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"It's not your fault."
"I know," he says "But I still did it."
And the plane flies onwards, to Siberia, that is, to the past. To that little bunker with its small corridors grating rust and longing and heat like a furnace metal pressing against his skull and the pain and the fire that flows through his blood солдат! Тоска ржавые печи - No! He takes a deep breath and clenches his fist, steel fingers grating against steel palm. No he wasn't there anymore. He isn't theirs anymore.
But he is still going back. Why? he asks himself. The others...! Yes, to stop the others! Shadows of himself, or else, he is a shadow of them. He couldn't quite tell which. Maybe there wasn’t a difference. But he has to go back, to stop them, to protect the world, "Защитите меня, солдат!" he remembers him saying and he obeyed, walking through the hallway with his body as a shield, it was so easy to obey, to let them fill this emptiness that was his entire existence. It had been so easy, even after all that time, to obey. Even this, was obedience in a way. A mission. Stop the others. How? Shoot them? Kill them, as they had tried to kill him? It didn't really matter. There is only the mission.
But there is also… him. That man who is sitting in front of him, carefully steering the plane. The plane which flies high over the distant world below, a distant countryside he does not know. The clouds thicken around them and the plane flies on and the engine hums quietly, like a mother murmuring to her child late at night, wrapped in the softness of clouds. The world below slowly disappears and they are nowhere and everywhere all at once. But they are together. They are together, he and Steve. Steve and him. As they have always been. Have they not experienced this very moment before? Was this the past or the present; was this a memory or reality? All distinction fades away into the sky and into the clouds. The world around them rolls white like fog. He is sitting behind his friend as he always has. Neither of them speak. The sky, only a patch visible, is flaxen gold and pale pink. It reflects in the windows of the tenements like the distant memory of a noonday sun. They watch the people below sitting in the shadow of brick apartments, enjoying the evening coolness. Their far-off voices flow over them faintly, quiet like the rumble of an engine murmuring, they rift upon politics and philosophy; neighborhood kids shout as they chase each other around in wild circles beneath the watchful eyes of their mothers from their apartment windows. And other sounds drift in: the sound of women talking , the brisk chatter of the radio, drifting notes of jazz. There is the sound of doors slamming, people moving. A cat mewls somewhere in the distance, a horrible horrendous sound. Or perhaps that is just B*'s saxophone, their neighbour who dreams of becoming a famous jazz musician. Somewhere a record plays, voices croon. Then the door slams loudly and there is shouting and the horrible noise in the distance falls silent - B*'s mother has had enough. His practice has been cut short once again and tomorrow he will complain to them that if only if for his despotic mother he’d be famous by now! Bucky and Steve look at each other and once they start laughing they can't stop.
He says something and the other one laughs, and they both smile and look at the camera. They are in black and white, and the world is grey, white snow is mixed with black mud and the stone buildings are shelled into ruins and they sit down exhausted next to the stark remains of an abandoned church and say nothing to each other. Steve holds out a pack of cigarettes. Smoke drifts up silently into an empty grey sky.
They are high above the sky, the plane whirrs loudly and he is pressed against his seat, he is wearing a parachute on his back and he looks at Steve who is on the other side. His mouth moves, imperceptible beneath the roar of the engine, but they understand each other anyway. Then the floor gives away, and he is falling. He is falling and the mountains sweep upwards and the train rushes by and he hears someone cry "Bucky!" but it's too late, he is falling and then the parachute opens and he is sitting in the balcony with Steve and they are pretending to be fighter pilots - they soar over the streets of Brooklyn and they say "One day, we'll leave this place. One day, we'll be ace pilots! One day, we'll fly across the world!"
He is sitting in the plane with Steve in front of them and they are flying across the world. He hears the almost imperceptible rumble of the engine like a mother murmuring to her child late at night. He is sitting and yet he is also falling, he is over Europe, he is in Brooklyn. He sees himself as he once was then and as he is now, him and Steve, together, from then, and from then and from now and from now and now they are all overlaid, the him from then overlays the him from now. And all of him from then and then, it is all him and for a moment, for a brief moment, he feels that he is whole, that all the layers of him stacked together have made a complete human being, then they burst out of the cloud and it is gone. He sees the distant land below, the sweeping valleys and rugged mountains interspersed with lights - that is the real world, the human world, but here he is above it and it is so very far away. He is broken and he will never be whole. And he is suddenly aware of the distance behind him and Steve, who sits in the front steering the plane and does not turn back to look at him, and he knows also that that little boy who had sat on that balcony oh so long ago, he does not exist anymore, did he ever exist, that boy? The very idea seems strange to him, that a boy like that who is him can exist, and maybe it's all just a lie after all. You are никто, nobody, they told him, you are a soldier, you come from the country, and he can remember fields of snow and a little village in Russia and maybe that's what's true and this man in front of him he thought he knew, he did not know him, if you say you know him then you're going to regret it, you're in for a world of pain, but he did know him didn't he? He is here, right in front of him, he really is. And if he is really there, then Bucky existed too. It couldn't just be imaginary, because Steve remembered him too and that proved that there really had been a person named Bucky once, it was not just made up, he could testify to it.
"Do you remember that time," says Steve as they get off the plane, and he does remember that time, a time he thought he might have just dreamed up, floating faintly in the back of his consciousness and yet it really did happen, and they are on solid ground and he tries to hold on to that remembrance, to that person called Bucky, even as he returns here to this place full of pain, to kill and destroy and to fight. There's always a fight in the end. And the winter air pulls around him and chills him to the bone and he is here again in this place and it stands above him just like he remembers it looming above him ominous and dark and full of pain and fighting and footsteps and steel pressing into his head and they open the door and he steps forward, forward to the past but instead he is in a little concrete room long abandoned, silent and still. The air stirs sluggishly and reverberates the sound of their entrance across the heavy steel and concrete that is slowly crumbling around the door of an old elevator. He walks forward, aware that it is the same place and the same action he has done before in a different time and yet somehow it feels far away. Because, he realizes, it is, it is not the same, it is not the past here after all, that just like that little boy he once was it is distant from him, that now he is a stranger, it is strange to him.
Then is not now. Once he was theirs but now he is is own. What once was is no longer and this bunker is now dripping with age and neglect, subsumed beneath the veil of time. They are gone from this place now and they have left only shadows which he will bring to light. And he is no longer theirs but he is here together with Steve as he always has, although not always, because that time has gone too. He can never be the person that Steve expects him to be, wants him to be, not wholly, and maybe he never was anyways. He is not that little boy on the balcony any longer, and he is not the soldier they wanted him to be and yet he was and he still is, in a way, they are part of him, layers of him, overlapping, and each part is so different he thought he could never be whole but maybe they can exist together after all. He is here in this place full of pain which once was his whole existence and yet he is with Steve and they are together as they always have and it is one and the same, the bitter with the sweet.
And the elevator rumbles to a stop; they have reached the end of it.
They step forward together, to the future.