a real killer these days). Bucky wonders if he’s housing Lemar’s dog tags near his sternum. Or maybe tucked into the inside of his shoe, like they used to do in the war.
Bucky’s shoulder aches with pressure the harder he pulls, flesh hand shiny red with blistering burns. There are people screaming, and they’re all flammable.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Coated in ash and sporting a flowering bruise at his jaw, Bucky hangs back while Sam makes his speech, shit-eating grin plastered on his face he for the life of him can’t wipe off. Sam deserves this. He deserves the shield (always has), and he deserves to finally be heard. Otherwise, it would be a real kick in the balls after all of this.
“So, guess we’re getting that break after all?” Bucky ventures when Sam walks up to him. He just laughs, low in his gut and full before they turn to leave and fall in step with each other.
He throws an arm around Bucky’s shoulder that causes them to stumble before righting themselves, and that just earns another laugh from Sam. “I guess so, asshole. Oh, and since we have this time off you are so staying over tonight before you head off. And no arguing about it, got it?”
Bucky still can’t erase the expression. “Got it.”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
When it’s all over, Sam tells Bucky about Bradley when he wakes up at his house the next day.
The museum dedicated to Steve’s life has been fitted with a bronze statue in a new room gutted and turned into a memorial, he says, and there’s a swell of pride in his voice. He talks about it softly around mouthfuls of egg and pancake that Sarah had made for them before Bucky has to leave for New York again.
“You should’ve seen it,” Sam laughs and reaches over to stab a piece of discarded bacon on Bucky’s plate. “I never made a grown man cry like that before. I mean, it felt good to do something nice like that, y‘know? Like, really good. Made me feel like maybe this Cap’ stuff will actually be alright in the end.”
Bucky slaps Sam’s hand away as he goes in for another piece. “You’ve been a great Cap.” Bucky rolls his eyes.
“Okay, okay I know, that is true,” Sam grins. “But I guess I should say thanks for all this. Helping out, y’know? Especially with the boat, you really didn’t need to.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it. There’s thanks to be said on my end too. We’re coworkers, remember?” Bucky sips his water and waves his hand. They’re gluey with syrup that he’ll have to clean up later, or lick off his fingers.
Sam slaps his hand away this time, and Bucky mocks disbelief.
“Enough of that bullshit.”
“Language, Sam.”
“Oh, fuck off we’re friends, got it? I don’t just let coworkers sleep in my house, so no point in denying it now. You met Sarah and my nephews too. Might as well call you family now.”
Family. A warmth spreads through his chest and Bucky could practically pick Sam up and twirl him like in those dumb, cheesy romance movies. He hasn’t had one of those in decades. Bucky’s face breaks out in a smile and he can feel his eyes crinkle. He tries to cover it with his hand, but Sam’s already seen it.
“Family,” Bucky repeats dumbly.
“You’re an idiot,” Sam rolls his eyes but he smiles back. He doesn’t hide it.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Bucky never went back to that museum—not after the opening day—but he does after he’s said his goodbye to Sam, Sarah, and the kids (and the boat). They’ve added new rooms since he’s been there. Ripped up the tiles of the floor and changed it to hardwood. Changed the lights out to something less harsh.
Bucky really does understand what Sam was talking about with the statue, though. Tall and broad, it’s been sculpted carefully with a precision Bucky knows he’d never be able to pull off. Steve would’ve thought it was impressive, he thinks. Bucky puts his dog tags to his lips.
He’d probably say something about the wrinkles in the clothes or some shit, talk about how remarkable it was and how difficult it is to pull that type of stuff off. And he’d make fun of Bucky when he’d say something stupid about it, because Bucky’s never had an artist's eye and Steve had years of knowledge about this wadded into his head since birth.
But, he knows then and there’s he’s been right all along about Sam being the only one deserving of Captain America’s title, and that’s all he really needs. So he slips the tags off and crams them into his back pocket, and he leaves the building.
Later, before he heads off, he goes to a supply store nearby and buys a thick envelope and a pen. Scribbling his name and an address, he slips in a copy of his identification and carries the ink blotted paper to the post office and mails it off before he loses his nerve.
He’s not sure how Sam will react. Bucky ducks around a corner, kneels in a back alley and tries to stop the shaking in his hands. It’s a little childish but Bucky hopes he’ll be proud.
When he finally gets to the airport he clicks off his phone. Bucky doesn’t turn it on until he crosses the country. Twenty one hours and over a thousand miles away. Doesn’t even touch it until his foot is on the ground, and he’s sprawled on the floor of his cramped apartment. He only has one text:
Sam: You motherfucker,
and a link to an article posted thirteen hours earlier. He skims through it, but he already knows what it says. He smothers the grin off his face and tosses the thing off to the side.
The museum adds two podiums in the section about Bucky a week later.
A stand for his tags, and one for Steve’s.