Chapter 13
XIII
“I was wondering if you’d done something stupid, you know, since you hadn’t called yet.”
Usually, Sam’s warm, sensible tone never failed to have a calming effect on Bucky. This wasn’t one of those times.
“You’ve spoken to him?”
“If by him you mean Zemo, yeah. He called me.”
“So you already know everything,” he said sombrely.
“Nah, I only know half the story. I was hoping you’d tell me the rest of it, so I can solve all your problems, as usual.”
Bucky hummed quietly. Unfortunately, he didn’t think speaking with Sam would go a long way towards improving things, this time. But it wasn’t as if he had all that many people to open up to about this — or about anything, really. And nothing could possibly make things worse, so he might as well talk to Sam and hear his two cents.
“This time it might be harder than usual, pal,” he murmured.
“I’ll be the judge of that. So, how did Steve react to the news?”
He shouldn’t have answered the fucking phone, he’d thought as he climbed the stairs. He should have ignored Sam’s call and done what he had promised himself, and more importantly Zemo, he’d do today: tell Steve the truth.
But he hadn’t. He hadn’t, and now it all had come crumbling down on him in the worst possible way.
He and Steve had bickered often when they’d been younger, all the time really.
But they’d only ever truly fought once or twice: once when Bucky had been called to war and Steve had understood he wouldn’t be able to follow him; another time, when Steve had become Captain America, and Bucky had understood he couldn’t remain at his side as anything but a comrade in arms.
Arguing with Steve was exhausting. By the time Bucky had told Steve they should call it quits and that Steve’d be better off with Peggy they were stuck in an abandoned hovel in the south of France, and they hadn’t spoken to each other for three days afterward — even when they’d been in adjacent rooms, Steve hunched over a map devising a plan of attack and Bucky sitting down to polish his rifle, the distance created by their strife had gnawed at Bucky’s thoughts and focus like a hungry rat.
However, the army life and its looming risk of sudden death at any moment had a way of putting arguments on the back burner, and in an instant they had resumed fighting side by side, covering each other’s backs.
When Bucky came into Steve’s room, he didn’t really know what to expect. Another punctured wall that had gotten a fist put through it maybe, or an open rucksack being hastily filled. But there was none of that.
Everything was still in its place. Steve was a motionless figure by the window, his stiff back to Bucky, his blank gaze reflected on the window glass.
The silence was eerie. There was soft music filtering in from the outside, as well as voices he couldn’t understand — some kind of local festivity, perhaps, or a street market. It only contrasted alarmingly with the tense stillness in the room. He could practically hear Steve’s jaw grinding.
When Steve turned, finally, his eyes were cold, ice blue, his mouth set into a bloodless line. His hands were braced almost casually on the windowsill he was leaning against, but Bucky could tell that he was purposely trying not to cross his arms. One of his fingers betrayed his nervousness, tapping rhythmically, noisily, on the stone surface.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away,” Bucky said, without much hope that it would help, the words sounding hollow to his own ears. He could already sense the conversation going downhill before it had even started.
“You know, the funny thing,” Steve said, with no trace of humor in his voice, “is I’d suspected it might be him, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Bucky shouldn't have been surprised; Steve was a strategist, perception was a fundamental skill of his. He sighed. “You were fine with us being friends, what difference does this make?”
“I wasn’t fine with it,” Steve started in that deep, irate voice of his, the voice straight from the gut. “And it was one thing to think… but I won’t be okay with him using you, manipulating you into— he could be raping you for all I know.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“What?" Bucky let out a harsh, disbelieving laugh. “Look, I can assure you when we fuck he’s never had to force me into anything I wasn’t willing to—”
Tap. Tap. Thump.
“Yeah, and you also thought you were willing when you killed people, didn’t you?” Steve interrupted, detaching himself from the windowsill, ignoring the bits of crumbled marble falling between his fingers as he stomped closer.
“That’s different,” Bucky protested, inhaling deeply as he straightened his own stance, bitterness pooling in his stomach.
“How do you know if it is? For a period he was your handler, he knows the words—”
This isn’t different from what you expected, he told himself as his hands went numb, it’s fine. “The words don’t work anymore,” he said, and it sounded like a mantra he’d repeated too many times.
“Maybe not as manifestly as they did, but subconsciously they might, and he knows how to—”
“Handle me?”
Steve grimaced, and apparently decided to go at it from another angle. His face was an ugly red. “He’s a terrorist.”
“Christ, this again?” he muttered. “We have an understanding.”
“So are you gonna have an understanding with Hydra agents too, soon?”
Bucky fought the sudden urge to hit him, taking a step forward almost unconsciously — he knew it’d be easy if he caught him by surprise. But he also knew why Steve was provoking him like this.
He reined it in and ignored the barb. “You must have seen that Zemo’s changed — you’ve been here for a while now. And he’s been nothing but generous since you’ve arrived,” he tried to reason, keeping his voice even. “You’ve been sleeping in one of his rooms, emptying his fridge, occupying his house, and he’s accepted it without a blink.” Well, kind of. He’d been civil most of the time, though.
“I’ve only been staying here because you were here!” Steve snapped. “And of course he’s been welcoming, he probably wants to keep you content and complacent so he can keep his privileges. I bet anything’s better than prison.”
Bucky shook his head, giving him an incredulous, scornful look. “He doesn’t need to keep me complacent. The Wakandans believe him to be changed as much as I do. We’ve been over this.”
Steve scoffed. “Well, we just found out Wakanda is infested with Hydra moles, so they don’t seem all that reliable right now. Maybe Zemo knew about that, maybe he architected the vibranium contraband himself.”
“He’d have no reason to do that,” Bucky argued. “What about Sam then? He’s usually with the two of us all the time, he’s seen us as we got together. You don’t trust his judgment either?”
That seemed to bring Steve up short. His lips pressed together and his nostrils flared, plainly angry, but he — actually controlled it.
Briefly, Bucky wondered what Steve thought of Sam right now — if he was as angry with him for allowing Zemo to get out of prison as he was with Bucky, or if he even resented him for letting Zemo get close to Bucky. He knew — Sam had confessed, as if there was a need to — that Steve had left Sam with more than a shield as his responsibility. But where he’d once found Steve’s fierce sense of protectiveness over his loved ones endearing in Brooklyn, and then been proud of that trait during the war and felt undeserving of it in Wakanda, now it only made him want to throw something in irritation.
“Buck, it’s not that I don’t trust Sam, or you, but it could be that he managed to convince all of you of being something that he’s not,” Steve said grimly, after a moment.
It felt like they were going in a circle, moving on only to end up where they started. “So we’re all idiots, is that it? Well thank God our lord and savior Steve Rogers has come back to make us see the error of our ways.”
“Stop that,” Steve said, a warning undertone in his voice.
“How can you be so…? Hell, Steve, you always do this. You’re an awesome strategist, but as soon as things gets personal, you can’t see beyond the end of your nose, and you stop fucking listening. Now you come back after years and you think you know better than anyone else.” There was no more heat to the words. He heard the tired ache in his own voice.
Steve clenched his jaw, then turned away. He paced restlessly, the same few steps back and forth.
After several long seconds, he finally stopped, and his words came out barely whispered, the sound of them as painful as though they were being spoken through broken glass: “How can you be with him?” He hesitated for a moment, troubled, and then Bucky saw a familiar fuck-it expression flicker across his face, before he blurted out, “Is this — have you thought this might be a way of trying to deal with — with what happened to you?”
Bucky stared at him, forgetting how to breathe as something icy cold settled in his gut. When he finally sucked in a breath, his lungs burned with it. “Are you asking me if I’m fucking Zemo because he reminds me of the time when I was the Winter Soldier?”
Steve cringed, but Bucky didn’t give him the time to talk. He could feel the anger mounting irrationally fast, as he vomited out, “Because he reminds me of when my handlers fucked me? Is that what you think?”
“Jesus, Buck, that’s not what I meant,” Steve replied, his voice aching with sorrow and eyes pleading with it. “But it might be that somehow, unconsciously, you’re still influenced by him, maybe he’s— I know you think you were completely cured in Wakanda, and of course I want that to be true, but what if—''
The worst part was, he could partly see where Steve was coming from. Weren’t those the same questions he’d asked himself in the first months as he’d started to feel that pull towards Zemo? Orders and sex and violence, they were all positive, pleasurable stimuli to him, and Zemo made ample use of all three when around him. They all triggered something visceral and hungry inside of Bucky.
Hadn’t he had his own doubts about his mental stability, fearing that he was still compromised, before finally coming to accept his feelings? Hearing a relentless question in his mind — Are you still complying?
But no, he was over all that now, had been over it for a long time. After everything they’d been through, he trusted Zemo, even if he didn’t always understand him. Steve knew nothing.
Steve had to see something of Bucky’s resolve in his eyes, because he tilted his chin and pursed his lips in frustration. “I mean, after everything we went through after I found you again, I— that didn’t mean anything? Doesn’t count for anything?” There was a note of desperation in his indignant voice now. “All the sleepless nights spent awake after you’d had a nightmare, all those times when I was sick with worry and didn’t even know if I could touch you or if you’d freak out, when I feared that if I said one word too many, if I showed how much I still wanted you, you’d run away and disappear again for decades— and then the moment I leave, you choose to be with an assassin, with someone who only used you for his purposes?” Steve scoffed, as Bucky tried to battle the guilt that wanted to rise up in him at his words. “This is probably just an elaborate trick to get revenge on the last of the Avengers. I can only hope that you’re doing this because you aren’t in your right mind, because otherwise—” He clenched his fists, steeling himself. The walls were back up on his face, and his next words left Bucky staggering on his feet. “You can’t just— You don’t get to do this, Buck.”
Bucky stood frozen for a few heartbeats, stunned. He felt a little sick. “I don’t— Are you fucking serious? I can do whatever the fuck I want, Steve.” It had been so difficult to come to understand that truth, to convince himself of the fact that as long as he didn’t hurt anyone he was free. It had taken months, years, and now Steve, of all people, wanted to undermine all that hard work? “I don’t need your permission or your approval. And I don’t want it, either.”
Steve’s arms tensed. “Bucky, God, I know you don’t need it, I— I’m sorry.”
Head reeling, Bucky moved a step back as he drew in a deep inhale, only for it to catch when his ribs compressed too tight, too fast, an invisible arm cinching around his chest.
“I’m sorry, it came out wrong,” Steve continued to plead, looking genuinely contrite. “I got carried away, I’m just trying— please. I came back for you, so that we could have—”
“Yeah, why the fuck did you do it? Why did you come back, Steve?” he exploded, trembling with rage. “I want the truth.”
“I told you,” Steve said stiffly, angry at having his integrity questioned. “I realized I had made a mistake. I came back for you.”
Well, Bucky thought, maybe you shouldn’t have. “You came back,” he gritted out, the words an avalanche now, unstoppable, uncontainable, “because Peggy told you to.”
“What?”
“Ain’t that what you said yesterday night? That you only thought about coming back ‘cause she gave you the idea?” he spat out.
Steve stayed still for a moment. Bucky could see him refrain from answering rashly, before he sighed and then spoke again.“This is why I didn’t tell you before.”
“This?”
“I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong.”
“And just what am I thinking?” Bucky said in a growl.
Steve flinched, and his next words were quiet, but they still held a pointed intensity. “That you were a replacement. A second choice. You are not, Bucky, you never were. But after Thanos, I’d convinced myself that it would have been better for the both of us if I’d stayed in the past. That you would have been able to build a new life for yourself, that way, without me. Which you did, it seems.” His last words took a sour tone.
“Oh please,” Bucky sneered. “Don’t you dare use this pathetic excuse of wanting me to start anew, I needed you, and you weren’t there.” His voice was hoarse, and something inside twisted, deep within him. “You didn’t even ask me what I wanted, what I thought about you going gallivanting into the past. You were not thinking of me when you decided to leave, Steve.”
“I thought you didn’t want me anymore!” Steve exclaimed. “And it’s not like you ever did anything to make me think otherwise, did ya? In Wakanda, even as you got better, you kept acting just like you had in ‘43. You wouldn’t look at me, you wouldn’t touch me. You decided you were bad for me and withdrew from me and I never even had a say in it. It’s what you always do.”
“I don’t regret doing that, in ‘43,” he only half-lied. During the war, after being rescued from the Nazis, he’d felt useless, longing for a Steve who didn’t exist anymore, who had a beautiful new shining shell that Bucky had hated — at least until he’d had it moving wonderfully underneath his own body. But even then, he had mourned for the loss of his little guy. And although he’d been happy for Steve to finally get the recognition he had always deserved, at the same time he’d detested them all for only seeing him as remarkable now, when Bucky always had.
And then, there had been Peggy, who saw through the shield and the muscles, who cared for Steve as deeply as Bucky did. Who would make Steve’s life easier, after the war. So he’d made a choice. “You know why I did it. I left you free to fall in love with Peggy, to have a better life with someone who wasn’t a man when the war would have ended.”
“Yeah, fat lot of good it did to me,” Steve said with a dark, self-deprecating smile, and his eyes were the color of the iced water that had swallowed him almost a century earlier. “Anyway, when I told you I was gonna go back, do you remember what you said to me? You said—”
“Okay,” Bucky remembered, cringing. He hadn’t been able to say much else, at the time.
“Yeah. ‘Okay’. So you can’t be surprised if I didn't think you wanted me to stay all that much.”
Bucky had been drawing breath to defend himself, but Steve’s choice of words had him rocking back on his heels. They were silent for a minute, Bucky sheepishly looking outside the window, Steve looking at him.
“I really thought you didn’t want me anymore,” Steve said, his voice softer, his blue eyes gleaming. “We’d had plans. For life after the war. We were supposed to go to California, or—”
“To stay in Europe. I know. I remember.”
“You know, in Wakanda I used to think one day I’d wake up and have the courage to kiss you again. I imagined you would smile at me like before, and we’d go back to how we’d been. But time passed, and you were still raw, and distant, and I started to think maybe I reminded you of your past too much, that I should’ve just left you alone. And after Thanos was beaten I told myself I could do one last good thing for the rest of the world and then I’d at least live the life that had been taken from me, and let you live yours.”
“Then… what changed?” he couldn’t help but ask.
“When I reappeared after putting all the stones back in their place,” Steve started to recount, “I made up a lie to explain how I had survived the plane crash. Peggy didn’t question it, but I saw she didn’t believe me completely. It didn’t take Peggy long to realize something was off, as I’d asked her not to tell anyone I had survived. She cornered me one day, said she wanted the truth, all of it.”
“She was always smarter than you,” Bucky said, deadpan.
Steve huffed. “That’s right. Apparently even though I’d tried to be careful, words and information about the future sometimes spilled out of my mouth, things someone who’d only lived till half of the forties just couldn’t have known in advance. And knowing what would happen was — no one is meant to know it all. Every horrible thing going on that I knew I could have done something about, it felt as if…”
“As if it was your responsibility,” Bucky murmured.
“Yes. Even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to mess with the timeline more than I already had.”
He looked like he was debating whether to say something for a while. He shook himself and, looking at the ground, continued in a low tone, “I went to Alexander Pierce’s house, once.”
“You… why?” Bucky’s voice was strangled.
“I wanted to see him before he— I wanted—”
“But Steve, in the forties he must’ve been—” he started, then had to stop and clear his throat, it felt so tight.
“Just a young boy, yes. Younger than we were when we went to war, even. I thought maybe, if I killed him, it would have been better for you in the future. But— I couldn’t be sure of that. What if you ended up with someone even worse?”
Bucky made a conscious effort to keep his mouth closed, to not let what his fucking stupid brain wanted to say spill out: a defense of Alexander Pierce.
Because Pierce had been one of, if not the kindest of his handlers. And that had been what made him the worst.
“So you didn’t…”
“No.”
He exhaled. There was a moment of silence.
“What about Peggy, then? What did you tell her?” Bucky asked.
“Not that much. I admitted I had been trapped under the ice for decades and then freed in the 2000s. That I had lived many years in the future, and decided to come back to her— to the forties.”
“Right. And she believed you, just like that?”
“‘Course not, initially she thought I’d been completely brainwashed by the Nazis, or that I’d lost my mind in the ice. I had to give her some serious proof before she did believe me. I may have told her something about upcoming social and technological progress — and Buck, God, she was so delighted — but I never mentioned the Avengers, or Hydra’s infiltrations in SHIELD, or Thanos.”
Steve seemed to get lost in the memories for a moment.
“For a while, we were happy, together. We bought a house in the countryside, and I dyed my hair in order not to be recognised, kept my head down. Even if I couldn’t show myself around too much, it was good to get to live the chance I hadn’t had the first time; I had to get used to the older technology and means of transportation again, but we traveled a lot, saw a great deal of things. But once the war was over, well, it soon became apparent that as long as everyone thought me dead Peggy wouldn’t be able to follow in her own steps to become who she was supposed to, and do all the amazing things I knew she would do in the future. We also kept a lot of things from each other: I couldn’t tell her what I knew about what would happen, and she couldn’t tell me about her missions, in case I let something slip, if only with a facial expression. We tried to make it work for a long while, though. We cared too much about each other not to.”
Bucky waited, but nothing else seemed to be forthcoming. Hemade a faint noise, prompting him to continue.
“When Peggy and I— Well, we started to spend even less time together, since she had created SHIELD, and so in the meantime I began looking for you. I was fine with living the rest of my life as a ghost, knowing my past self would be found in 2012, but I couldn’t stand knowing you were being brainwashed and tortured somewhere, and that you would continue to be for decades more.”
Why does it still feel as if I was a replacement, then?
“One day, I came home after a couple of days away and Peggy introduced me to a new, brilliant colleague of hers, an agent I immediately recognized.”
Bucky frowned, bemused. “Who was it?”
Steve raised his gaze from his clasped hands, showing a wistful grin. “Her husband. In my heart I’d known they would eventually meet, and that they’d like each other — she’d never have married someone she didn’t admire profoundly. It wasn’t long before I realized I was keeping them apart just on the basis of an old promise made during a global conflict. And in the meantime, I never stopped thinking about you.”
And now Bucky saw why Steve seemed different, not just physically, in the creaks around his eyes and the sparse white hair, but in his behavior too: he looked easier to upset, more rash and frying at the edges than the Steve he’d known before. This was a man who’d looked for a place to belong for almost all his life, and no amount of super soldier serum or Pym particles had managed to really give him one, in the end.
“I continued to search for you. Siberia first, then all of Russia, then other USSR countries, following only whispers and what I remembered from your file. Years went by, but it wasn’t as if I didn’t have time,” he said with a bitter smile. “But I couldn’t find you, and it took its toll on me. Me and Peg — we weren’t what I had thought we could be. And then one day we talked, and we talked some more and, uh. We decided to remain friends.”
Oh.
“And Peggy said… she said there wasn’t a universe where you and I don’t love each other. That she’d accepted it even during the war. I believed her. So, yes, you could say Peggy helped me realize I’d made a mistake.” He fell silent, took an audible breath, but didn’t go on for a long while.
The noises from the street were slowly subsiding.
Bucky was speechless. He wondered if Zemo was still downstairs or if he’d gone out while he talked to Steve, hoping he was still home so that after this he could go and tell him that no, there hadn’t actually been any nefarious motive behind Steve’s mysterious return. He’d really come back for Bucky — only too late.
Steve seemed to find the will to continue after another moment.“Not long after, I went to Germany to look for you. Instead, in one of Hydra’s most hidden laboratories of the Sowjetische Besatzungszone, I found a way to come back to you. I made a snap decision.” His expression had transformed from melancolic to smug, with the boyish act-now-think-later look Bucky knew well.
“A snap decision,” Bucky repeated flatly. “You could have died. You could have destroyed the space-time continuum or whatever the fuck it’s called.”
“But I didn't. I woke up, and realized I’d made it. I was… back to the future.”
“That isn't remotely as funny as you think it is. So that’s why you appeared in Germany.”
“Guess so,” Steve said.
“Jesus.”
He closed his eyes, trying to think. He’d have to ask something more about this thing Steve had miraculously found in a random laboratory — another time-travel machine, it seemed, and just as well-functioning as the one the Avengers had built decades later. Not now, though. He would need someone more experienced with him for it anyway.
He wasn’t sure if the fact that things between Peggy and Steve hadn’t worked out made the reasons for his return worse or better. In part, it was a possibility he’d pictured from the moment Steve had started being evasive about the time he’d spent in the past. He decided it didn’t matter though — there was no point in dwelling on it now. “Look, Steve… I do love you. Peggy was right on that, I’ll never stop loving you.” He didn’t know how to continue, except for the certainty of having to insert a ‘but’ in the sentence that would follow.
Here’s the thing: loving Steve just wasn’t enough anymore. Just as it had probably not been enough for Steve and Peggy, after a while, when they’d realized they wouldn’t be able to follow the path they’d dreamt for themselves. It was just how life was.
“Then tell me what to do,” Steve said before he could go on, and the words caught and rasped. “God, Buck, tell me something. Tell me what you need me to say. What you need me to do. Please. Anything you need. I’ll do it.” He made an abortive gesture, as if he wanted to touch the back of Bucky’s hand, but in the end he held back. Physical contact had always seemed to settle Steve, Bucky recalled.
He stared at him for several seconds, then forced himself to say tightly, “I need you to leave, Steve. Just for a bit. I can’t have you here right now.” Having Steve in Zemo’s house felt even more wrong now that he’d learned the truth.
Steve nodded after a couple of seconds, resigned. “I’ll give you all the time you need. I just want you to be happy, Buck,” he added quietly, like that was fair at all, and then he took his jacket and wallet and got out of the room. Bucky didn’t dare move for a long time.
When he went down to the kitchen, much later, the cooker had long been turned off, the house was silent, and there was a note on the table, written in elegant Sokovian script.
“Well. It could have gone worse,” Sam said by the end of Bucky’s recount.
“Could it?”
“Of course. For starters, now we know something more about Steve’s return, at least. And most importantly, from what you told me he didn’t completely freak out, and you two didn't get into a fistfight. I’d consider that a win.”
There was a long silence at the receiver, during which Sam waited patiently. Finally, Bucky asked the question that had been burning in his mind since the beginning of the call.
“Sam, where is Zemo?”