Brooklyn calls to him like a siren song.
___
Bucky does not want to go back to New York City.
Ideally, he wants to stay in Wakanda if they would have kept him. He would have been content to live the rest of his days out in the countryside, raising goats and sitting by the lake. He wouldn’t even have minded watching the children entrusted to his care or farming a small set of crops around the village if they would have asked him. He just would have given anything to simply exist in a place where he couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. He is tired of violence, even if his palms sometimes itch for a body to punch and he can still recall the exact weight of a pistol and the way it felt in his hand.
And if he couldn’t have Wakanda, he was content with admitting to himself that the next best option was simply not living at all.
But, of course, as he learned the hard way decades ago, he doesn’t really have the luxury of choice anymore. He hasn’t really had much free will since he signed his life away to the US Army back in the 1940s. Ever since then, a choice has simply been made for him, whether it’s by HYDRA or the Avengers or the US Government, and he has always complied with the decision being made. Same prison, different name.
So the United States Government says he’s going to be extradited, Wakanda agrees, and that is the end of it.
Even so, he begs to go somewhere else. Anywhere else but New York. He imagined himself safely tucked away in the hills of Montana. Raising cattle couldn’t objectively be that different than raising goats. Or Los Angeles, he could make it work there; he might even find pleasure in the experience of simultaneously dipping his toes in the cool Pacific and baking in the heat. Washington D.C. could even be okay. They could keep a close eye on him, and besides, Steve had lived there for a while. Maybe he could find meaning in tracing his footsteps.
Sam lived there, too. They weren’t necessarily friends, but it might be nice to live near someone he at least knew. It was at least better in opposition to the alternative - sent back to a place where he felt like he was surrounded by ghosts.
He just cannot bear the thought of returning to the city, to a life and a history that no longer exists. It would simply be too painful.
The resolution, however, is pretty cut and dry. As they board him onto the flight, they let him know that as a technical New York state resident, that is where he is going to be dropped off. End of the story. They take his arm. They shackle his legs together, and they handcuff his remaining hand to the seat. In his head, he can’t help but think that this is pointless. He could easily escape this and kill all of them if he really wanted to. He had done it before. Or at least, he had in a past life, as a different person. Although, now more than ever, it is difficult to see where the lines between James Barnes and the Winter Soldier were still blurred.
They’re willing to give him a few thousand dollars of back pension, a portion of his parents’ measly estate, and a new lease on life. In return, he’ll meet with a therapist twice a week and avoid doing anything that would land him in a federal prison.
They tell him he should be grateful.
He doesn’t feel grateful.
___
“I don’t want to be here,” He says on his first day of therapy. The bright lighting is giving him a headache, and Steve’s notebook feels like a thousand-pound weight in his back pocket.
He’s not even entirely sure why Steve gave it to him. Unlike him, he’s been here the whole time. He hasn’t just tried Thai food, he’s been to Thailand. To kill people, sure, but he can remember every excruciating detail and visualize it as clearly as his new and bare midtown Manhattan apartment. He can conjure the sites and the sounds and the exact memories almost at will.
Something to remember him by, maybe.
It was a shitty reminder.
Dr. Raynor narrows her eyes and braces her shoulders.
“Be here in my office, or be here as in being alive on this planet?” Her voice is steady and practically unfazed by the question. It makes sense that she’s heard this before if she’s been working with veterans - he didn’t love calling himself that. He wasn’t a war hero, and as far as he knew, his war wasn’t over. It might not ever be over. But he physically shrugged. This was probably not the first time she had heard this.
“Well,” he can feel himself grinning against his will. This was something buried deep inside him, and he didn’t necessarily mind that it was coming up. It felt like he was getting a personality back. “I guess that being alive on another planet wouldn’t be so bad. The other superpowered freaks I’ve met didn’t seem to mind it so much.”
Dr. Raynor shakes her head in the manner of a disappointed school teacher. There’s a tinge of guilt that Bucky felt. He had hated getting in trouble in school.
“So,” she smacks her lips. “I see you use humor to deflect difficult emotions.”
He shrugs again. “Just a part of my winning personality that happened to survive the past seventy years.”
“Winning is subjective.” Dr. Raynor tries to suppress her own smile by shaking her head. She writes down notes furiously. “A man meets an alien once, and now he thinks he’s so cultured. Please. You should have been here when aliens destroyed half of the city - twice. Then you could let me know if you want to go live with them.”
Bucky is still not sure of the real answer. He doesn’t want to be in this office, and he isn’t sure if he wants to even be here period. But he at least resolves that he doesn’t hate his therapist as much as he thought that he was going to.
As clear as day, he can hear his parochial school teacher, Sister Margaret in his ear repeating her signature saying. Thank God for small mercies.
Maybe God hasn’t completely forsaken him yet.
___
Brooklyn calls to him like a siren song.
___
“You want me to do what?”
Bucky’s not even sure why he called Sam. They’re not friends, not really. They just both happened to know Steve, and Steve isn’t really Steve anymore. So Bucky figures Sam is the next closest thing he has - another human being to lean on. His therapist would call that vulnerability. He would call it downright unpleasant as an experience.
“I want you to help me set up a Facebook.”
“It just cracks me up that you defrost a couple of decades and you immediately slide right into the Boomer role. Up next, you’re going to be terrorizing cashiers and asking to speak to the manager.” Bucky can hear the fullness of Sam’s lilting laugh even over the phone. In the background, he can hear children laughing, the sound of arcadias singing in the distance, and in the muffled yelling of a woman. Sam sounds like he’s surrounded by life, and Bucky feels overwhelming alone.
“Shut up,” he retorts. “Technically, I’m part of the Greatest Generation. I helped defeat the Nazis. So I think I deserve a tad bit more respect.”
“I don’t know, man. Sounds like something that a Boomer would say.” Sam laughs harder. The yelling and laughing in the background turn into delighted shrieks. Something thaws deep in Bucky’s heart. “What do you even want to be on social media for? I don’t think your pals from your bowling team are going to be online.”
“I want to see my nieces and nephews,” Bucky lets out one measured exhale. “I want to know what they look like.”
With the exception of Rebecca, the rest of his sisters had died before 2014. That was one of the first things that he checked when he was in Wakanda, and they finally let him access the internet. When he found out, he had wept bitterly for nearly an hour. Shuri, a more perceptive and caring soul than she initially let other people on to - a trait that he appreciated in most people, - just turned her back and fiddled with her own instruments to give him the illusion of privacy. Carefully and methodically, he combed through pages of obituaries, marriage certificates, birth certificates to paint pictures of lives he wasn’t there to witness. Part of him wished he could have seen them one last time, but the dark and ugly part of his brain reminded him that they would never love what he had become.
He didn’t cry to mourn their death. He cried out sheer relief that they died thinking he was a hero rather than a monster.
“You could just go and meet them. They’re definitely still alive, and they probably have children. This might be good for you. Having a family - well sometimes it’s annoying as shit - but for the most part, it’s good.”
“Sam! I am not annoying,” cries the muffled voice. Sam laughs wholeheartedly again.
“I would rather not. It’s better of them to think of me as a ghost than to know me as a killer.”
The laughter dies in Sam’s throat.
An hour later, [email protected] is set up with an account under an alias. It doesn’t take him long to find his sisters’ children. He spends hours pouring over selfies and home movies and pictures from their childhood. He searches their faces to find traces of his own, of his parents. Rebecca’s daughter has his eyes. Mary’s daughter has his father’s jawline. Helen’s son has her smile.
Alone in his bare apartment, he weeps so hard that tears simply stop running. Instead, he just sits there and heaves while no tears or sound escape.
___
He can’t resist Brooklyn’s call forever.
It was his home. It is the most explicit tie he has to himself, the real him who may or may not even exist anymore. To avoid Brooklyn was to avoid himself entirely, and Bucky eventually decides he’s tired of running.
His therapist reminds him that the only way out is through.
He goes in the middle of the night. There’s a part of him that thinks that is a foolish choice. He can remember his own mother pouring over the daily paper and reminding all of the kids of the danger that lurked around the city at night. Bucky realizes that no longer applies to him. He is not afraid of the night because he has been the danger that lurked around the city. If they knew any better, anyone he ran into should be worried about him.
Navigating the subway isn’t as challenging as he thought it was going to be. The map is somewhat easy to read, and something about the city sings to him in his bones. This is his home, as much as he wants to deny it. He could navigate around blindfolded. This city made him who he was on the foundational level. Here was where the purest and most unadulterated version of himself lived, and he was never going to be able to walk away from that person - as much as he desperately wanted to.
The old neighborhood has changed. Even in the pitch blackness, he can realize this was nothing like the place that he grew up. He is acutely aware of the fact that it had to change over the course of a hundred years, but he didn’t truly believe until he walked the streets himself. He walks in dizzying circles for hours. His apartment building, Steve’s apartment building, the old dance hall, their school, even the old office where he signed up to serve decades ago - all of it gone. Instead, dozens of high rises, brownstones, and chain stores stood in their places. A whole history erased forever so some kid could get cheap coffee from a Starbucks. He closes his eyes and squeezes them so hard he sees stars.
He wanders until near dawn. He’s not sure what he’s looking for, but he knows it when he sees it.
It’s the corner. He simultaneously did and did not come looking for this exact spot, but it feels right that he ended up here. It’s not just any corner - it was the corner where Steve had kissed him, the first time. He could see it all as if it was a movie playing out in front of him.
It was right before he deployed, around the same time of the day as it was now. The sun was threatening to peak over the sky, but the neighborhood hadn’t started moving in earnest yet. His green uniform was properly pressed and starched, but hours of dancing put deep creases in it. His hat was a little ajar from an evening of drinking. A lock of his hair was plastered to his forehead by sweat. Steve was equally as disheveled, his loosened tie hanging from his thin neck. He looked exhausted but delighted. He grabbed Bucky’s arm and leaned in slowly and deliberately. Bucky returns with gentle enthusiasm. He can still remember the rush of adrenaline, the shock to his system, the blood rushing to his head. It was a time of unadulterated joy.
In the present, he is so overcome by the emotions that he simply just sits down in the middle of the street. The thoughts have literally knocked him off his feet, and he can do little more than bury his face into his hands. From a distance, he is acutely aware of the teenagers, local kids with basketballs under their arms and school uniforms still on from the day before, staring at him.
It reminds him of him and his buddies from school when they were kids. There used to be this old kook from the neighborhood who fought in the Great War and lost his mind. He used to do the weirdest shit, as he and his friends proclaimed it, like wandering the streets in his knickers and drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle while sitting on a stoop that wasn’t his. They used to watch the old man like an oddity. Upon the realization, more shame opens upon him like a floodgate.
Decades later, Bucky realizes he himself is now the old kook. He has no one and nothing. And in a world where people can’t seem to stop killing each other for some reason or another, one of those kids was going to be in his position soon. It was a cycle that he was powerless to stop.
___
“How was Brooklyn?” Dr. Raynor asks on Monday morning. Her pen is at the ready, tightly gripped in her hand.
“Shitty.” Bucky responds, and it’s the first time he’s told the truth in therapy. It feels like something might be changing.