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These are the sounds of his infancy.
The crackles, whines, and squawks of the wireless. The clatter of feet on the central staircase of his apartment building. The vroom-vroom of his cradle's rockers against the floor boards.
And always, always, like a heartbeat, the thumps and creaks of the spinning wheel.
His gran is forever on the upright chair with the narrow backboard in the corner of the living room. He rarely sees her leave it, and when she does and the wheel falls silent, it seems unnatural, like the room is holding its breath until the wheel turns again.
At first, it's the movement that catches his attention. It's natural that this is the case. The rhythmic pedalling, the spokes of the wheel in constant rotation, the gradual filling of the bobbin with newly spun singles of yarn – all of the elements fascinate his infant mind. He doesn't need a mobile or a rattle to amuse him when the wheel is in motion. The mesmeric dance of wheel, pedal, and flyer are enough.
By the time he's old enough to toddle about unassisted and voice his simple wants, it's not the machine itself that holds his gaze. It's the glimmering sparks that flow from his gran's clever fingertips into the fibre. They make something inside him grow warm and tingle when he's close enough.
“What are you looking at, my lad?” she asks one day. She draws her arm back and a new thread of light travels down the twist, only to be draw up through the orifice to lie, quiescent, on the bobbin.
“The colours,” he answers.
“Tis brown, and grey, and white,” his gran says, and indeed, the fleece in the sack at her feet that she's tugging handfuls out of is those colours.
“No, the blue,” he says, letting a fingertip drift to point at the spot where the glow begins, but not touching. He knows not to touch.
His gran hums and stops, wrapping the leading end around a knob of the upright to keep the twist in. She pulls out a new handful of fleece, sticky and pungent with lanolin, dappled with little impurities of mud and the occasional burr. Her comb is a table fork, too bent and old fashioned for company, but perfect for fluffing out the matted, kinky clumps of hair into clouds. It feels clumsy in his chubby hand.
“You'll comb for me,” she says.
His parents stiffen when they return from work and see him seated on his cushion at his gran's feet, a little pile of fluffy fibre in his lap like a mountain. He's a little dizzy but he's happy, too, and so proud of himself. The warmth inside him is like a lamp, lighting his whole body to his fingertips.
“Jamie's got the gift,” his gran says matter-of-factly. “I'll be teaching him, now.”
His da bristles further, his face darkening. His da's fist curls tight, and Jamie knows what that means. He sits very, very still. “Woman's work. It ain't right for a man,” his da spits.
“You shut up about it,” his gran reproves. “My uncle Liam had the strongest gift in the whole county. His nets never broke, never frayed, caught more fish than anyone else's. His work was in such demand that it paid for the dowries of every one of his sisters, and then those of their daughters, in turn. You think Winnie could have married a rake like you without Liam's money, come down to her through me? You don't know a thing about being a man, and you've never so much as sewn on a button. An untutored gift's a dangerous thing. I'm teaching him.”
He watches the confrontation with wide eyes. His father's lips tighten, as though he's holding back words, but he turns away, silent.
His gran nods. “The lad's tired, Winnie. Put him to bed.”
The bed is warm and pillowy. His little sister, long a-bed, sighs in her sleep. If there is further argument, he doesn't hear it, hastened into sleep by the resumption of the wheel's gentle sounds.
His da never raises the question again, never tries to forbid him helping his gran, but he stays out longer, comes home drunker. His ma gets thinner and sadder.
For the longest time, all he does is comb out the fleeces people bring his gran. He never sees her pay for them. They just arrive in the hands of people who want something. Sometimes the fibre is as coarse as sacking, only fit for carpeting or upholstery. Other times it is rough but softens out with soap and epsom salts, when the plied yarn is washed to set the twist. Mostly it is wool fit for wearing that will be knit or woven or crocheted into something someone can put on their body. That is what Gran likes best, he knows.
Once, there is a fleece with a pearly lustre so soft he can barely feel it with his fingertips when he touches it. His gran spins that one so finely the finished yarn is no thicker than sewing thread.
“A wedding-ring shawl,” she sighs happily when she ties up the final skein. “So delicate it can pass through the ring of the bride. Such a lovely thing to make for someone.”
He's the shadow at her side, combing, always combing, until he's fast and sure and the muscles in his forearms bulge with every pull of the fork through the staple. The glow in his chest is a banked fire that flares a little brighter with each stroke.
The day he begins school, she gives him an odd spinning top, one with a long stem like a pencil.
“It's a spindle,” she says. “It's not much, but you'll make better yourself when you get older. The best tools are those you build yourself, or give a little piece of yourself to. You'll get my wheel in time. Uncle Liam made every bit of it, except the forged metal. But that's for later. For now...”
There's a length of his gran's yarn attached to the spindle already, which she loops around the whorl and holds on to securely. With a quick twist of the stem, she sets it to spinning quickly in place, then feeds some of his combed fibre to the leading yarn. It catches quickly, and soon, she has several feet of brand new yarn trailing from her fingertips to the spindle, which has dropped down to hover above the floorboards. She snatches it up and wraps the yarn around the stem.
“You try,” she says.
He can't. The yarn breaks because he has spun it too finely, or with not enough twist. The spindle drops too low, hits the floorboards, and rolls across the room trailing its unfinished yarn. The spindle wobbles too much, spins too slowly, spins back the wrong way and unwinds all the twist, leaving him with unspun fibre. His fingers fumble the stem again and again, never getting the smooth, fast rotation his gran demonstrated, never spinning more than a few inches of lumpy yarn at a time.
He's incredibly disheartened.
“Practice,” his gran says pragmatically. “The first twenty years are the hardest.”
The Barnes family are good Catholics, but there's a distance between them and the rest of the congregation. By the time he's six, he finds it hard not to wriggle in his pew in discomfort whenever there's a sermon on the evils of witchcraft. It'd be easier to ignore, he's certain, if Father Matthew didn't stare down at his gran while he delivered it.
His gran never lowers her head in shame like he does – she just stares back.
He doesn't really understand the weight of his gift until the day of his First Communion. His gran has stitched every hem of his clothing, and he can feel the hum of her magic all around him. Now, she's holding up his brand new rosary and raising her scissors.
“No, don't!” he says, but it's too late. She's snipped the string and the beads are flowing from it into the bowl in her lap. Snip, snip, snip, and the beautiful thing is a pool of jet beads, scraps of string and a simple crucifix.
His tears spill over.
“No need for that,” she says brusquely. “Fetch your box.”
He knows there's no point arguing. Under the edge of his bed is an old apple crate that he keeps the things he's made inside. They're inexpert and often ugly, but he feels the same hum of power in them that he feels in his new clothing, so it feels right to keep them safe.
His gran picks through the oddments and scraps until she finds a length of yarn that's to her liking. She threads it through the large eye of a darning needle and sets to work. The needle slips through a bead, then a knot is tied. Beads and knots, beads and knots, in clusters, one after the other, until the final knot is firm. Rather than using her scissors, his gran bites the tails of yarn off close, then rubs the damp ends in to join with the length.
“It's small-minded folk who don't understand the breadth of God's bounty,” she says. “Take it.”
It's a rosary. It's his rosary. It glimmers between the beads with the magic of himself and his gran together. It's more right for him than a simple string of beads could ever be, blessed or not, and he knows it.
“It's a gift, the way we are. Like anything, it can be turned to evil, but just being isn't anything wrong. Now, pray for me. Show me you know how, properly.”
He kneels, right there on the hard floor, and murmurs the Latin he's been taught, the beads on their length of yarn slipping gently through his fingers, one by one.
His spindle is fairly neglected for a long while. He'll bring it out from time to time to show he's practising, but he struggles still to make it work the way he wants. Until, that is, he finds a motivation to get it to work in the form of a tiny, angry kid he rescues from getting turned into paste.
Meeting Steve is like something snaps neatly into place inside him. It's not magic, but still, it's like he was waiting all along for him. In Steve's dark blue eyes and the quirk of his bloody mouth, Bucky thinks maybe, Steve feels the same.
“I had 'em on the ropes,” Steve says thickly, his lip fat and split.
“Sure you did,” Bucky says, pulling Steve up to stand. He's shorter than Bucky's little sister, and Bucky knows right off that he'd be just as mean when he's steamed, so it's easier to agree to the patently ridiculous than risk having to fight over hurt pride.
They find a rain barrel to dunk Steve's face into so that all the blood won't upset his ma, then they sit on a stoop and talk until it's getting close to dark.
“See ya later,” Bucky says.
“Tomorrow,” Steve says, and the next day, they walk to school together.
“Steve gets sick in the cold weather,” he says one day, sat at his grandmother's side.
“Hmmm,” his gran says, drawing her arm back. The spark that trails down from her fingertips is violet. “Sounds like he could use something warm to wear.”
“Yeah,” he sighs.
“Well, don't just sit there. It's going to be hard work, and summer's almost over,” she says.
The spindle feels just as awkward as ever in his grasp, but this time, he doesn't put it away once he's spun a foot or two. He works at it until supper time. The stem is heavy and thick with yarn. It's a fraction of what he'll need, but it's a start.
After two weeks of constant work, he's spun enough and plied the singles together to make a scratchy but warm yarn, chunky and thick. Under his gran's watchful eye he washes it and hangs it to dry with weights pulling down.
“Here,” his gran says the next day. “You haven't made your own yet, so you can borrow these.”
In a case lie several pairs of fine knitting needles and crochet hooks of yellowish-white.
“What are they made from?” he asks, touching the slick surface with a fingertip.
“They're bone,” she says.
“I thought you said...” Bucky begins, pursing his lips.
“I said never to use whale bones or those from a butcher or knacker, or ivory, or tortoise shell, or green wood. Tools from those might do for people without the gift, but your tools must always be from fallen wood or freely given. Some might say there's power in an unwilling donor, but something taken without permission will always fight you. You might weave someone's undoing when you sought to guard them. There is always cruelty in slaughter, and always goodness in something freely given, as the bone for these was. You have nothing to fear from them.”
“Who gave it?” Bucky asks.
“That's something you'll learn when you're older. For now, choose. You'll know which ones,” she says, and he overcomes his hesitation to pick up a pair of long, straight pins with points at one end and carved knobs at the other.
“Good,” his gran says. “The hook might have been easier, but those will do. Firstly, though, they need to know you.”
His gran's tiny penknife is wickedly sharp, he knows. She holds it out to him, handle first.
“Choose a place that won't stop you working. Never cut your fingertips; they're your tools, you should never damage them if you can help it,” she tells him.
He thinks for a long moment and in the end selects the back of his left hand, a little way away from the visible veins. It stings, but not much, and the blood that wells up is just enough for him to dab on the knobs of both knitting needles with his right index fingertip. The blood sinks into the surface and vanishes, as though it had never been.
“Very good,” his gran says, squeezing his shoulder with her bony hand. “Now, we can begin.”
His eyes creak open reluctantly. His body refuses to move, otherwise. In his narrow field of vision, there is a neatly folded mound of fabric, a scarf that sparkles here and there with golden light. Sunlight, he'd thought while he spun and while he knitted, stitch by laborious stitch. Summer.
“Ah, you're back with us,” his gran says.
“I...” he manages, before the effort stops his words again. The fire in his chest is ashes. For a second he thinks it's gone forever, but then he feels it – the tiniest of sparks still alive and burning.
“You put too much in,” his gran says.
His brow furrows as he struggles to muster the words to convey the importance of what he made, of how much Steve needs everything Bucky had to give.
“You'll be weak for some time,” she says. “You'll be a-bed for days.”
“Why...”
“Didn't I warn you?” his gran asks. “Would you have listened? You know what it feels like, now. You know how much you can put in, before you tip yourself right into an invalid state. I couldn't have taught you that without you feeling it. You'll be better, bye-and-bye.”
She reaches out and squeezes his fingers tightly.
“It's good work, strong. I hope your friend knows the value of it.”
After the scarf, there is a hat, a pair of mittens, and a thick cabled gansey that takes him the better part of a year. He gets tired sometimes when he's been working for hours, but his gran is right. He's felt out the edge of his limits, and he knows when he must stop.
Steve grumbles that Bucky's trying to smother him by degrees under the weight of wool, but he wears it all and makes it through the next few winters with a few fevers and several bouts of bronchitis, but no pneumonia and no calls to the priest for last rites.
“Just don't knit me underwear,” Steve gripes.
“Now, there's an idea,” he says, and Steve socks him in the shoulder with his bony little fist.
The warmth he feels inside is more than just his magic. It flushes his cheeks with an unusual heat and leaves him slightly breathless.
Bucky receives his draft notice on a Tuesday. It's just luck that he's home a little early and opens the mailbox himself. Usually it'd be Steve, but Steve's actually got a job on commission, painting a new sign for the store on the corner, and he doesn't come in until after seven, flecked with colour and reeking of turpentine. By that time, Bucky's draft letter is carefully hidden in his box, the one Steve never touches because of what's inside – Bucky's tools, the ones he's made over the years, and his gran's. The latter he keeps carefully wrapped and only uses when he needs to. Steve's never asked, but his eyes slide away from them when Bucky opens the little case and pulls out a pair of needles or a hook, like he knows there's something otherworldly about them. Bucky's never tried to reassure him otherwise. It'd be a lie.
Instead of coming clean, Bucky tells Steve outright that he enlisted on his lunch break, casual, like it was on a whim.
The pain in Steve's eyes burns him, but it's nowhere near as bad as Bucky knows it'd be if Steve knew the truth – that Bucky was chosen by random selection for something Steve wants more than anything but can never get for trying.
He shivers through the medical, stripped to his skivvies in the bare room filled with chairs and bodies like his. It all goes fairly smoothly until they get down to the supplementary section – the questions that they rarely get different answers to but have to ask anyway, by rote.
“Any paranormal or enhanced abilities, trained or untrained, inherited or acquired?” the officer asks in a bored drone.
Bucky hesitates for too long a moment.
“Son?” he asks, his eyes suddenly sharp and boring into him.
“It's nothing,” Bucky attempts, but it's too late.
“It's obviously something, or you would have said no. I'd like to remind you it's a criminal offence to lie during your enlistment. So, do you have something to declare?” the man demands.
Bucky had never realised he didn't have a name for what he was until this moment in time. His gran had always called it the gift, the skill, the power. She never used a label and applied it to herself in the way that people do to keep the world neat, categorised.
The only words he knows are a slur, a bit of playground nastiness that still twists like a knife. He has to consciously force his mouth to shape them.
“I'm a stitch witch,” he says, his cheeks heating with old shame.
The officer's eyes flick to the woven cuff around Bucky's left wrist. A mosaic of colour softened to pastels over years of wear, it's glaringly out of place in this chilly sea of skin and underclothes. He'd expected to be asked to take it off, but until now, everyone's eyes had just slid over it, like it wasn't even there. Weaving isn't something he's done much of, but when his gran had passed, quietly and suddenly in her sleep, he'd built his own loom and shuttle and woven the cuff from the scraps of yarn in her basket. For such a simple frame and basic design, it had come close to draining him, and his mother had spent the days afterwards feeding him soup and tea and checking his temperature. At least he'd looked appropriately wan at the graveside, his external frailty matching his internal despair and grief.
He wonders, if he is asked to remove it now, whether they'll accept the simple fact that it doesn't come off, and that taking a pair of scissors to it would likely be unsafe to even seriously contemplate, let alone attempt.
“You're a textile and rigging technician, class to be determined upon assessment,” the officer says after a moment of thought, writing something down on the clipboard in his hand.
It's a clinical and dry title that fits uncomfortably, like a new pair of patent leather shoes. Nowhere in it is any indication of something other than the utterly mundane. The same label could be applied to a weaver or sailor with no spark of gift whatsoever. His gran's disapproving face looms large in his mind, and he has to focus to hold back an inappropriate burst of laughter.
Something must creep through into his expression, however, because the officer queries him sharply as to his thoughts.
“I guess I just don't see what use that could be to the Army,” Bucky says.
There's a softening around the officer's eyes, as though a memory has crept up on him without warning. He's middle-aged, maybe even old enough to have served in the Great War, the one that denied Steve and so many others their fathers.
“When your stitches are what's keeping a man from bleeding out into the mud, you'll understand. I just wish there was more of you boys to go around. You been taught how to use it?”
“Yes, sir,” Bucky says.
“Well, those men who serve with you are going to be the luckiest platoon at the front. Don't let it get to you; they'll realise just how fortunate they are fast enough,” he says with startling earnestness.
A moment later, it's covered up again with bluster, but as Bucky signs his name and his life away to the U.S. Army, he wonders if beneath the officer's uniform there's a latticed scar, testament to a wound that could, and maybe should, have killed.
The notes in his file must mean something, for all that there isn't a hint of magic in them to Bucky's eyes. Between his high marksmanship scores and his gift, he's Sergeant James Barnes by the time he's been through Basic and a handful of courses that range from medical training to parachuting and abseiling. It's almost as if anything to do with a rope or a knot or canvas has been crammed into his head by drill sergeants in the dim, murky pre-dawn light and the baking sun.
He's issued an official set of tools. Hooks, three sizes. Knitting needles, sewing needles, awl. A spindle. A tiny loom the size of a postcard with a shuttle scaled to match. It's all very utilitarian, basic. Soulless. The awl, hooks and needles are metal. The loom and spindle are plantation pine, chopped down with brutal efficiency for the war effort, green and growing until the axe and saw.
“Well?” asks the impatient supplies officer.
“They're fine,” Bucky replies, holding them like unexploded ordnance.
He knows he can't refuse them or say he'll just use his own. This is the military, where everything is official and rationed and rubber stamped by men who know absolutely nothing about the realities of a gift they can't weigh and measure with machines and science.
Though his first instinct is to bury the tools, like a stinking corpse, as far away from his bunk as possible, Bucky places them neatly in his footlocker, alongside his kit for cleaning his weapons and his boot polish. He shuts the lid with a finality. Though he may have no choice but to use them at some point in the future, he remembers what his gran told him again and again – that first and foremost, his most important tools are his fingertips, and if those are all he has, well, he'll just make do with them.
Any vain hope Bucky might have held that he might keep his gift under wraps are quashed the moment he joins his regiment.
“Barnes? Aren't you the stitch witch?” he is asked by the captain, a man his own age whose uniform is still as stiff and new as his own.
It helps that he's standing at parade rest, alongside dozens of other men. His body holds its form, his eyes staring straight ahead, chin held high. He thinks of his gran, upright and unashamed while the priest threatened her with hellfire.
“Yes, sir!” he answers, his voice at the required half-shout, firm and unbending.
“Huh,” the man says, and moves on down the line, only pausing to quell the flutter of startled comment amongst the ranks.
Somewhere between hell and damnation, he goes from being an outcast to being called upon. It's grudging at first – requests salted with fear and threats. Once they've faced mortar fire, vampires, and the reanimated corpses of their own men, though, the walls break down. One man asks for a charm to help his aim, another for a ward against fever and dysentery. Like a building flood, the men approach and ask, leaving him with little piles of offerings – cigarettes, pornography, coins – until Bucky's fingers twitch and twist in his sleep, knotting invisible thread into loops and braids that never end. Maybe it'd be different if he just made exactly what the men asked him for, but he can't help working in extras to guard against the million misfortunes a man in active combat is vulnerable to, any one of which could be deadly.
“Sit down,” his captain says, one day.
“Sir?” he asks.
“Sit, before you fall,” the captain says. There's a braided cord peeking out from under his uniform shirt, some of Bucky's best work with the materials available. If he only had a few handfuls of raw fleece, perhaps a basic spindle that didn't make his skin crawl, he could make one better. As it is, he's reduced to ravelling holed socks and working them together with waxed thread or string for strength. The weak pulse of power is almost enough to make him weep. A child could do better.
“But, sir,” he argues.
The firm, dirty hand of the captain bears down on his shoulder, folding him at the knees to come down on an upturned crate.
“You turned the eyes of two separate squadrons away from us, kept us hid until we could get back to our line. Don't tell me you didn't, because I won't believe you. You've been awake for over a day. Now rest. We're as safe as we can be, for the moment.”
When the captain seems sure he's not moving, he nods and walks away. A short while later, O'Malley appears, bearing something the Army claims is coffee in a tin cup and the chocolate rations from at least three men. O'Malley's as green as grass, enlisted on his birthday, and he speaks with the gentle lilt of Ireland, despite his U.S. citizenship. He looks at Bucky with an eager, almost worshipful gaze that itches and prickles, the patriotism that inspired his service not yet reduced to the bitter cynicism and dark humour the more seasoned soldiers, Bucky amongst them, have developed like a callus.
“Thanks, kid,” Bucky says, accepting the offering. He knows it's the only way he'll get any solitude.
His captain falls in the first barrage of blue light. It's a slaughter, a massacre, and over it all oozes the taint of magic twisted and corrupted. The weapons tear through men left and right, showing no discernment between men Bucky knows and has knotted charms for and those he hasn't. There's death screaming high and grinding between his back teeth, and the moment he realises he's the highest ranking officer left alive, he orders the rest to surrender.
They're stripped of their weapons and their armour and herded into the hills. His tools are taken from him and thrown into the fire, but that's okay. They're inert U.S. Army issue shit that he never used anyway. The cuff around his wrist blisters the fingers of the man who tries to steal it, which earns him a beating. Somehow in the petty flurry of blows and curses, they forget to cut it from his arm, so it stays, as does his rosary, safe in his pocket.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now, he thinks, as the world goes grey and distant.
Where the trenches were fire and blood, the factory is a satanic mill that grinds them all down to skeletal, shuffling drones. The guards work out they can't take his cuff or his rosary, but they make short work of stripping him of his excess clothing and bootlaces. It doesn't stop the men in his cage ravelling their own clothing and slipping the scanty strands to him to twist into cord with his bare fingers.
He used to pray while he worked, under his breath. Now, his shapeless need permeates the fibres.
When the guards catch him, they beat him. He gets beaten regularly. His ribs grate painfully against each other when he breathes, and he puts the pain into his work too.
They only leave his hands alone because without them, he'd be useless. They kill good men every day through overwork. They cross themselves as he passes, but his fingers remain intact.
It's no secret that the men the doctor chooses to take away never return, so a lot of the charms he twists he charges with energy to avert the eye, to make the wearer less likely to be taken, to be unnoticeable. Not invisible, not protected, but it's the best he can do.
It's only when they take him that he realises he never made one for himself.
The world is too sharp, too bright, too hot. The drugs burn away his self until he's a mote floating in a beam of light. Someone, somewhere is muttering words, but it's not important. The straps holding him down are hemp and cotton, harvested by farmers deadened to the gift, and set with buckles of cheap alloy. The wool and canvas in his clothing was made by machines, no hands touching it but those of factory seamstresses and supply officers until it was handed to him. His uniform reeks of sweat and filth now, is damaged in a dozen places, but the threads sing to him, soothing and familiar. He's never felt something that had no magic in its making as alive before, but it unmistakably is. There's nothing in its weave that can help him, but it buoys him up like a hammock, holding him above the darkness.
Steve...he thinks, the word-shapes dropping into that darkness like stones into a well. Steve, I don't think I'm gonna make it. I'm sorry.
Zola's face intrudes into his field of vision. Zola's words sound like a garbled mess, but his brain untangles the threads and determines that no one else has survived for so long. Maybe it's something to do with his gift. Further experimentation is necessary.
I'm coming for you, Steve says, right in Bucky's ear.
Just hold on a little longer, his gran says, her warm hand around his wrist like a brand.
“Let us begin,” says Zola.
His eyes are lying to him. Someone is there, someone who tears the straps from his body (he screams as though his skin has been flayed from him), someone hiding behind the mask of Steve's face.
“Bucky!” Steve cries, his huge hands feeling up and down Bucky's arms for a wound.
There's a gentle throb above Steve's heart, a pulse of Bucky's magic he's carried on his body since he was fifteen, since Bucky was head-over-heels and stupid, since he swallowed down the fear threatening to choke him and risked...
“Steve,” he says, his lips thick and clumsy. “Found me.”
Steve uses those massive arms to lift him up. He's like a rag doll, loose and floppy. His hand slaps weakly over where the scapular rests beneath clothing and bounces back off Steve's balloon chest. The Black Scapular of Help of the Sick. It seems redundant, now. Maybe he should make Steve the Blue and Black Scapular of St Michael the Archangel, like he'd always thought he would if Steve hadn't been perpetually sickening for something.
“I found you,” Steve agrees. “It led me right to you.”
He kisses Bucky's forehead in fervent haste before they have to run for their lives.
The walk back to camp is slow, painful, and awkward. They're injured and malnourished, have no food, medical supplies, or water, and a catalogue of injuries that thin their ranks a little more each day. Bucky does what he can to patch folks up, but even with magic, sewing thread and a steel needle can't save a guy with half his blood gone, or one whose body is burning up like a torch with infection.
One man they just can't wake at dawn. There isn't a mark on him, but he's dead, just as sure as if he'd been shot where he lay. He's wearing a tattered twist of cord around his wrist Bucky had made.
Steve's the only one of them who isn't swaying on his feet, but even he looks tired, his eyes more sad and hollow with each loss. Bucky can't stop staring at him – the height, the muscle, the way Steve's strong features just fit his new face the way they never quite did in his old one. What was done to him, Bucky just can't tell. If it was magic, it isn't a kind that he can feel, and Steve himself hasn't become magic from it. Aside from the scapular, he feels just as he always has done – warm, alive, and inert to the power – just in a larger package.
Steve takes a handful of men of different nationalities, ethnicities, and specialities and, with the skill of a stitch witch himself, spins all those different fibres together to make a strong, durable rope that he hangs on the belt of that ridiculous uniform. His core squad is seven once you add in Agent Carter, who isn't out with them every mission but is far more involved in active combat than any woman outside of the French Resistance. The brass hate her addition so much that they don't even kick up a stink the way they did with Jones and Morita – they just ignore her, so long as she's omitted from the official reports.
From time to time they need a bigger crew, and with the SSR's support they pull the best guys they knew from Azzano to bulk out their numbers. They burn through Hydra like a righteous fire. They get in and get out and protect their own.
It works. Until it doesn't.
O'Malley's eyes are bright and black with pain from a gutshot. They're pinned down by regular fire, and even if they weren't, they're too far from the medics to make any kind of difference. He's dying by degrees, without even the dignity of a cot and a compress on his brow.
“Sarge,” he murmurs. “Sarge, you gotta listen.”
“I'm here,” Bucky says, because he can't change the kid's fate, but he can listen.
“Always knew there was a reason, us getting thrown together,” O'Malley says. “I know, now. It's right. I'm a sacrifice.”
“Don't say that,” he pleads, but the kid cuts him off.
“Listen. I gotta get this out. Your great uncle, he saved my grandda. He was a sailor, caught his arm in a pulley. Nothing they could do. Liam was there. Used his kerchief as a tourniquet. It stopped...the bleeding. Stopped it like magic. Held grandda's blood inside him until they got him to the surgeon. Seventeen years old. Never be a sailor after that, but he had his life. And because he lived, then there was me, and my sisters.” O'Malley hissed and writhed with the pain, the blood-smell thick and metallic, like pennies. “He gave Liam his arm.”
“What?” Bucky blurts.
“What they couldn't mend, they had to take off. And he owed Liam his life. So what they took, Liam used to make his tools. A gift, freely given. I remember the rules. And now, I'm offering you the same deal.”
Bucky's gut churns, thinking of the slender yellow-white knitting needles and hooks in their case. Of choosing the pair that called to him to knit that first scarf for Steve. Of the slick, smooth texture of the bone between his fingertips, the bone from this young kid's grandfather, freely given.
“No,” Bucky says, but O'Malley won't listen.
“I'm for it, I know that, Sarge. And you need powerful tools to help all the boys, to keep them safe. You take what you need from me, you hear? Captain, sir, listen, please, I want this. I offer this, my body. It is a gift, for Barnes to use as best he can.”
“I hear you,” Steve says.
“The rosary,” O'Malley asks. When Bucky reaches for O'Malley's pocket, O'Malley grabs his hand. “Not mine, yours.”
“Damn you,” Bucky chokes.
“Your rosary, swear on it,” he insists. “Swear you will do as I ask.”
The yarn pulses with light as Bucky swears, and O'Malley's breath catches at the sight of it, so close to crossing over that the magic is as alive to his eyes as it is to Bucky's every day.
“Thank you, thank you,” he sighs, his tortured body going limp with relief.
Bucky holds the crucifix up to O'Malley's lips for him to kiss.
Then he draws his sidearm and shoots O'Malley in the head.
He manages to turn his face away from the corpse before he is violently sick.
He extracts the bones he wants in a kind of daze, peeling back flesh and exposing the white within. There isn't a pot big enough in their packs to boil them. They have to trek many miles before they find an abandoned farm with an intact copper washtub that somehow survived the meticulous scouring of the country for scrap metal for munitions. The scent is both nauseating and appetising, too like food for their bellies to ignore, too distasteful for their brains to contemplate eating. Boiled clean and dried, then soaked in several rations of precious gasoline and dried again, the bones are clean, white and ready to be carved.
“We can't stay still for much longer,” Steve says, anxiously watching the horizon.
“Well, then you might have to carry me,” Bucky says, grimly. “I'll have enough power to carve and sand without stopping, but it will drain me completely. I won't be able to move when I'm done.”
“I can carry you,” Steve says with fierce certainty.
“Then I'd better get started,” Bucky says with a grim smile.
The knitting needles are first – simple lengths of bone cut and shaped into pairs of identical length and diameter. The awl and sewing needles are next – tiny, delicate work that requires the utmost concentration. The spindle he saves for last, somehow knowing instinctively, that it will require the bulk of his time and the absolute limits of his skill.
The whorl is shaped from the fattest point of the joint, the stem from the smoothest, straightest section of the thigh bone. The balance must be perfect; utterly perfect, the stem free of burr or splinter. Though the aim is utility and practicality, he finds his hands carving an intricate knotwork around the lip of the whorl, knotwork he stains with his own blood until it stands out, dark crimson against the white.
“I need, I need, something, something to spin,” he murmurs, reaching up and back without looking. Someone places a wad of surgical cotton and a loose scrap of thread from a fraying hem in his hand. The thread is feathered but it holds firm when he loops it around the spindle, catches hold of the fluffed-out cotton when he twists the stem to spinning in a perfect, stable rotation above the dirt floor. He adds more and more fibre until it's all used up, until he's caught the spindle and wrapped the new yarn around the length of the stem, just like his gran had taught him.
“I think I'm done,” he mumbles, and strong hands catch him as the floor rises up to meet him.
He wakes up two days later in a forest, crows wheeling above him. At his side, wrapped carefully in a large square of silk are the tools he made. They're white to most anybody else, he knows, but to his sight they're swirling with a rainbow of colours like a slick of oil on water. The staining of the knotwork has stayed, which worries him until he finds a small scab to pick to dab a fingerprint of blood against the stem and it vanishes completely.
The power of the tools almost frightens him. He'd be scared to touch them if they didn't feel so right in his hands, so welcoming, so willing to be used. O'Malley's gift had been a true one, a priceless treasure that he must use to save lives and prevent further bloodshed, no matter how grim its origins.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” Steve says, coming into view. Worried creases on his forehead smooth out when Bucky says, “hey” in return.
“We weren't sure what to do with 'em, so we just did what Jones says his aunt does with her voodoo things,” Steve adds tentatively, like he might have screwed up something glowing with potent power by breathing on it wrong.
“It's good, you did good,” Bucky assures him, stretching out a limp hand to pat Steve's arm. Steve catches Bucky's hand instead and wraps it between his.
“So did you,” he says with a proud smile.
Maybe it's the very power of the tools and his skill at wielding them that draws Hydra to them. Perhaps they'd just been watched all along. It would be foolish to assume that Hydra had no magic workers of its own, and they'd had more than enough time to taste his power while he was captive. The right practitioner can twist a seeking charm that acts like a compass and leads them right to a person. All it'd take would be a few hairs, a drop of blood or semen, spit. Work it into a square of cloth or a piece of yarn and will it to guide you true.
However it happens, it takes them all by surprise. A small group, probably shrouded in notice-me-nots, surrounds their camp. There's a man for each of them, and there isn't a shot fired, just a flutter of silk in each of their faces and then...
...and then...
...and then he wakes on his back in the last of the winter snow.
“Interesting,” Zola says. “Again, your biology confounds me.”
“Magic,” he whispers through lips almost numb with exhaustion.
“Science,” Zola sneers. “A science I shall one day master. But for now, with the power of the Cosmic Cube, you and your little band shall no longer bother my master and his plans. Perhaps when the war is over, you shall serve me again. I have some experiments that I wish to continue.”
Zola's smile is cruel. He walks away, and there is no way Bucky can move to stop him. It takes half an hour before he can push himself to roll over, to see what is left of his friends.
They're not there.
In crumpled piles, the uniforms scatter the clearing, empty of men.
“No!” Bucky shouts, his voice weak.
The noise stirs six balls of feathers into squawking alarm. Swans. Six swans, flapping their wings wide and trumpeting into the late afternoon sun.
He's horrified, alone and impotent. He pushes himself to sitting and just stares. A swan pecks at his bootlace to see if it's edible.
“This isn't real,” he whispers. “It can't be.”
He sits and he shivers, helpless and lost for what to do. Despite their appearance, the swans don't seem to fear him. They don't leave. They waddle about, preen and squabble, peck at grass and bugs, but they don't fly away.
Eventually, the sun slips beneath the horizon, and he feels his magic welling up inside him, unbidden.
“No, no, no,” he murmurs frantically as feathers sprout along his arms.
“Don't fight,” Steve says.
“Steve!” he cries.
Steve's body is still swanlike, but his feathers are retreating, his features returning. A dark knot of feathers on his breastbone marks where his scapular will sit, guarding Steve's heart. He never had time to replace it like he'd planned, and now, it seems he never will.
“Just let it happen,” Steve says. “It'll be okay.”
Bucky can't help fighting it, though, and the transformation is slow, painful. By the time it's finished, the other men are all redressed in their uniforms and have begun setting a fire against the sharp cold.
“There,” Steve says, one hand smoothing down Bucky's feathers.
Bucky hisses, and Steve chuckles.
Steve folds Bucky's clothing neatly and sets it on top of his pack to keep it dry. Well, drier. They're never completely dry out here.
“So, you're the only one who can save us,” Steve says casually, breaking open a ration kit and poking through it for something a bird can eat.
“What?” Bucky blurts, but it comes out as a weird honking sound.
In front of him lie his tools, oily-rainbow and thudding with banked power. To his side is a freshly gathered bushel of spring's first young nettles. His hands sting now, but by midday, they'll be too swollen to bend his fingers to twist the spindle. That's when he'll switch to knitting, though that's a torture all its own. At nightfall, he'll pack away his work and let the magic flood him. The one benefit of the change is that his injuries are wiped away. Every morning, he begins with smooth, unmarked hands.
He supposes that they're technically AWOL, though he'd make an argument for them being POWs. He imagines the face of his commanding officers.
Well, sirs, you see, these swans are my squad. They just look like birds. Oh, and I'm making nettle shirts to save them. I'm not allowed to talk at all while I do it, or even cry out in pain. That's why I've been living in a cave rather than doing my fucking job.
Steve had known the solution the moment the curse had fallen. He hadn't known where the information had come from, but the little Bucky knows of curses, it's something about the natural balance of the world. The curse and the cure growing together, like the dock leaves he picks by the handful to soothe his skin, growing side-by-side with the cruel nettles he needs. His gran had only spoken of curses sparingly, and mostly to warn him against using them himself.
“They always come back against the one who lays them,” she'd said. “So trust God to right your wrongs, and never use your gift for harm.”
He'd been true to that, even in war.
It's infuriating not knowing what's happening with the fight while he's stuck here. For all he knows, Hydra's taken Europe and the United States is next. He hides from scouts and planes, but he takes heart that sometimes the engines he hears belong to the Allies.
Steve, he thinks. Steve.
He takes another handful of nettles and grits his teeth against the burn.
The shirts take shape slowly.
They don't have to fit, Steve explains. They didn't make us wear the silk ones. The shape is just suggestive of the thing, somehow.
It doesn't really make sense to Bucky, either, but it feels right.
Though they don't have to be made-to-measure, neither can they be sized for an infant. They're for men, not children, and it's important that the size dimensions reflect that. Bucky knows this, deep in his bones. So his tortured hands spin and knit the brutal fibre into garments coarser than sacking.
Don't forget yourself, Steve says suddenly, one day, and Bucky is startled to discover that he had forgotten. He fluffs his feathers and lets them settle back into place.
Winter is coming, Steve says later, some anxiety in his voice.
There's a pile of five shirts in the corner, and fibre spun for the front of another. Though he's gotten more practised at what he's doing, the late summer nettles are tougher than the tender spring stems he'd begun with. He works twice as hard for half the progress.
He thought he had only one shirt left to make before the seasons turned to chill and snow, but he'd forgotten himself.
What will happen if he saves the others but not himself? Will he get another chance next spring, or will breaking the curse only partway doom him to this life forever?
So be it, he decides. If that's the only way, then, so be it.
The sun is sinking into the west like a stone on the last day of summer. The afternoon is already chill in this high, lonely place. Steve and the others have become more and more restless as the hours pass by. Bucky, on the other hand, feels calm and resigned. The six shirts for the others lie in a neat pile. His own is still hours from completion.
He's not going to finish.
If he had until midnight and his hands were uninjured, then maybe, maybe.
As it is, his fingers are puffed like sausages, the skin blistered, cracked, and abraded from the tough fibres. The sharp bite of his teeth into his lip distract him from them, help to remind him not to make a sound. The missing sleeve mocks him.
Steve pecks at his elbow.
I know, Bucky thinks. I'm sorry.
Steve pecks again, and Bucky feels tears well up. He stops working and places his hand on Steve's back, feeling the soft down of feather and the furnace of warmth Steve always throws out even through the fierce pain.
There's a shift within him, a change. It's time.
At the first subtle shimmer of magic over his friends, he picks up the shirts he's so painstakingly crafted over the long days. His arms fling wide, and without him even trying to be precise, each shirt covers a swan. The resulting flash of power is like the pressure wave from an explosion.
Again, he's knocked flat on the cold ground.
A single snowflake from the slate-grey sky lands on his cheek, and then, everything is whisked away.
It's late in the year, late enough to go south. He should be joining all the others, moving away to warmer climes, to feed and breed and fight. He instinctively knows which way to go, so he spreads his wings and flies.
Somewhere below him, there's a shout. A human is running after him, throwing something over him, something that weighs him down, making his body unwieldy and heavy. It grows large, his right wing sheds its feathers, and he drops like a stone, down over the edge of the cliff.
His sole remaining wing flutters uselessly as he plummets. Steve is fast fading to a speck above him, one hand straining into empty air. He opens his mouth to scream.
“We amputated it,” someone is saying. “It was broken in seven places; too many.”
“Good, good,” another agrees. “We can make it much more useful if we... shall we say, begin again? It has skills and power that it can use, if we but give it the right tools.”
He looks down to where his body is incomplete.
Your fingertips are your best tools, don't damage them, a whisper in his mind says, like a buzzing insect.
His tools are damaged. He has violated his body.
“I need to be complete. My tools. Where...?”
His voice is rough and unfamiliar. The men nearby are blinking at him as if he has done something astonishing and strange.
“The Asset will be supplied with what it needs,” a man says decisively.
That's good, he thinks. He is relieved.
A man is tied to a table. He is gagged and his eyes are bright and aware.
Someone hands him a sharp knife.
“This one has been supplied to you. It will be sufficient?”
He looks down at the body. Straight, strong limbs. Beneath the skin and flesh, he knows, are bones, long, white and bloody.
“Yes,” he agrees.
“The doctor says it must remain alive. Understand?”
The guard's fingertips press hard into the flesh of his remaining arm, reinforcing the order.
“Understood,” he says, then he begins.
It takes a long time to remove what he needs. Every time the body on the table goes quiet, he is asked to step back while the guards throw water over it to revive it. By the end everything in the room is soaked in watery pink.
He boils the bones and treats them with the chemicals that are supplied to him. Then, he begins to carve.
When he has finished, he has a square pocket loom and shuttle, an awl, a Turkish spindle with a cross shaped whorl and a set of crochet hooks in a range of sizes with edges sharp enough to cut yarn or draw blood. When he touches them, he hears screaming in his head. He doesn't like to touch them.
“Very, very good,” the doctor says, rubbing his hands together.
“No,” he says. There is something very wrong with the things he has made.
“You told me you want to be complete,” the doctor says.
“Yes,” he agrees.
“And so you shall,” the doctor says. “With my plans, and these tools, you will be complete again.”
That's what I want, isn't it? He hesitates.
“You will do this, Soldat,” another man says. “Are you ready to comply?”
He glances at the plans. The spindle is needed first, then the loom. It will be delicate, difficult work. It will require every bit of his skill, and a great deal of modification to adapt that skill to compensate for his missing limb. It is necessary; he has been told this over and over. It is the only way.
“I am ready to comply,” he says, and somewhere, someone is weeping.
His arm is a metal part of him, organic and inorganic, deadly and malevolent and pulsing with power. Fighting with it is both the hardest thing he does and as easy as breathing. When it is damaged, he is the only one who can mend it. He thinks this is why he is allowed to remain out of cryofreeze this time.
The man on the bridge damaged it.
The technician who tried to tinker with it has been taken away. Though the guards bristled at his outburst, he was not disciplined. He was simply allowed to remove his tools from their vault drawer and work to correct the damage. They try to slip and buck in his hands as they always do, but he is used to the capricious, dangerous nature of them and compensates.
It shouldn't be like this, someone murmurs as he tucks them away. His fingers are blistered.
Visions flicker behind his eyes – knitting needles in a case, humming with power, a spinning wheel creaking and turning, a thin boy smothered in lumpy, thick-spun knitwear that glinted golden...
The man on the bridge had felt familiar. Something under his clothes, on his chest, had seemed to reach out for him. Magic, but not an attack.
A welcome.
He's stunned back into awareness by a solid backhand across the face.
“The man on the bridge... I knew him,” he says when the man who hit him stops talking.
The chair takes that away from him again.
The man on the bridge is there. He remembers him, and his words hit like bullets, tearing little holes and making him bleed out everywhere.
Bucky, the man says.
For an horrific moment, his whole body shakes in revulsion. What has he done? What has he become? What... The screaming in his head rises to a tortured shriek of metal, and he fights and fights and fights because that's all he knows how to do.
That's all...
That's...
There's blood on Steve's face, blood glinting on his metal knuckles, the knuckles of the abomination grafted to his flesh and he...
and he...
and...
The side of the carrier falls away and Steve is fading fast to a speck below him, punching a hole in the water below.
Bucky lets go of the girder and spreads his arms like wings as he follows.
He sleeps rough. He stays away from cameras. He eats at soup kitchens and steals when he has to, but never from people who look like they can't afford it.
His arm seethes and grinds and clicks, a monstrous thing, an accusation, a sin he can never erase.
He looks beneath the surface at the intricate knotwork of wire and bloodied fibre twisted into Gordian complexity with hooks and fingers and magic. The mechanics of a limb ruthlessly synthesised by taking the living bones from a man and making tools from them, tools forged with magic and science, then weaving the artifice of life.
He looks at the chrome and remembers the blood, remembers the broad clean white of feathers, remembers a faded, woven cuff that sang and burned the hands of those who would harm him.
He remembers Steve.
The exhibition is full of things that are wrong. He doesn't know what the right things are, not yet, just that there are sour notes here and there that make him twitch and flinch. Lies. Omissions. Political spin to pretty up a dirty, hard mission that left them all shaking and sleepless for days. And...
...and...
There's a face. It's his face. He knows this from staring at it in public restrooms and in brushed aluminium and steel on buses and trains.
But it's not the face he sees, not for more than a moment. It's not the flickering of old film reels of that face side by side with Steve's.
It's the box.
It's a battered old ammunition case. Behind a cube of perspex on a melamine plinth it hums with power, and the things inside are his.
He breaks in after hours, tricking the security systems with ease. He dodges the elderly guard and ghosts into the room until he's standing close enough for his breath to fog the plastic to translucence.
“O'Malley,” he murmurs under his breath.
A pair of knitting needles. An awl. A tiny darning needle. (There used to be three, he remembers.) A spindle. He takes them all. Wraps them in a square silk kerchief he found in a charity store, stained, but old enough to have had hands involved in the making of it rather than just machines. The box, he leaves.
He nestles the small bundle down under his clothing. It feels like coming home.
He has no home, of course, not truly. But he has a name, he has his freedom, and he has a set of tools that are sending warm waves of welcome radiating out through his body, soothing the small hurts, easing his anxiety.
Bucky takes a deep breath and steps out into the future.
These are the sounds of his present.
The whines, clicks and whirs of the arm.
The bellows in-and-out of his breath, the thud of his heart, the whisper of his skin and clothing.
The hum of the spindle catching the fibres. The clack of a tiny loom, constructed from fallen wood, carefully cured and carved. The scratch of yarn against itself as his needle weaves in and out, inaudible to others, but a pleasant counterpoint to the other gentle noises as he anchors the final strand, bites it off close and rubs it in to join it to the whole.
A sigh of contentment escaping his lips, not smiling, but almost, as he looks down at his work: a scapular of St Michael the Archangel.
