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Steve Rogers stood in the parlor belonging to the Winter Soldier, the currently most famous—or infamous—clairvoyant and medium and spiritualist of New York City in the glittering gilded era, surrounded by veiled mirrors and a rather surprisingly practical solid table, and glared at the fire in the fireplace. The fire leapt up merrily in welcome. Mocking him, he decided, and glared more.
The Winter Soldier was keeping him waiting. This was a manipulator’s trick, no doubt designed to keep him off-balance and also give any associates time to go through his greatcoat pockets in the outer room. Genuine psychics might be real, but they were few and far between; odds overwhelmingly argued that this Winter Soldier had to be a fraud.
Which was, of course, why Steve had come. To investigate.
He turned, glancing at windows, at tall vertical walls, at mirrors. Two-way? Mechanical?
The Winter Soldier. Even the name carried an insult. Supposedly, the story ran, the newest celebrity seer of New York City had been a soldier, a good man and a brave man, who’d perished in battle and yet somehow returned to life, given extraordinary powers, abilities beyond the merely mortal. Both Steve and Nick Fury, who ran the unofficial-official ball of yarn that made up the Shield psychic investigations team, had been personally offended by the breathless accounts in Society newspapers, gossip, adoration.
He paused to roll up shirtsleeves under his waistcoat, wondering who was watching, why the heat in the room.
The weather’d been chilly in New York, but then it’d been chilly everywhere; the fire wasn’t unusual, but it’d been built up high. Smoke effects, he thought. Or subtle manipulation of clients. Like the mirrors and the elaborate candlesticks, the aged silver, the general air of somber eerie tension. Dark wood and heavy curtains. Thick carpets; they’d muffle footsteps and trickery, of course. Unnerving wallpaper striped in green and grey marginally uneven designs, like an itch between shoulderblades.
No one knew the Winter Soldier’s proper name. Even Fury didn’t, and that was a trick, one that’d begrudgingly impressed everyone. Nobody on the Shield team knew what kind of paranormal blood their commander had, but he knew everything, and if he did not know this—
Steve, as the most indestructible—plus that other gift, the elusive magical one—had volunteered to investigate. Other people could’ve handled this one—Sam might’ve talked to birds and beasts of the skies, Tony was charming in both man and wolf form, Natasha…
Well, no one knew what Natasha was, either, but it was scarily effective. Whenever anyone asked she simply smiled and inquired whether they were certain they wanted to know. They never did end up wanting to.
Steve had been angry about this one, though. Angry, and hurt, a kind of low deep visceral stab that he’d not noticed at once. When he finally had he’d realized he’d been metaphorically bleeding for some time, a sort of stunned furious pain stemming from a wound he’d thought closed over if not healed.
A soldier. Someone who’d died. Someone who’d fought for a cause, given his life, no doubt loved and been loved, fallen to his death from a train, lost in snow, hand slipping as he reached for Steve’s—
Steve had woken from that nightmare shaking and tense, dripping with sweat, throbbing with anguish and rage. He’d asked for this case. Couldn’t let a fraud continue. Couldn’t let some unscrupulous bastard prey upon grieving lonely people, using a story that should’ve belonged to a hero.
He knew perfectly well that he was approaching this case emotionally. He knew the Winter Soldier had never used the name or the details belonging to Bucky Barnes, the love of Steve’s life, the man who’d been Steve’s other half and heart and laughter and partner on missions and in bed, a scientist’s delight in mechanical wonders and the cool steady eye of a sharpshooter, long legs tangled with Steve’s in a tent or in a Brooklyn apartment, gasps and moans and the thunder of heartbeats, and the white blank void of death and cold and a ravine opened up in Steve’s soul.
This Winter Soldier likely did not know who James Buchanan Barnes had been, and indeed was not even using a specific story, only the general outline of service and life given and resurrection; nevertheless, Steve Rogers was angry, and he burned with it, like smoldering coals.
Even powerful men had come to see the Winter Soldier. Steve had heard the rumor that Alexander Pierce, arguably the most influential man behind the United States government, would be attending a séance next week.
He’d been staring into a smoke-hued mirror without seeing anything. Lost in shimmer and emotion and blurred age-spotted glass.
And there was still no sign of the man in question. Annoyed, Steve shut eyes, reached without moving down into that space where his own gift dwelt, that blue-gold flicker of Irish inheritance, the ban síde’s kiss in his blood that’d let him know about ill intent, possible death, a warning, danger on the rise—
Every sense he possessed told him that he wasn’t in danger. Not immediately so, anyway; possibilities fluttered like specters across the psychic horizon, tattered and vague. He knew he wasn’t a proper banshee, and he was glad of that; his diluted trace tended to function more as a barometer than an incontrovertible prophecy, and it was less tied to his specific family and more a general warning-of-deadly-peril-up-ahead. More useful that way, he’d decided.
He scowled at the expanse of mute gleaming mirror above the fireplace. Ran a fingertip over the mantel: dust and heat collected on his skin.
No danger? If the man were a fraud, Steve could certainly handle that; perhaps it was only that easy. But anyone clever enough to get close to Alexander Pierce had to be, at the very least, cunning and quick-witted and not opposed to deception. This did not add up.
A voice said from behind him, “Captain Rogers?”
Steve spun around. Nearly tripped over the fireplace poker. Became for a second the clumsy half-grown boy he’d been, new to the muscles and the height, puppy-awkward in his strength. Bucky’d laughed at him, and then kissed him, and then suggested they experiment with ways of getting used to those muscles. “What the f—where were you, how’d you—”
No reflection in that giant mirror. Not in any of them. No sound. A sleek figure in black, masked and shrouded in long dark hair, gazed at him.
A prickle ran along his spine.
And then the Winter Soldier, the clairvoyant sensation of New York City, shoved smoked glasses up into his hair, yanked the mask off, and demanded, in a pure Brooklyn accent, “Steve?”
Steve couldn’t move. Couldn’t blink. Couldn’t even breathe. The parlor and the disconcerting wallpaper and the mirrors dissolved into a roaring green-grey blur. His heart flung itself against his ribcage.
“Jesus Christ, Stevie, sit down.” The Winter Soldier grabbed one of the chairs from the séance table, shoved Steve into it, hovered; Bucky Barnes, all wide eyes and generous heart and concerned hands, touched Steve’s face, checked his pulse, perched on a broad brocade chair-arm beside him. “Your heart—”
“The damned scientific experiment fixed that,” Steve retorted automatically, habitually, instinctively, echoes of previous bickering rising like sparks from leaping flame, “you just like worrying—Bucky, oh God, what the fuck, oh God, Bucky.”
“I didn’t know it’d be you.” Bucky, sitting on the chair-arm, took his hand, rested fingers over his wrist—that fussing again, and Steve couldn’t decide whether to shout for answers or protest his own health or tumble Bucky into his lap, because Bucky, Christ, after all this time, all this hurting, Bucky.
“I didn’t know,” Bucky said again. His costume glasses had gotten caught up in a tangle of dark hair, which was longer than Steve remembered; he moved differently, no action wasted, each breath inhumanly efficient. He’d been wearing black, clinging and leather and otherworldly rather than gentlemanly fashionable, and long concealing gloves; he’d pulled the right one off to touch Steve. “I knew they’d send someone but Rogers is pretty common as far as names and I’m not so good anymore at—I didn’t—I should’ve known, but I didn’t, not until I saw you, and then I remembered, I saw you—”
“Bucky,” Steve said.
“I don’t always know what I don’t know.” Bucky went to run a hand through his hair, knocked glasses to the carpet, glanced at them in some surprise. “I’m sorry, Stevie, I should’ve—I can explain. I think. The mirrors are a trick. The angles. If you were wondering.”
“Bucky,” Steve said.
Bucky flinched as if this were an accusation, and fingers shifted under that left glove. A sound fluttered out. A whirr. Mechanical, maybe? “I can try to explain. It’s—I’m sorry. I’m not—not being adequate. I know.”
“Bucky,” Steve said a third time, and then, “What?”
Bucky flinched again. That was different too: Bucky Barnes, while not exactly a Steve Rogers in terms of burning righteous determination, had absolutely possessed his own share of stubborn self-sacrifice and—before the Continental war—easy charm. On missions he’d been a good sergeant, a leader in his own right, intuitive and empathetic and scared as hell but brave right through hell too.
Someone’d hurt Bucky, had taken all that empathy and twisted it up into guilt over being inadequate—whatever the hell that meant—and made that sweet heart need to fight back against fear of authoritative displeasure. And Steve Rogers forgot about his own mission, forgot about the rest of the world, and wanted to hunt down the person who’d done this. He wanted that so badly he thought he might scream.
And Bucky was here. Bucky was alive. Bucky was…doing something, pretending to be a seer and a psychic, here in these spiritualist’s rooms, with a purpose. Not good anymore, he’d said. Not good at what?
He realized he hadn’t moved to touch Bucky in turn, hadn’t even said anything, had been shocked and stunned and only now beginning to thaw, not just from the bewilderment of the moment but from long months and years before that, an ice he only noticed as it melted away and left him raw and exposed and alive.
He held out a hand, shaky. “Buck. You’re here.”
Bucky looked at the hand, with some uncertainty.
“Please,” Steve said. “You know me. You said you did. I think you do. And—and what the hell is going on, and it doesn’t fucking matter, never mind, I mean it does, I’m here to—but I’m here. You’re here. And I’m sorry, Bucky, I’m so sorry—I couldn’t save you, I didn’t save you, if I’d—done more, tried harder, gone down with you—I love you. I don’t think I ever said it that last day and I should’ve—”
“Steve,” Bucky said.
Steve stopped babbling and watched his face, watched the words.
“I’m not me anymore,” Bucky said. “Or—don’t look at me like that, come on, Stevie, don’t, I’m doing fine, most days, really stop with that expression, okay—sometimes I’m me. Sometimes I’m not. It’s a long story. The short version is, I didn’t die then. I got picked up by some German mad scientists and metaphysicists, the Hydra group, you might remember them, I’ll tell you about that later. I did lose the arm then, though.”
Steve looked at the glove. He was still thinking about the first then, in the middle of Bucky’s words. The fire crackled, sudden and hot.
“Whatever they did to me…” Bucky shrugged, light and fluid, dismissing pain. “If you were wondering, yeah, it’s real. Everything I see. Possible futures. Divination. Talking to ghosts, even, if they’re hanging around, which they tend to do because hey, someone can actually hear them. Hydra thought I’d be useful. I was. I was…pretty well trained.” He paused; the pause held secrets like broken metal, sharp and glinting, full of jagged vicious histories he did not offer to fill in. “Eventually I got away. And then I spent a while trying to figure out who I was, and then I knew what I wanted to do, and that’s where we are.”
A lot of holes lurked in this story, omissions and questions. Steve whispered, “How’d you get away?”
Bucky actually laughed, soft and swift; he sounded, Steve thought, like someone who’d remembered how to laugh, who’d once forgotten. “You, actually. Not you in person—I didn’t have that piece until I saw your face, just now—but I was in London on a mission and you were there too, the Shield team, on a different mission—you didn’t know about Hydra or the ghosts—and the papers talked about a Steve Rogers and saving people from certain death. And I remember I thought, for no goddamn reason, my Steve would do that. And then I had to know what that even meant, and who I’d been.”
“So you left…”
“I said it was a long story. It is. And bloody. But yeah. I talked to a few ghosts, called in a few favors from the other side, and started looking.” Bucky moved to get up, as if he’d somehow made himself no longer welcome at Steve’s side; Steve said, “Wait,” because this was ridiculous, and caught his hand. Bucky started to react, visibly stopped himself, stood still with Steve’s hand in his.
“So,” Steve breathed, “you’re alive, and you’re a psychic medium.”
“Genuine and unvarnished.” Bucky’s smile went sideways, crooked, bruised. “I got a lot of ghosts in my head, Stevie. I’m telling you that right now so you know. Memories that aren’t mine, some that are, some that I can’t be too sure about. Sometimes they get pretty loud and parts of me end up…drowned out. I know I’m missing bits.”
“You knew me. You know me.”
“Once I saw you,” Bucky said. “Sometimes it works like that. Sometimes not. I didn’t know what plums were until I bought one and tasted it and then I remembered—”
“You loved them,” Steve whispered. Summer juices and rich purple flavors, bursting over skin, and messy kisses. “You remember that.”
“I do now.” Bucky hadn’t moved. Hand in Steve’s. Drenched in firelight. “I’m not a good man, Steve. If I was, I’m not anymore. What I’ve done—”
“You weren’t you.”
“I did it. I remember it. And what I’m here to do—”
The mission came crashing back down. Landed on Steve’s head. The Winter Soldier. The clairvoyant and celebrity. Shield and his team and this investigation.
He held onto Bucky’s hand. Whatever else happened, he had this. He’d gotten to have this again. Bucky might not’ve said the I love you back, but hadn’t pulled away.
“Alexander Pierce,” Bucky said.
“What?”
“He’s Hydra,” Bucky said, simply.
“He’s—”
“I know he is,” Bucky said, “because he was there. When they—when they wanted to use me. He gave me my orders. To call up revenants, to extract secrets, to complete missions. He was there sometimes when they…tested my capabilities. What I could see, what I could do.” He hesitated for a moment, perhaps weighing whether to divulge more, then finished, “I tried to please him.”
Steve said a very long, very furious, string of words that would’ve been more appropriate to a soldier’s camp than a proper Society parlor, spiritualist or not.
Bucky grinned. This expression lit up his face, and the room; Steve’s heart got a fraction lighter, absurdly, in despite of its burdens. “Pretty much, yeah. Didn’t know you knew some of those words, Stevie.”
“Guess we got a lot to talk about,” Steve suggested, and curled his hand more closely around those fingers. “Want help?”
“Help?”
“I’d say Pierce qualifies as a threat to global psychic security, if he’s involved in Hydra metaphysical manipulations, wouldn’t you? Right up Shield’s alley.”
“I’m not Shield,” Bucky said, gazing at him with an expression Steve remembered: fond, exasperated, one step from a sarcastic eye-roll. “I’m a mentally unstable medium and ex-sharpshooter with voices in my head and apparently a goddamn sweet tooth, I don’t know, I know at least six parts of me love chocolate and sugar and these amazing iced lemon cakes in the shop a couple streets over. I knew Pierce would come to investigate me, if I went all public and mysterious, and I was planning to kill him. Is that what you wanted to know? I’m a killer, Steve.”
This bluntness landed a knife-hilt to Steve’s gut; aching—for himself, for Bucky—he managed, “So am I. You know—maybe you don’t, I don’t know—I’ve killed. We’ve been soldiers, Buck—”
“No,” Bucky said. “Not like that. Some of the ghosts I called up—the ghosts I let in, the people I was, for Hydra—it’s not like that, Steve. I don’t think I know what it should be like anymore. And I am planning to kill Alexander Pierce.”
“You keep telling me that,” Steve said, standing there in Bucky’s séance parlor with the eerie mirrors, the stage-dressing, the theatricality, “and if you didn’t want me to know, to interfere or to help you, you wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t I,” Bucky said.
“Pretty sure the Winter Soldier’s not stupid,” Steve said. “I don’t know, though, I mean, Bucky Barnes could be kind of a jerk, he’s got your sense of humor, you might like him.”
Bucky’s smile came back to fly hopeful unsure banners around the edges of lips, the corners of eyes. “Punk. What’re we gonna do?”
Steve raised eyebrows. “Said I’d help you.”
“Me and the ghosts,” Bucky said, not only meaning the external ones; they both knew as much.
“You,” Steve said, “always, Buck,” and the firelight painted gold along Bucky’s cheekbone, hair, shoulder, and the wind rustled autumn leaves and dry branches outside. “Lemon cakes?”
“I once had a little old lady from Paris in my head,” Bucky murmured, “who could make amazing gingersnaps. I was thinking I might learn to bake. After. If there’s an after. Whatever happens.”
“I like gingersnaps,” Steve agreed. He did.
“You don’t give up, do you,” Bucky said. “Christ, Steve. I tell you I’ve been a little old lady—for the record, she was also a spy and a practiced hypnotist and follower of Mesmerism—and you don’t blink. I tell you about me and you say you’ll help. You’re the most goddamn stubborn person I’ve ever met, and you have the biggest damn heart, you still do, after everything, all this time and all of—everything you had to go through, without me, and you’re still you, and I fucking love you.”
They stared at each other, then.
The wind yelped, cheerful and pointed, and went back to flirting with tree-branches behind curtains. The fire purred.
“So,” Steve said finally, “you love me.”
“Oh, fuck me,” Bucky said. “Or you. Either way, really, if I’m remembering that right. We tried everything. We liked pretty much everything.”
“Everything,” Steve said, stepping closer, sliding arms around Bucky now, his Bucky, brilliant and tangible and complicated and true; the world would be complicated too, the mission changing before their eyes, explanations and plans and affirmations to be made. But here and now, this, on this autumn evening—
He said it again, “Everything,” and Bucky laughed and started to say something, a joke about the echo, about hearing voices, about Steve himself; Steve kissed him mid-word, and Bucky’s arms went around him in turn, a faint tremble amid their strength, a shiver of reprieve, a surrender to joy and a possible future, glimpsed in visions.