Talk
She paces her room for hours after she hangs up on Bucky. Her heart is racing, something scratching fiercely at her insides. A voice in her head, that sounds notably calmer and cooler than she feels, is saying she should not have hung up on him like that. Already she wants to talk to him again, hear his voice in her ear again.
Sam is in the living room, snoring on the couch, but the present sound of quiet domesticity only makes her feel more alone. She feels like she's missing something, like she's lost a limb. And she knows it's because of him. Bucky.
They're at her father's apartment, which feels both intimately familiar and foreign. It's clear though, by her bedroom walls, that she hasn't lived here in a few years. Maybe she had been living at the university? Her steps quicken, anxiety roils inside her, sick rising up in the back of her throat. Panic threatens to overwhelm her again.
Because she knows that's not right.
Her pace slows, her steps falter, pain throbs in the back of her head.
Morning baby. He’s handsome in the morning. Short, soft hair tousled gently, lips pink and slightly swollen. His arm is over her waist. She's naked. Fingers trail along his cheek. Her fingers.
Morning.
I love you.
I love you too.
Y/N bends at the waist and vomits on the floor. Because it was soft and warm and nice. Clearly she had loved him. Clearly he still loves her. So why aren't they together? What had changed?
In the memory he had been a little younger, looked a little less hollowed out. He looked happy. In the memory, she feels happy. So what had happened between then and now?
Sam opens the door then and looks at her with pity in his eyes. She’s still bent over above the pool of vomit, clutching her stomach, and all Sam does is come over and pat her on the back, guiding her to the bathroom, instructing her to brush her teeth. Hatred fills her veins. Not for Sam, who she’s been told has been her friend since birth, but for the look in his eyes. They all walk on eggshells, treat her like glass, hold pity and unwanted sympathies in their hands. And all she wants is to be told the truth, for someone to look her in the eyes and talk to her. She feels more and more like a lonely broken child with each passing day.
But Sam seems to have some need to be her caretaker at the moment and so she lets him run a washcloth under cold water, settle her on the couch, and instruct her to put the cloth over her eyes.
Her chest hurts as she imagines, again and again, the look in Bucky’s eyes in the memory. Such softness and love. Then she thinks about the walls in her bedroom. There are posters of bands she no longer recognizes, handwritten notes, drawings and photographs, old movie ticket stubs and concert tickets, film posters and prints of famous paintings. All four walls are almost entirely papered over in things that were…are important in her life.
But there are gaps. Photograph sized gaps, letter sized gaps. Gaps whose emptiness are painful.
Someone had ripped them down and she has a good guess who they might’ve featured. Her teeth start to ache from how hard she’s grinding them, clenching them together.
Y/N was wrong to hang up on him. She knows he can’t tell her about the accident. No one else will and if he cares about her as much as he seems to then he won’t jeopardize her health like that. But she does need someone to tell her about herself and she thinks he might be the closest to her. Bucky knows her and in the process she might learn something about him, she might remember him. Maybe this way too, she can judge whether she can trust him or not.
Without waiting for Sam to come back to the living room she leaves the apartment. She knows the short walk to the gym by heart. No one had had to show her when she woke up. Everyone supposes it must be muscle memory.
~
At the gym, securely in her father’s office, she redials Bucky’s number, now saved in her phone and memorized.
It takes him a long time to answer again. But this time he sounds sleepy instead of desperate when he does.
“Hi Bucky.” Before he can say anything else she continues. “I’m sorry for hanging up on you. That was rude of me.”
“That’s okay, babydoll.” He sounds breathless and it deters her from telling him again not to call her that. “Really it’s okay. I understand.”
He's so kind it makes her eyes water. “Well it was still rude. I know you can’t tell me about the accident and I shouldn’t have tried to make you. But I think I do need someone to tell me about me.” He’s quiet and so she continues. “I think you should be that person. You’re the only one I’ve met that seems to want to tell me the truth. At least some of it.” She sighs, “I’m at the gym, in my father’s old office. If you have time-,”
“I’ll be right there, sweetheart.”
It’s only seven in the morning. She smiles.
~
He makes it there in less than five minutes. He feels sort of stupid as he parks his motorcycle in front of the gym. Actually he feels like an asshole, he feels the deep throb of guilt in his gut. He hates the damn bike but he can't get rid of it. Bucky just doesn't have the money to trade it for a car.
In Frank's old office, Y/N is pacing. She comes to an abrupt halt when he walks in the door. There was a time, not too long ago, when a smile would have spread over her face and she would have run to hug him, to kiss him, to murmur in his ear, I missed you, Buck. How was training? Now she just frowns and steps back distrustfully.
"Hey, doll." Bucky also knows that he should stop calling her doll and sweetheart and baby, that it wasn't helping anything, just confusing her further. But its second nature. He's called her things like that since forever.
“Hi.” She says, her mouth an uncomfortable tilt. “Uh, sorry about asking you to come over so early.” Y/N twists her fingers nervously together.
His smile is soft and so are his eyes. “I’ll always come when you call, Y/N.”
Awkward silence rings around the room after that as she looks anywhere but his eyes. The dirty floorboards, the yellowing walls, her scuffed shoes, have all suddenly captured her attention. It’s never been awkward between them, not ever. But things seem to be changing, things have changed. And not for the better.
“Why don’t we go on a walk? Around the city?”
“Is that something we used to do?”
He nods, “When we wanted to get away from the gym for a while, or you wanted to get away from your schoolwork. When I wanted to get away from my-,” He freezes. He had been about to say my family. He clears his throat harshly and looks away, jaw clenching. “Away from everything.”
Sympathy runs across her face as they leave her father's office. When they reach the front of the gym however Sam is there with his arms crossed over his chest and a stern expression on his face. They feel half like teenagers getting caught sneaking out.
“Sam-,” Bucky starts, reaching out to take Y/N’s hand without thinking, needing the comfort and reassurance of her skin against his. She jumps and flinches, darting away from him. His heart shatters but he’s glad it’s only Sam here, who, surprisingly, out of everyone, seemed to believe his side of the story.
Conveniently, as everyone else has so kindly pointed out to him, the other side of the story has been erased. With Y/N’s memory gone, and possibly forever, there’s no way to get the other half of the story. She could tell them Bucky’s telling the truth, tell them-
“Bucky!” Sam snaps his fingers in front of his face. “What do you think you’re doing?”
He flounders for a moment, mouth opening and closing comically, as he tries to think of a good excuse, a good lie.
But Y/N is better than him, always has been, and so she tells Sam the truth. “I called him Sam.”
“Y/N-,”
“Sam. This is my choice okay? I think…he can help.” She doesn’t seem to want to say Bucky's name. “I’m trying my hardest to remember but just sitting around, here and in my room all day, it’s not helping anything. At least when he’s around I-I feel something.”
Bucky closes his eyes. Fuck. Sam is only going to read into that the wrong way. And he’s right. When he opens his eyes Sam is glancing between them suspiciously. “Like what?”
She shrugs, looking smaller and more confused by the minute. It makes him want to wrap her in a blanket and keep her bed all day, shield her from the hurt the world can inflict. “Just something.” Her voice is quiet.
He pushes past Bucky and takes Y/N’s hands, who doesn’t jump or pull away. A raised eyebrow is sent Bucky’s way. As if to say, see? She doesn’t flinch when I touch her. “You have to promise me to tell me if anything happens.”
She frowns and glances at Bucky, a shard of fear in her eyes now. “I’ll be okay.” Pride dwells in him, because she chooses him.
“Just promise me.”
“Okay.”
He releases her hands, nods, and walks away.
~
She keeps her arms crossed over her chest as they walk along and carefully keeps her distance, a foot of space between them, practically as far away from him as she could be on the small sidewalk.
Rage is humming in his blood, though he supposes he understands Sam’s concern. He understands why Sam keeps her so close. For one, Sam had promised to take care of her when Y/N’s father died. But they had also promised each other, as children, to always look after each other.
It’s a promise she no longer remembers.
Sam does though, and it isn’t one he’ll soon forget.
Bucky remembers it too. He remembers the hot jealousy in his stomach as he watched from shadows of her father’s apartment’s hallway. It had been early morning, the light cool and the world silent, as they sat on the couch together. They had promised to always watch the other’s back, protect against threat, because that’s what they were, best friends practically siblings. That did not stop him from wanting to throttle Sam.
And Sam had been there before Bucky ever was. Their fathers had been best friends and, in the end, so were they.
He had been thirteen and filled with a hot anger that only Y/N seemed able to temper. That fury is a part of the reason why no one trusts him now. He hadn’t interrupted them, let them make their promises, as he stood in the hall alone, covered in bruises after what he thought was the worst night of his life.
“Bucky?” Her voice draws him away from his dark thoughts. “Were we friends? Before?”
Anguish.
That’s what this feeling must be.
Pure, unchecked agony.
She doesn’t even know if they had been friends. “Yeah,” he can hear the distress in his own voice. “Yeah. Always.”
She frowns but moves closer to him on the sidewalk. “I can’t imagine how hard this is for all of you. I’m sorry I’m making it harder and I’m sorry that you’ve got it worst of all.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
They walk for a time in silence but this time it’s a comfortable one. She doesn’t stay so far away, moving closer to him on the sidewalk.
Bucky leads them to a park. They sit quietly for a while on a bench until Y/N reaches over and tentatively puts her hand over his. He jumps and jerks away and could kick himself when she pales and looks guilty. “Sorry.” She scoots away, looking down. “They tell me that I was an English major at college. And creative writing and art minor.” She looks over, “My room is covered in movie posters and drawings and-and letters.”
Y/N looks at him expectantly. He swallows uncomfortably. “You wrote to me all the time. To everyone really. But you wrote stories for me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean…you wrote letters to other people. But you wrote for me. Stories. Because you trusted me to read them. And to distract me.”
She looks at him like she knows, like she remembers. And Bucky wishes she would try to put her hand over his again, hates that he lost the chance to hold her hand or at least feel her skin against his. “Distract you from what?”
He thinks about his mother and then his old man and the one time Y/N met them both and he decides not to tell her. Bucky shakes his head and tells her about something good. He doesn’t want her to believe he’s a monster. “You came to every one of my boxing matches and in exchange I went to the theatre or the ballet or a film festival. We tried to paint together sometimes. You and uh, you and Stevie tried to teach me to draw.”
“And we…what else did we do together?”
“God...Y/N we did everything together. We boxed together and went to school together and did homework together. We ran together and ate together and slept together. And I don’t mean-I don’t mean sex. I mean we’ve shared a bed so many times over the years I’ve lost count. But I know that’s not what you want to ask.”
She bites her lip and eyes his hand sitting between them on the bench. Slowly he reaches over and offers his hand, palm up. Cautiously her eyes raise to meet his. “I don’t know why I want to touch you. I-I don’t even know you-,”
He touches her arm. “You do though. You’ve just forgotten for the moment. Maybe your body remembers.”
A nod. She doesn’t pull away from his touch, doesn’t flinch. “When did we get together?”
“We were fifteen.”
“And why do they keep you away from me?”
“Y/N-,”
She pulls away from his hand as her mouth pulls into a tight line. “I deserve to know that.”
“I can’t.”
For a moment she looks like she might argue, a wild fire driving into her eyes, and Y/N as she was comes back to him. Argumentative and willing to call him on his bullshit when needed. Because he could tell her. It has nothing and everything to do with the accident. He could tell her a half-truth and leave the accident out of it. But a half-truth still feels like a lie. Instead of arguing with him she takes a deep breath and says, “Fine. Tell me about you.”
“I thought-,”
“I think I was wrong. I need to figure out who I am, until my memories come back. I need to…do it myself.” She frowns again, forehead creasing. “Sam keeps me cooped up in the apartment all the time. He says he’s letting me run the gym but really he does it all. I’m so bored and anxious all the time. All I can think about is everything I don’t know and how…Natasha and Wanda and Sam all look at me with such disappointment and pity and…I know I’ve only seen you a couple of times but you don’t look at me like that. You look at me like you understand, like it’s okay and you’ll wait and you don’t expect anything.”
A reluctant smile makes its way onto his face. Even when she doesn’t remember anything he still manages to know her best. “What do you want to know about me?”
“I don’t know why but I want to know everything. I thought I was afraid of you but now I think that feeling is excitement. You make me excited.” She leans close, “We were troublemakers weren’t we?”
Now he smiles, full and big, “Maybe a little bit. So were Sam and Steve but somehow they never got caught and so they looked like the golden kids with wild best friends.”
“Tell me about you. Tell me how we got in trouble.”
She’s smiling. She looks happy.
The anger and sadness that is always coursing through him goes away. He feels better, he feels happy. And he thinks that, for a moment, Y/N has forgotten to be reserved with him. She’s craving freedom and he knows Sam isn’t doing her any favors by suffocating her with protection.
“Okay.” He would hate the way his voice sounds so soft and loving if he were with anyone but Y/N.
And, as simple as that, they sit in the park and talk all day.
Its late evening when they get back to the gym, Bucky having taken Y/N to the diner for dinner to see if it would jog any memories. It didn’t but he gets to watch her try her favorite food again for the first time. Her expression of bliss had almost been worth it.
Sam and Steve are waiting for them when they walk through the door.