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He remembers—
Old wool suit that never fit right, shoes with newspaper crammed in the front, rats scuttling in the walls and under the bed and through the gutters, finishing water-bloated rodent corpses out of the drainpipes and saying, “So d’you hear that there’s no better city in the world than this?” Hunger. Starvation once or twice, but they didn’t live there, dangling off the ledge. They walked the fine precipice everyday between the kind of hollow where you can function and the kind of hollow when you can’t. Hiding food in the pockets of that damn wool suit. Slipping it out as casually as you could as your buddy started shaking. “Here, I got this, no, shut up, you need it and I don’t want it. I’ll throw it in the gutter if you don’t take it, I swear.” Laughing like you don’t mean it. Watching him until he puts that scrap of life into his mouth.
nothing that matters.
Mission: Eliminate the target.
When he thinks, he thinks that he’s been dreaming for so long now. One of those nightmare where each night you run down the same corridor, the same monster chasing, until you kick your heels too high and it clamps down. The same blinding pain as it eats you whole every time. But that’s not so bad as the corridor. He could endure (does endure, must endure) the teeth of the thing if he could only move a little further. Each night, however long a night is these days, he learns nothing new about the corridor. He remembers nothing from the last night, except that he has been here before and he’ll be here again and it will hurt every time.
There is no corridor. There is a monster but not as he sees it. There are walls in his head that he can’t touch and he didn’t build. They close in if he looks too closely at them. To think anything, he has to move around these blocks that are not real. Think in mirrors and masks. Pretend to himself that he is not thinking at all.
Mission: Eliminate the target.
Mission: Eliminate the target.
Mission: Eliminate the target.
Mission: Eliminate the target.
Through this smoke, gunfire, debris, he has, sometimes, this clarity—a sad dark thing. He cannot recognize it as such. For it to stay in his brain, he has to cover up what he’s uncovered, wrap both hands around it and look away as he tucks it on the back shelf. As long as he never owns them, these moments like sunlight through a gas cloud, they are his. The only things that are.
He makes the mistake once, peers through his hand and sees: this is not the first mission. this is not the same corridor. this is not the same decade. before you eliminated the target, he promised you the secret of the moon landing. you are so far from home.
Wipe him, they say, and he bits down willingly. The gas cloud swallows the sun. The soldiers choke to death as their lungs swell and puss. This feels safer.
The monster lopes towards him, falls upon him, devours him not whole but bite by bite.
And he remembers—
Small bed. Big enough for your purposes. Warmth, in a word. It’s been a long winter. Looking to be a long summer. There’s more than one kind of warmth. Warmth’s got weak lungs. Coughs a lot late at night, you pretending to sleep through it because if you ask, “hey, you alright,” he’ll just try not to cough. Swallow the hacking down. But he can’t, so the next night he’ll tell you, “it’s alright, I’ll take the couch,” because he doesn’t want to wake you, and it’ll be a week before you can cajole him back with lies that you can’t sleep, it’s too damn cold. Small bed. Smaller with two. Him pressed against your chest. Notching the ridges of his spine between the hollows of your ribs. Arm flopped over. Holding him. Holding him. Holding
There are places you don’t go and things you don’t touch and the world is so full of pain that who would blame you for skipping what you can
You kill a man with blond hair and a nice smile
You kill a woman with fire in her blue eyes
You kill and kill and kill and kill and kill and kill and kill and kill and each time the monster devours you in the end
You wake up in the corridor again
You’ve been here before
You’ll be here again
Mission: Eliminate the target
“Bucky?”
“But I knew him.”
“Who the hell is Bucky?”
There aren’t choices in his life. There’s a leash, a stick, a carrot, the walls, the monster. Wipe him, they said, but when they were done, there was still clarity. Sad dark thing. And what clarity shows is not a memory, not a dream, but just knowledge of a fact, the same way no one ever had to tell you that when you jump up, you fall down.
Bucky chooses Steve.
That’s just how it goes. Even that’s not a choice.
Walking away, though. That might be one.
He’s running down the corridor. The monster snaps at his feet. He’s running down the corridor. He’s never gotten this far before. Behind him pants the monster, shaggy beast with dull teeth, dead eyes, who has never gotten this far either. The thump thump of its feet fade behind him. Until they are almost gone. He slows. He stops. He walks back. The monster lies sprawled like a puddle of matted fur. Curled up against it are only three hideous limbs. Some hero ripped its arm off long ago.
“Come on,” he tells it. “There’s got to be some way out of here.”
He remembers flashes. He can see the pages, but the text’s been redacted. Sixteenth birthday -------------- running--------------Mom half turns and opens her mouth----------------------------that old wool suit-----------------“I didn’t ask for your help.” “Yeah but I’m--------------------“Damn it, Steve.”---------------------alleys again, always-------------------------------------------holding a letter in her shaking hands and says, “Tell them they can’t take you.”---------------all the stupid with you.”---------------------------------------------------------------------------“Steve?”-----------------target mission eliminate the mission eliminate eliminate the target mission
He has a name. He found it in the gaps between the walls. It doesn’t belong to him, no more than this coat or hat or life or shoes, but it's his, in a way. He has a past now. It’s bricked off, but there are gaps in the mortar. He can press his face against the stone and peer through at the zoetrope of history. The wind blows smells through the gaps. Voices. Bits of trash. He catches two ticket stubs for the World’s Fair, and the brick crumbles a bit more.
Mirrors and masks. He can think directly, but he’s forgotten how. The monster sleeps with its head on his shoulder, and that is as real to him as the cold ground. They were never going to escape without each other. There are walls built that can’t be torn down. Text blacked out can never be read again. The almost but not quite of what he was isn’t nearly enough. But neither was one roll of bread pulled out and shared. It still helped. There’s things that keep you alive, and there’s things that keep you going. For now, he decides, yes. He can keep going.
In an IHOP in Maine, he orders a stack of waffles and remembers his mother’s name. In a small fishing village in Newfoundland, he sits in an internet café and rereads his own Wikipedia entry; after thirty minutes deliberation, he makes a correction to his birth place. He moved to New York. He was born in Indiana. Driving a stolen truck through Indiana, he remembers why he was so glad to move away. The Depression started early for farmers. He was nine years old, and he was moving to the greatest city in the world. He and his mom were escaping east. Dad had escaped a long time ago. Mom said that her husband had died on the western front; just because his body came back, walking and talking, that didn’t change anything.
His first week in New York City, he slept on the floor of his second cousin’s kitchen, with strangers on either side. Through the thin walls, he could hear clear through to the neighbors. He laid in bed without sleeping, staring up at the ceiling, while some stranger on the other side of the wall coughed their way through the night.
He remembers after the fall too. He can’t tell you how many he killed, how many he was contracted to and how many he took out as collateral, and he can’t tell you how much they suffered, in the killing and in the chase. They blur together—one bloodied face, one endless scream. Sometimes he includes himself with his victims. Sometimes he gets as far as wrapping his cold fingers around his brittle throat. He was a Howling Commando once. He killed the bad guys.
He’s not a Howling Commando anymore. But he remembers them. And that pries loose his fingers and drops his traitor arm into his lap. It is what it is. You keep going. If he was going to die, he should have died during the worst of it.
It’s terrible, wanting to live. He wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
He makes it all the way to New Mexico, skulking around the shadows of Howard Stark’s second contribution to the war effort, when homesickness hits him like a bullet. But it’s not till California that he realizes that he’s just too damn good at what he does. Steve will never catch him. Not unless he wants to be caught.
He doesn’t want to be caught. He’s had enough of that for a lifetime.
But when he gets back to New York, the land is different, the city is different, and he does not know this place. It is not home anymore. The monster whines at the foreign streets. The asset finished mourning them a long time ago.
There is not a place left in this world where he belongs.
There’s a park in the heart of the city. He sits there on a bench for hours. Night falls. A police officer comes by and tells him he has to move, and he replies, “I’m a veteran.” He doesn’t know why he said it.
The officer’s mouth twists, and he says, “I’m sorry, son, you can’t sleep here tonight.”
“Then where am I supposed to go?”
The address scrawled on the back of a fast food receipt leads him to a homeless shelter four blocks from where he grew up. He walks to it. He walks past it. He keeps walking. The night thickens, and the streets thin. People cross the street to avoid him.
He walks until the streets tint grey. The layers of darkness strip back. Birds sing, like harbingers of dawn. As the first slivers of light slice through the gaps in the skyline, he sits back down on the bench he’d left ten hours ago. That’s when the pain starts—first in his feet, then his shins, his knees, his thighs, his back, his shoulders, his neck, his head, and arcing down through his one good arm, weariness pooling in the tips of his fingers. Some kind of hurts don’t start until the hurting is done. There’s something to be said for unending despair. You keep it going long enough, you never have to know you’re despairing.
But God, is he glad to be sitting right now.
Washington, at least, is as he remembers it. It’s where he began this time around. There’s still bits of the city smoldering from the crash of the Helicarriers, but scaffolding covers the worst of it. The monuments stand. The streets still flow. He passes the former headquarters of SHIELD, fenced off, guarded, and empty. The world ended for more people than just him.
The Captain America exhibit is still running. He doesn’t visit it again. This, at least, he knows—he doesn’t want anyone telling him who he is. Even if he’s not sure himself. Metaphors and mirrors exhaust him these days. He’ll be blunt. He’s not the asset, he knows that. He’s not the monster either. He’s not the Winter Soldier. He’s not Bucky Barnes.
He’s been so many things. And now he’s tired. Whatever else he is, he’s tired.
James. He’d been called James once. It doesn’t fit perfectly, but it fits enough for now, and he is so tired. He’s worn identities that fit him worse. He’s been so many things. This, at least, he knows, part two—if he needs to change again, he can change again. That’s what things do. Tragedy changes you. It’s not tragic you changed. He knew a woman once who tried on new lives like new coats. She kissed him in the dead of winter with a heat his keepers had never been able to freeze out of him. “Who are you,” he had asked, and she replied, “Whoever I need to be to keep going,” and she’d kissed him again, and life hurt less for the seconds her lips were against his.
He’d forgotten that. He remembered now.
He can be James.
The man who hesitates in the doorway before he comes in, James faintly remembers him. Wings. James had torn them off. Man looks like he remembers that too. He drags up a chair and sits across from James in the empty meeting hall. “Hey man,” he says. “You here for the group session?”
James doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know why he’s here, and it’s been a long time since he spoke with anyone but monsters.
“That’s cool, that’s cool,” the man says gently, speaking to a scared and dangerous animal. “You’re a little early, that’s all. But you’re a veteran. You’re welcome here. You wanna help me set up the chairs?”
James helps Sam set up the chairs.
“I’m going to call Steve, if that’s alright with you,” Sam says as they lay out the snack table.
James doesn’t say anything, but Sam looks sideways at him until he gets a response so James jerks his shoulder. Yes. Maybe. It could be. Sam doesn't trust it.
“Steve will be happy just knowing you’re alive. If you’re not ready to be found,” Sam says, “you don’t need to be found.”
It’s not anger James feels at that, not the clear burn of righteousness or fury. It’s the peevish sting of annoyance, a bug bite where the slap to kill the biter hurts more than the bite. Don’t ask him what he wants. Choose. Don’t make him admit to wanting what he wants. Just give it to him. Force it on him. There’s danger in desire. There’s danger in fear as well, but James’s been afraid for so long that it’s welded to his skin. Desire—
There’s a blade in his hand and it’s aimed at another man’s throat. But the other man has a familiar face, and so the asset wavers, just a moment, it’s the blue in the stranger’s eyes, and that moment is long enough because the stranger has him by the wrist now, and he’s turning the blade until the tip presses against the asset’s thigh and together they stab him.
This is desire.
“Don’t worry, it’s cool, just give us a minute,” Sam says, his words muffled and closer than Bucky would have expected. And then he realizes that the ground is hard beneath his knees, and Sam’s arms are warm around his body. James touches his face. It’s dry.
“Give us a minute,” Sam tells the person in the doorway, waiting for the meeting to start. Sam doesn’t let him go. James doesn’t move away. He has no strength these days, none, and he uses every bit of it to tip his head forward. He could have killed a hundred men with the effort it takes to rest the weight of his skull on Sam’s shoulder.
They still don’t move.
“I don’t know what I want.”
James pretends that he didn’t say it. He pretends Sam didn’t hear it. “I hear you, man, I hear you,” Sam says. “That’s alright. You don’t have to know.”
James doesn’t need the words. He’s so heavy right now that he’s amazed Sam can hold him up. His body should be a bloody smear under James’s weight.
“I got you, Bucky,” Sam says. “You can come home now.”
His face buried in the hollow of Sam’s neck, his good arm clinging to Sam’s chest. His world is vapor, and Sam is rock. “I can’t come home. I’m not him. I’ve remembered everything I can remember. I’m not him anymore.”
Sam’s arms tighten. “You can still come home.”
I’m with you. Till the end of the line.
And James knows he’s here. Sam didn’t have to call him. James didn’t have to either. He came for the meeting. He came to see Sam. Or he came because he knew. He just knew. The same way James knows now that Steve is standing in the doorway without having to look at him. Without Steve having to say a word. The air is different now.
Sam shifts. Sam sees Steve now. And for a moment, Sam starts to curl around James, shielding him with his body.
“Thank you,” James says, and means it with an intensity that surprises him, but he stands and says, “It’s okay.”
Steve looks at him with love in his eyes. And Bucky looks back.