looking in the dark(for an empty heart)
Bucky Barnes cannot remember a time before Steven Grant Rogers. Stevie loves to roll his eyes and call him a lying sap, but Bucky genuinely means it.
He’s raked his muddled brain for decades and has yet to come up with anything. Realistically, he knows there must have been at least a few years before he picked up a pint-sized blonde punk as a sidecar, but in his brain… there’s nothing there. Not an inkling of the second birthday he’s seen black and white faded photographs of, not the day his youngest sister Winnifred was born when he was 6, nothing. Bucky has never lived in a world without Steve by his side. His fancy twenty-first century shrink always seems to take notes and shake her heads when he tells her this.
“James.” She scolds with soft looks of disapproval. "This sounds like an incredibly toxic case of severe codependency.” She warns.
Bucky just scoffs, not even willing to dignify her comment with a response. He knew he would hate this, he knew she would be like this, from the minute Stark gently suggested he talk to someone.This isn't near Bucky’s first appointment with a shrink, but every time before this, they had been attempting to decondition Hydra’s programming from his fucked up brain, and Steve had been tucked under his arm for every agonizing second. Now though, there’s no trigger words left in his brain and Steve isn’t here.
The shrink must have moved the second purple armchair that usually sat pressed against Bucky’s. It’s a considerate move on the therapist’s part, but Bucky can’t help but be angered by it. Moving the chair doesn’t fix anything. It’s not as if taking the empty chair out of Bucky’s line of vision will do anything to fill the empty void in his life. It’s not as if Bucky can ignore the loneliness that has settled in his bones or the hollow feeling in his chest that makes it hard to function on the bad days and impossible to breathe on the worst days. There’s nothing anyone can do about the destruction and terror that Steve’s disappearance has caused in Bucky’s life.
“James, you've gone quiet. Tell me how my last statement made you feel.”
The therapist sets her pen down on the pad of paper resting in her lap. Even with his super serum vision, he’s not quite able to make out the tiny lettering she has sprawled over the pages, so instead he just sighs and readjusts, letting his head rest against the back of the armchair. He closes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths, trying to ground himself back to reality again. Eventually, he leans forward, wipes his sweaty palms against his jeans, licks his lips and tries to explain his way of existence.
“You’ll never understand.” He murmurs into his hands.
“Then I need you to help me understand James.”
Her tone is soft, with a sympathetic hint and it has him gritting his teeth. He’s not angry, not really. He’s frantic and he feels as though the world is collapsing around him and everything hurts. Bucky is no stranger to feeling useless, as though he is clinging to the last ounce of his sanity and fraught with utter hopelessness, but these emotions are simply too much to unpack, they expose his heart to more vulnerability, the last thing Bucky is convinced he needs right now. Anger though, anger he is well acquainted with handling alone. He’s spent nearly every conscious moment of the past 70 years being angry, feeling pure unfiltered rage towards his captors, for everything they’d done to him and made him do to others. But even there, he had Steve in his head to keep him company. Now, even thinking about his sweetheart brought on more anguish and pain.
Bucky huffs again, this time with annoyance instead of resignation.
“Ma’am, with all due respect, this whole fucking thing is stupid. You’ll never understand what Steve means to me. We were all each other had for damn near a century. When his pa left, I was there. When his ma died, God rest her soul, I was there. When Stevie was homeless and had no one else and nowhere to go, I was there. When I got kidnapped during the war, he came to get me. Defied all the odds, defied science for fucks sake. And then when Hydra got a hold of me, and the rest of the world was convinced I was dead, he got there. It’s been me and him against the world since the goddamn great depression, so if that makes us codependent or whatever the hell you wanna call it, I don’t give a shit.”
A brief tension filled silence falls over the room, and Bucky’s eyes flick towards the door again, he really can’t wait to get the hell out of here.
Eventually though, the shield appointed shrink gives a curt nod.
“James, it’s clear you are not ready to talk about the possibility th-”
Bucky shoots up immediately, shaking his head vehemently, as though if he denied the possibility hard enough, he would erase it from existence. He starts making a B-line for the door. He’s got his flesh fingers wrapped around the handle when the therapist catches his arm.
“Let me apologize for the wording, let’s save that discussion for another day.”
Her words do absolutely nothing to quell the bile threatening to rise from the pit of his stomach. He’s not doing this today and he sure as hell isn’t coming back. Her hand remains on his metal shoulder, and Bucky feels like his lungs are going to collapse. The room begins to spin and Bucky is acutely aware that he’s having a panic attack, but he’s not able to do anything about it. Then, momentarily, he’s back there, in the cold, unforgiving clutches of Hydra. He’s alive, he’s alone… oh god he’s alone. Just when Bucky was beginning to actually learn how to be a person again, they’ve found him.They’re going to punish him for attempting to escape, for thinking he was a human.
When he finally recovers, the therapist is prompting him to meet her eyes. She’s not touching him anymore and her glasses are on the ground next to her.
“Oh god.”- Bucky must let slip out loud, because the therapist is quick to attempt to reassure him.
There’s nothing she can do to prevent the inevitable sobs that rake through Bucky’s body. She knows that he has just remembered. Any relief Bucky might have initially felt at realizing he was safe from Hydra is immediately squandered by Bucky’s realization that Steve isn’t here. Even though Bucky might be safe, the love of his life is God knows where, almost certainly in imminent danger. And Bucky is here, having a breakdown on his therapist’s floor. So, for the billionth time in his life, Bucky is utterly scared shitless, hopeless and beyond desperate. But, for the first time in a century, Bucky is well and truly alone.