Chapter 15
XV
“Sam, where is Zemo?”
“I can’t tell you, Buck, I’m sorry,” Sam answered, and it really sounded like he was. “He asked me not to. But he’s okay. I keep in touch with him every day, and I don’t think he’s planning anything crazy.”
Bucky stirred restlessly in his chair and gripped the phone tighter, only slightly reassured by Sam’s words.
“He told me he was giving you time to make a decision,” Sam continued after a moment, “but to be honest it seems like he thinks you already made one, Buck.”
“That’s…”
He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to think.
He closed his eyes and tried to breathe. His fingers spasmed around the phone again, and he quickly put it on speaker and threw it onto the table before he could accidentally break it.
He felt the beginning of a panic attack enclosing him, like a cage descending on him, stealing the air from his lungs, in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time.
“Buck?”
That night’s dream of Steve taking care of him in Wakanda came back to him. Then he remembered Steve’s troubled expression after he’d killed Dmitri Sarkov, and with that memory came the usual feeling of being inadequate and undeserving of Steve’s love, always, always scrambling to catch up and reach Steve’s pedestal. And Steve’s love was all-encompassing, so naively anchored to the past it usually prevented Steve from seeing through the stale image of his old best friend to the man Bucky was today.
Among the numerous moral and practical issues having an affair with Zemo had posed, that had never been one: Zemo wasn’t blind to who Bucky was now, since he’d only ever known him after he’d become the Winter Soldier. And Bucky didn’t ever feel unworthy of Zemo, because they both had blood on their hands — that was what connected them and what made their bond so terribly strong: they were both starting from the bottom, from the mud, trying to rise up, to do better, and when they failed, they did so together, as equals.
Most importantly, Bucky knew if he ever had a regression and started to kill innocents again, Zemo would stop him, by whatever means necessary. He wouldn’t like it, but he would do it. He didn’t have that same certainty with Steve.
“Buck, come on, talk to me. Don’t get lost in that mind of yours.”
Bucky half-smiled, starting to regain control of his breath, feeling the weight on his chest slowly easing up. The way Sam said it, one would think his mind was a terrifying place to get lost in.
And well, it was. Less so than it used to be, but still.
The thing was, after Hydra, he’d been thrown into the world alone, and like a bird freed after a lifetime in a cage, he hadn’t known what to do with himself. The emancipation hadn’t been freeing, but rather a new kind of enslavement, far worse because he didn’t know the rules of this one. And Steve had become his willing foothold.
“Steve told me who I was before I myself could remember,” he began in a rough voice, because he might as well start from there. “He was my only constant. Even when I was— when Hydra had me, when every piece of my identity had been stripped from me, I had visions of a small boy with blond hair and blue eyes. For the longest time, I believed my name was Steve because it was the only one I remembered, whenever I could remember I was supposed to have a name at all, that I wasn’t just ‘the asset’.”
These were facts. Undeniable, and real. Steve had been the last mooring of Bucky Barnes, because in his old life, beyond his mother and sisters, Steve had been, for lack of a better word, everything.
And yet…
All his past insecurities, which he’d almost believed he’d left behind, had resurfaced with the return of Steve, who had dragged them back from their shared past like a corpse washed up by the river. The self-loathing, the doubts, the constant nightmares — Bucky had been abruptly plunged back into what had been his unvarying mental state up until a few years earlier.
“You know,” he went on, with a forced lightness to his tone, “I was given the option to leave the fight after I was freed from Zola, in 1941 — honorable discharge and all. I wanted to go home. By that point, I didn’t want anything to do with the war anymore. My country could be crushed by German forces and I wouldn’t have moved a finger from my shitty bed in Brooklyn.”
“Then why did you stay?” Sam asked.
“Why do you think?”
“Oh,” Sam exhaled. “Steve.”
“I had a dream last night. A memory. I was with the Howling Commandos and I’d been shot — a fatal wound, or at least that’s what I thought then. And until today I didn’t remember why, but as I was there in the snow thinking I was about to give my last fuckin’ breath, I wanted Steve to hold me, but I also resented him so damn much.”
“Because he’d asked you to keep fighting and risk your life?”
He shook his head, although Sam couldn’t see it.
“Because I’d let him convince me to.” He took a breath, spreading his hands on the table. “I see now it was more resentment towards myself than him, but at that moment it wasn’t that clear to me, since, you know, dying in action and shit. Anyway, even if I had decided to return to Brooklyn when I had the chance, Steve would have stayed where he was, helping for as long as he could. He was still a reckless idiot, with the difference being that now people actually listened to what he said. And if something had happened to him while I was at home… Well, I probably would have followed him into it not long after hearing about it. So I don’t regret doing what I did, staying to protect him, but sometimes…. Many years later, in Wakanda, I still was prone to — outbursts… against Steve. Even as he took care of me and made me human again.”
“You were always human,” Sam said softly, as he usually did at this point of these sorts of conversations.
“Sometimes I thought that if I’d only been a little more selfish…”
“You would never have become the Soldier,” Sam completed.
He nodded. “I think some part of me blames him for it, even though it wasn’t his fault. I chose to fight for him. I wanted to. But in Wakanda he tried to get back to how we were before — I just couldn’t, and maybe this was one of the reasons.”
Sam took a moment to absorb all that. “Wow. Holy shit, that’s pretty heavy.”
Bucky raised an eyebrow. “Is that your professional opinion?”
“Nope. Do you want to hear my professional opinion?”
Bucky shrugged. “Sure.”
Bucky didn’t have to see Sam to know he was shaking his head. “I’ll give you something better. A friend’s advice. You’ll decide what to do with that.”
“Shoot.”
“I think you never got to express that resentment, and so it only added to the guilt you felt for what you’d done as the Winter Soldier, and to the feeling that you didn’t deserve what Steve was doing for you.” Bucky remembered talking a bit about the latter with Sam after they’d become close during the Flagsmashers’ exploits. “And now that he’s back, you can’t help but still feel all of that. But Buck, you shouldn’t try to make things go back to how they used to be with Steve because of this debt you feel you have just ‘cause he helped you. I’m no love expert, alright? But even I know that is not a healthy foundation for a relationship.”
That had been what Zemo had tried telling him too, but it wasn’t so easy. He couldn’t just stop feeling like he did, thinking he should repay Steve somehow, that he’d been a dick to him in Wakanda, especially now, in the light of what he’d told Bucky he’d been through with Peggy too.
“Also,” Sam added, “you can’t decide what to do based on what you think you want, or should want, but based on what you truly need for yourself, as you are today. You need to stop and really reflect on that, man.”
Bucky frowned. “Isn’t that an opportunistic asshole thing to do? Making the choice based only on what will make my days better?”
“No, Buck, I don’t think it is,” Sam answered patiently. “I mean, it’s not certain that the person you choose now will end up being your partner for the rest of your life, but if you choose them according to what you think you should want and should be, you’ll only make yourself and the other person miserable in the long run. So no, it’s not a selfish thing to do at all. Or at least that’s how I see it.”
Bucky rubbed his knuckles and blew out a breath, a long contemplative sigh. “Alright, I’ll… think about it. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
He grimaced. “Fuck. Zemo’s got to be furious, wherever he is,” he said, trying not too surreptitiously to gather information.
On the phone, Sam scoffed. “Buck, it’s Zemo, he’s a drama queen, you know it. He’ll take you back as long as you beg him very nicely. He loves you.”
Bucky winced quietly. “We’ve never told each other.”
He could feel Sam smile condescendingly. “People as complicated as you two don’t need to say it out loud.”
I don’t give my trust easily, was what Zemo had said to him. But then, James Barnes, ex-Winter Soldier, didn’t let people get near him easily either. He didn’t let them in, and still, Zemo had found a way to get dangerously far behind the walls.
There was a knock on the door. “I have to go,” he said, standing up and suddenly feeling exhausted.
“Call me when you’re ready, and I’ll tell you where to find him,” Sam promised.
“Okay. Just — make sure he’s fine, alright? Please.”
“Of course,” Sam said in that gentle tone from before, and Bucky hung up.