Bucky fell in love with Steve when he was sixteen.
If he had to be honest with himself, he had always known that Steve was special, that the word “friendship” wasn’t enough to express what they shared. Nevertheless he had always dismissed those thoughts, because that’s what his mum would’ve told him to do, if she’d known. Homosexuality was a sin, even Sister Anne Marie said so, and Bucky’s mum had raised him right, after all, so he wasn’t going to disrespect her memory by indulging in those sick fantasies. And however, it wasn’t like Steve would’ve ever reciprocated.
Steve was righteous, his spirit as unbreakable as his body was weak. They’d never talked about it, but Bucky knew what Steve thought about homosexuals. He didn’t hate them, ‘cause he was too compassionate to ever hate anyone if he could help it, but it was clear that he didn’t understand nor appreciate that kind of lifestyle.
It was wrong. The Bible said so. Damn, everyone said so, except maybe for this cousin of Bucky’s, Christopher, who didn’t really count because, as Bucky’s family always repeated, he was going to end up dead in a ditch someday, with his weird behaviour and his revolutionary political ideals.
Bucky had known all this for his whole life, so it had been fairly easy for him to avoid touching Steve too much, to redirect his thoughts when they entered in dangerous territory; it had been even easier to sometimes get some nice girl to kiss him sweetly behind the school, at recess, and focus on the softness of her lips, the clumsy way she tried to touch his arms and chest, the caress of her hair (blonde, always blonde) on his neck. He was a kid, and it had always been more than enough distraction.
Then it happened, all at once.
He had turned sixteen some months before. Back then there hadn’t been enough money to celebrate or anything, but now it was Stevie’s birthday and he’d been saving up his lunch money for a while, hoping to put together enough cash to finally buy Steve a real present. Maybe those nice pencils he never let himself look at for too long, insisting that the old, chapped one he already had was enough.
So, when Bucky entered the shop and found out that he had saved enough to buy both the pencils and a sketchbook, he felt his heart swell with happiness; but it was nothing compared to what he felt when he finally got to give Steve his present, accurately wrapped in newspaper pages, and saw the younger boy’s smile almost split his thin face in two.
“Buck, this is too much, it’s amazing!” Steve protested, unable to look away from his new art material, a million drawings already forming in his mind. Bucky smiled too, blushing hard and thanking God that Steve was too distracted to notice.
It was in that moment that he realised that all those years spent trying to ignore the feelings he’d had for Steve had been completely useless, because right then, right there, he knew he’d do anything just to keep Steve that happy for the rest of his life. He’d work for him, he’d take care of him, he’d provide for every single one of his needs, he’d give away every single thing he owned, he’d sell his soul without a second thought, just to keep that excited smile on his face.
Steve hugged him tight, thanking him, and Bucky finally accepted that he was completely, hopelessly in love, and that nothing would ever be the same for him.
***
The winter after Steve’s 20th birthday had been a rough one.
Steve himself got sick at least four times, once with a bad case of the flu, twice with what looked like pneumonia, and then the fourth time with something that might’ve been flu and pneumonia all together, for which the doctor had no name and even less remedies. Bucky knew that Steve needed to go to the hospital, but even working three jobs he had already had to choose between rent and food twice since October, and he knew that it was not even an option.
And Bucky hated himself sometimes, hated himself so bad, because all those promises about keeping Steve happy and providing for him had started to reveal themselves for what they’d always been: fantasies, illusions. Bucky was doing his best, he really was, but his best was simply not enough.
If only he’d been smarter, maybe he’d have been able to stay in school and find himself a proper job, one of those which paid enough to keep a nice apartment and to buy food and not to worry about medical bills. But then, had he been stronger, had he worked harder, he’d have probably gotten a better position inside factories, and he’d get paid more than the minimum wage. If only his body hadn't been so damn needy, his stomach rumbling constantly and his eyelids closing against his will, they’d probably have more saved, and Steve wouldn’t be getting skinnier and skinnier every month. It didn’t matter that, under his work clothes, Bucky’s ribs were showing just as much.
Stumbling home after a double shift at the docks, the first thing Bucky did every evening during those terrible weeks was running to their shared bedroom. He needed to check if Steve was still breathing, he needed to get him to drink some water and to swallow some of that nasty syrup that only cost a couple cents at the drug store. Then, he needed to make sure he was warm enough, most of the time laying down gently next to him, sharing body heat in the absence of spare blankets.
He talked to Steve for a while, talked about their few friends, about his day at work, about the places they’d go once Steve was feeling better, not even once allowing himself to think about the possibility of him not getting better at all, because he was barely keeping it together as it was, and he knew that, if he just let himself think about it, he’d shatter.
And finally he prayed, not with the hopeful words Sister Anne Marie had thought him at Sunday School, but with the broken voice of a desperate man: «Please, please, don’t take him away from me.»
***
Bucky’s last night in Brooklyn didn’t go exactly how he’d pictured it.
He thought he’d just take Steve to that exhibition he’d been dying to visit, paying attention not to make it look like a date, but at the same time living it like the date he’d always wanted, and would never get. Just to have a good memory to go back to, when the horrors he was sure he’d find in Europe would be too much to bear.
But then he really thought about it, thought about Steve, who had to live through the humiliation of being perpetually surrounded by guys who weighted personal value by the number of shots you could swallow before losing consciousness, by the number of girls you’d kissed, or by the number of push ups you could do. In every case, Steve’s answer was a zero, and Bucky knew there were people who were just waiting for him to leave to give Steve a hard time about that. He didn’t want to give them other reasons to pick on him by behaving like a couple. The last thing Steve needed was to pay for something that Bucky was, for a sin that didn’t even belong to him.
So Bucky invited two girls to go to the exposition with them, and thought it’d be alright, because he didn’t mind the company if he got to see Steve’s eyes sparkle like they did in front of the many attractions.
Except for the fact that Steve disappeared after no more than half an hour. Bucky tried to pretend it didn’t sting, but when he saw his friend ready to try to enlist for the umpteenth time, he almost ended up screaming.
It was their last night.
Bucky knew that Steve didn’t love him the way he did, he knew he was nothing more than a dear friend to him. But even as a friend, he thought he’d mean more than that. He didn’t even know what made him angrier, the fact that Steve didn’t value their last hours together enough to actually spend them with him, or the fact that Steve wouldn’t stop trying to volunteer, not understanding that the thought of him being home, safe, was the only thing that was keeping Bucky from losing it.
However, he didn’t have the strength to remain angry for more than five minutes. So he pretended to understand, he pretended to be sure he’d be coming back and pretended to be sure that everything would be alright. He hugged Steve, holding him tight, and by calling him “punk” he tried to convey all the feelings he could not give voice to: «I’ll miss you so bad, take care of yourself, don’t forget about me, you’re all I have left in this world.»
***
When Steve came to save him, in Azzano, he thought they’d finally broken him.
He’d been having hallucinations every now and then, when the pain got to be too much or they denied him water for days, but none of those had felt that real. Steve’s face right in front of his, light blue eyes sparkling into his dull ones, large shoulders, strong hands gripping his arms… Too strong to belong to his Stevie, who was small, and skinny, and home.
But then Steve called his name, and that voice was one that Bucky would never forget, one that he’d be able to recognise between thousands, millions of others. There were no doubts, that was Stevie, somehow so big that his body was no longer recognisable, so different that Bucky didn’t really know what to think of it, but him nevertheless, there to save him.
For a short moment he felt hope surge in his chest, felt love and gratefulness and thanked God for that small blessing, for Steve’s hands on him, for a second chance; because Steve was with him, and if Steve was with him then he was okay, everything was fine, he didn’t have to be miserable anymore.
It didn’t last long.
Later on, days after that successful mission, Bucky found himself hating what had been done to his friend. Not because he was jealous, like many thought; not because he didn’t like Steve that big, because he’d always love him, in any form or shape; not because he wasn’t glad that finally they wouldn’t have to worry about pneumonia ever again. He was so, so sincerely glad for that.
It was just that, when Bucky’d been drafted, his only consoling thought had been that Steve would be safe. The first time he found himself on the battlefield, the first time the camp he was in got bombed, the first time he saw a person die right in front of his eyes, and every single time after, when he felt like his humanity was slowly being torn to shreds, he’d start thinking about Stevie, safe at home, in Brooklyn, finally able to go to art class because of the money Bucky himself could send him. Most soldiers spent their wages gambling, trying to always have a good provision of alcohol and cigarettes; Bucky had signed papers to have most of his pay delivered directly to their little apartment, smiling down at his meagre ration of beans and stale bread and thinking about all the things Stevie could buy for himself, soups, fruit, maybe even meat to help his anaemia.
But no, of course Steve had never even needed that money, because he’d proposed himself as a lab rat and had then been traveling all around the USA dancing and singing songs, just to eventually end up where he’d always wanted to be, into the war that Bucky had always wanted to keep him away from.
And now he was there, overly confident in his new, stronger body, diving head-first into danger like it was fun. Ignoring the anxiety that plagued Bucky whenever he barely succeeded in putting a bullet into someone, before that someone managed to shoot Steve right between the eyes.
Then there was the way everybody now idolised Captain America, while nobody had ever given a damn about Steve. And the thing that really made Bucky livid was that Steve seemed not to mind the way he was being used– because that was the right word, used. And for what? For a sick propaganda that only led other young kids to enlist, their heads full of dreams about freedom, heroes, noble deeds.
Bucky knew there was nothing noble about the war. He had seen hundreds of corpses of children, arms and legs missing, faces deformed in horrid cries; he had waited interminable hours in the mud, with cold and stiff bodies pressed against his legs, hoping not to be the next; he had heard screams that still haunted his sleep every night; he had seen young boys slowly going mad, losing themselves in drugs and alcohol, and then silently putting their lips around the barrel of their gun.
He knew that heroes were just a rarity, that torture didn’t make you fight back harder, that pain didn’t make you stronger. Whenever he thought about the war, the only thing he could see behind his eyelids was his own trembling body, strapped on a chirurgical table, and all he could hear were his pleas, tiny broken sounds of “stop, stop, stop”.
He hated Steve for representing all of that. He hated Steve for keeping him into the war, when he could’ve gone home after Azzano. He hated Steve for not understanding, for asking too much, for wanting him to be the same guy he’d been before, and for making him pretend, every day, to be more than a disillusioned man.
He hated Steve and yet, loved him more than ever. Because even if everything was wrong and falling apart, Steve’s eyes were still the same, his fierce soul was still the same, and that was enough to make Bucky thank whatever God could be up there. Everything was in pieces, but between the broken shreds his Stevie was there, the man he’d do anything for, the only person that could make all of that worth surviving.
So, when Steve asked him if he’d follow Captain America into the jaws of death, Bucky almost laughed at him. He’d promised to give his soul, his life if necessary, for his Stevie, and he’d never come back on that promise. There wasn’t anything else that mattered.
Right then, Bucky’s lips stirred in one of those tired smiles that were so common of him nowadays, and he simply answered: «That little guy from Brooklyn, who was too dumb to run away from a fight. I’m following him.»
***
When Bucky fell, he didn’t have time to think.
It wasn’t like in the movies, where your whole life just passes in front of your eyes and you have all the time in the world to realise what’s happening, to suffer, to grieve.
To Bucky, death would forever feel like adrenaline and ice.
It was just after, after they’d found him, after the torture had started breaking him for real, after shattered bones and hunger and beatings and experiments and the chair, that he found himself analysing the moment of the fall.
Longing for it.
How sweet it would’ve been, if the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes forever could’ve been Stevie’s blue eyes, instead of the dark walls of his cell.
***
When the Soldier hit Captain America for the first time, on the Helicarrier , the thing that really confused him was the sudden feeling he got in his belly, like he was doing something wrong, something forbidden. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was following the orders he’d been given.
The Soldier was not allowed to have an opinion on what was going on. He was not allowed to have feelings, because feelings belonged to real people. He was a weapon. Weapons didn’t feel pleased or upset about what they were used for.
Yet, even before landing the second punch the Soldier could already feel it: horror, heavy on his stomach, creeping up like frost on his limbs, making him move slower. Making him weaker.
The Captain kept on talking to him, lying to him. He said things about being his friend, about having known him before, that just didn’t make any sense. The Soldier had no friends; the Soldier had handlers, doctors that directed his maintenance, and, sometimes, during particularly difficult missions, collaborators. There was nothing more, just like there was no before. The Soldier didn’t have a past. He’d been created by Hydra. He’d come from the ice; it didn’t matter how hard he tried to think, there were no memories of anything else.
The Soldier had to complete his mission. The fact that the Captain refused to fight back, despite his enhanced strength, was inconsequential. The fact that the Captain kept on calling him Bucky, telling him he was his comrade, was irrelevant too. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter.
But the fact that he had to remind himself of it was already enough to alert him that he was malfunctioning. Everything felt wrong, crocked. The Captain’s voice did something to him, sent shivers down his back, made his heart hurt somehow. He hit a little bit harder, angrily, because he had already failed to eliminate that target once, and that couldn’t ever happen again.
The Soldier almost wailed when his focus shifted again. There was something weird about the Captain. A tiny voice in his mind provided the information that he was supposed to be smaller, skinnier; yet, that couldn’t be true. The body in front of him matched perfectly the information he’d been given.
«Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.» Panted the Captain, breath short.
The Soldier felt like his head was going to explode. He didn’t have a name. Weapons didn’t need a name, and he sure as hell didn’t deserve one. So he screamed: «Shut up!», his breath as laboured as the Captain’s, because he couldn’t let himself listen to him, he couldn’t lose his concentration, he couldn’t fail another mission. Without missions he was nothing, had nothing, merited nothing.
The Captain let go of his shield and the Soldier wanted to scream at him, yell to fight back, plead so that it could stop, all those words that he didn’t understand, all the confusion, the splitting agony inside his brain. But all he could do was tackle the Captain and then punch, punch, punch again. He distractedly calculated that a common civilian would’ve died already, the skull smashed in, and the knowledge left an metallic taste in his mouth. Or maybe it was just the blood.
«You’re my mission!» Hissed the Soldier, putting all the strength he had left into a series of punches. The Captain just took the blows, not even trying to stop him. The Soldier analysed the injuries on his face, and thought that maybe he’d gotten too weak to do so. He felt his heart pound furiously into his ears and he found his fist quivering, almost unable to hit again.
And just when the Soldier started to think that maybe he truly was going crazy, he truly was malfunctioning and needed repairing, because he’d never felt an agony so strong, he’d never experienced a similar sense of terror, and all of a sudden he was feeling and hurting and wanting, for the first time ever desiring to disobey; right in that minuscular second of hesitation, the Captain answered him, his words muffled: «Then finish it, ‘cause I’m with you ‘till the end of the line.»
And right then, the Soldier saw another face in front of him: it resembled the Captain’s, but it was younger, thinner, paler, definitely more delicate. Fragile. Yet, the eyes remained the same: firm and stubborn, a bit sad and… loving, in a way that the Soldier didn’t understand.
Everything was blurry, the Helicarrier was exploding and falling to pieces around them, but the Soldier took a moment to contemplate the Captain’s irises, and there found his answer. He jumped after the Captain when he fell, saved him and dragged him out of the river. He let him live, and walked away.
Then came horror, confusion, desperation, an endless flashing of images and thoughts that trashed the Soldier’s brain and left him bare, devoid of any certainties; after, doubts arose, guilt plagued him, and he hated himself more than he’d ever thought he’d be able to hate anyone.
But whenever the pain got to be too much, he allowed himself to think back to the day he’d freed himself from Hydra, and he let himself indulge in the sweet, sweet memory of the instant his hand had found the Captain’s, underwater, and he’d managed to pull him out of the river. There, remembering the moment he’d been saviour instead of killer, remembering the sudden need to protect that had flooded him, remembering the bliss of a human touch that didn’t hurt or injure, but instead sealed wrecked pieces together; there he found the eye of the hurricane. There the storm finally quieted, and warmth welcomed him home.
***
After the battle on the Helicarrier, the Soldier did a lot of research. Going back to the Captain without the memories he now knew were missing was not even an option. Then, once he started getting some of those back, he begun to think that going back wouldn’t be an option, ever.
The Internet held endless information on Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes: he’d been Steve Rogers’ best friend, a sniper during WWII, a part of the Howling Commandos. He’d apparently lost his life in combat and was remembered as a war hero. And most importantly, his resemblance to the Soldier was terrifyingly real.
The Soldier spent hours accurately observing his face in the mirror. There was no way that it was actually him; maybe he’d been constructed to resemble the Sergeant, as a sick joke. He wasn’t even sure if he was a real person or not.
The only thing that he was completely certain about was that Barnes had probably been a good man. The Captain had been trying to stop the Soldier because he thought that somewhere, buried deep into his body, his friend was still waiting to be rescued. The Soldier knew that there was nothing to save in him. He knew he was just a broken thing, useless human waste, now that he didn’t have a purpose.
Death seemed very appealing, then.
The thing that stopped him from giving up were flashes of memories. At first they’d been scary and confusing, almost painful when they came; but as the weeks passed and the mayhem in the Soldier’s mind started to calm down a bit, he found himself almost longing for them. Once they were gone he always felt too old and tired, empty somehow; but he relished them anyway, proof that he’d actually been alive once. Proof that his cruel existence wasn’t all that there was.
Sure, there were memories that left him shaking on the floor for hours, his fingernails leaving red, angry marks on his face and chest, the metal arm bruising his ribs in an extreme tentative to keep himself together. Sometimes smells, noises, even textures or flavours would send him back, back to the war, back to the chair, back to images of himself coldly snapping the neck of a girl, whose only sin was that of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, because the rules said to never leave any eyewitnesses behind. There were days when the memories left him so exhausted that he couldn’t even manage to get up to get a glass of water, and there were days when they left him so anxious that he had to physically stop himself from banging his head on the wall until he passed out.
But then, there were also moments when his shattered brain showed him different things.
He remembered that once he’d been able to dance, to move his body in ways that were not meant to be dangerous, but instead endeared those around him, made them want to get closer instead of further away. One day he saw a memory of himself playing cards, just a couple seconds really, and couldn’t stop replaying it again and again in his mind, focusing on the expression on his face: sparkling eyes, the corners of his mouth gently curled upwards. A smile. He’d been allowed to smile.
He got flashes of himself working, of himself preparing soup, of himself braiding a young girl’s hair, and he never really understood what was going on, who the people in there were, but it was nice enough to make him feel more human. He started to believe that maybe he’d really been a person once, maybe he’d had a real life, with a job and a family and friends. The day he remembered he’d had a mother he almost broke down crying.
Lastly, memories of the Captain started to come. But in most of his reminiscences he was not a Captain, he was not big and physically strong, he wasn’t even in the Army. He was just a scrawny little guy, whose name was Steve.
The Soldier saw Steve draw, stretched on a battered little couch, while the morning light shone gently on his pale skin and blond hair; he saw Steve lying in bed, face flushed, clearly sick, while his own hands were trying to feed him some soup; he saw Steve walking carefully in the snow, all bundled up in a big green scarf; he saw him bloody and beaten up after a fight, only it was a different kind of fight than those the Soldier was used to. Then there were flashes of their time in the Army, flashes of Steve jumping out of rising flames, offering his hand to the Soldier when he was hurt, sharing the tent with him at night and pressing his warm body against the Soldier’s back.
He remembered how it’d felt like to be good, to have purpose, and silently grieved the loss of the best part of himself. He still didn’t think that there was anything left in him: he was just a shell, a wrecked body without a soul. He didn’t believe he’d ever deserve forgiveness for the blood that stained his hands. That was the main reason he was still hiding from the Captain, from Steve, who he knew was looking for him. It would’ve been disgustingly selfish of him, to go back to Steve pretending to be a person he was not anymore, just because he couldn’t stand to remain alone. He wouldn’t fit in the Captain’s life anymore, there wouldn’t be any place for him and his darkness.
Then, one day he got back a memory that shook every fragment of certainty he’d found until that point. Maybe –he found himself thinking, hyperventilating in a corner– maybe there was purpose for him after all. Maybe not everything had been lost, maybe all the tragedies and the pain had been necessary to lead him to that precise moment, to that realisation. Maybe there was still something good for him to do. And his soul, perhaps his soul was not gone like he’d thought, because he couldn’t imagine something like that coming from the dark void he’d imagined lived inside his heart.
The day the Soldier remembered loving Steve Rogers, he also remembered what hope felt like, and he decided he’d let himself be found.