He always wakes up with vertigo.
He doesn't know why. Maybe it's a product of disorientation, confusion so brain-deep it skews his sense of gravity as much as his sense of everything else around him. Maybe it's a product of his dreams, the nightmares spoken to more by the clammy sweat clinging to his skin than by any assistance from his shattered-useless memory. He doesn't know, can't hold onto the thought longer enough to really be curious; there's just a flicker of familiarity, recognition of the sensation stored safely in his body instead of his brain, and then a voice is saying "Bucky," soft and gentle and startlingly near, and when he twists over it's with the jerky adrenaline of a possible fight.
Blond hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, a mouth soft on a smile that doesn't make it to touch the steady gaze. His head checks the features, catalogues the possibility of a threat; there's strength there, he can see it in the arms visible under the line of a t-shirt, but no immediacy to the potential threat. An arm is hovering over him, a hand lifted like it's just come away from contact with his hip; from how much warmer he feels across his bare stomach, it was probably pressed around him.
"You're awake." The smile widens, shifts out of pure comfort into something halfway to happiness. "You were having a nightmare again. I wasn't sure if I should wake you."
He can feel his forehead crease, an expression of confusion he struggles to fit to words. He can understand the sounds he's hearing - English, he thinks - but when he stretches out for meaning on his own tongue everything collapses in on itself, turns into sound either meaningless or in a language he lacks a framework for.
"Bucky." The smile is fading out again, a line of worry building between pale brows. "Do you remember who I am?"
"Bucky?" he repeats back, forming the sounds more as an echo than from his own mind. Something catches, a familiarity to the curve of his tongue over the consonants, but when he reaches for it it fragments, a soap bubble against fingertips, and is gone.
"Yeah." The line is deeper, the voice lower and softer. There's a rhythm to the words, a path worn deep by repetition. "You're James Barnes."
"Oh." He blinks at gold hair, soft mouth, long eyelashes. A hand comes up - his own - brushes against the clean line of a cheekbone. There's a prickle of an almost-there memory, a shape lost to dim light. Eyelids shift, blue eyes giving way to a flutter of soft lashes, and his fingers pull down, catch at the corner of lips like he's reaching for the smile hidden underneath them.
"God," a voice, and then "Bucky," rougher and lower, sounding almost rain-damp and sticky. A head turns, lips dragging against his fingertips, and then there's another patter of sound, meaning dropping into his head without any deliberate effort of his thoughts. "Go back to sleep." Movement: a head comes down, lands behind his shoulder. "I'll wake you if you have another nightmare."
"Okay," he says, thoughts too fuzzy to muster any resistance to the tone of command in that voice. He blinks, stares unseeing at the ceiling while breath catches into an irregular wet noise for an inhale, two, before steadying and smoothing.
"I'll bring you back." Direct, clean, the sound polished with habit. "I promise, Bucky."
He takes a breath. It fills his chest, expands to fit into all the empty corners, stretches out the tension that had collected there. It would be nice, he thinks, to fill his head the same way, to let memory spread out into the shadowed-over edges of his thoughts until he can recognize the face against his shoulder, until he knows the almost-familiar resonance of that voice or the warmth of the arm around his waist. He's still thinking about it when he starts to slip into the haze of sleep, near-delusions forming themselves into the shape of dreams in his head while unconsciousness is still cresting the horizon.
It would be nice, Bucky decides, if he could remember Steve's name someday.