Birds and Volcanoes
by Tonzura123
A/N: Dedicated to Ultrageek, who is a very busy lady, but has plenty of time to come up with heartbreaking head-canons. (Cheers.) Anything cool in this story is likely her fault.
Unstable. Erratic, they called you, when you were malfunctioning.
Fear fluttered their eyes, twitched their limbs. You could smell it on their skin like bitter salt, in the air like a fog. You felt their weak hands skim over your body.
You were a mountain where the birds landed. Volcanic. Ticking plates, crushing each other and spilling out hot, red, blood. You shaped the century like this. You formed the world.
But the Man on the Bridge called you "Bucky." And "James Buchanan Barnes." The Man on the Bridge was still and sure. His voice an echoing brontide. His movements a twisting river.
The Man on the Bridge changed your shape. Made you solid. As close as you could be.
OO
You follow the Man on the Bridge.
OO
Deep in the city, in a place dedicated to time and memories, there is a room with pictures of the Man, and of Bucky James Buchanan Barnes. Here, the floor crawls with small creatures. They shift around you as you move. A thousand short lives, in flocks and packs and families. You are alone. You watch the faces on the walls, and the dead men watch nothing. Their eyes are cold and dead. They smile forever.
Best Friends Since Childhood, says the glossy glass picture, Bucky Barnes And Steven Rogers Were Inseparable On Both Schoolyard And Battlefield. Barnes Is The Only Howling Commando To Give His Life In Service Of His Country.
The hand is healed now. It touches the face of what The Man on the Bridge sees when he looks at you. That gray face, frowning, heated, it feels like nothing. You touch it with your hand. It feels cold. You press, permafrost cemented from the century of Siberian winter. The fissures you make on the glass are small veins, without blood, but the knuckles of a lesser saint are a raw, raw red. Slow to bleed. Quick to heal. You are stronger than glass. Stronger than ghosts.
Bird song, the flash of feathers. Alarms in red light and the freeze of clustered bodies, as the room with pictures of the Man on the Bridge senses your violence.
Ghosts are louder than you.
You slip between their flailing wings, pocketing precious eggs which drop into your waiting palm. Eggs of ticking gold, of unlatched silver, of incoming calls and l8trs. You leave the faces of the dead with your hat pulled low over your eyes and the hand stuffed deeply into your pocket.
Your legs find a shop front far away from the museum. Your legs find the red leaves and kick through the sugary scent of decay. The shop with a dark, musty desk and a keen-eyed jay. You sell your treasures for green leaves and depart again lighter, heavier- you cannot stay here. You know this at your core. This place, these shaking foundations, you can't do it. Something is crawling up your throat from beneath, hot, dangerous.
You shut your mouth and walk for wings of your own.
OO
Weapons cannot fly.
You have a ticket to Brooklyn crumpled in your pocket. The bird behind the desk is soft and sings sweetly. She asks if you have anything on your person which could be considered a weapon.
"I am a weapon," you say. You can think of a twenty-six ways to kill her with her laminated name card. With the belts of businessmen. Heels of CEO's. You think of the Man on the Bridge and feel safer. You are a weapon, but maybe you are something else. Something underneath. That liquid part of you that strains and slips into hollows, shoring up wherever it can fit.
The air smells like ozone, rainfall, and the bird twitches in her plywood desk. Beyond her, you can see a bag, circling in a river of other bags, with the colors of a missing limb, and snow, and a ripped button coat. You think of eyes like a burning summer sky and crumbling sidewalks and red brick walls where your back rests between shifts at the shipyard.
Sir, says the bird. I need you to. Please step out of the line.
You do step out of the line. You think of the word Bucky and of a world that doesn't shake.
Two wolves, four arms, black shirts, earpieces- they grab your arms.
You think of instability. Of missions.
You stop thinking.
OO
Someone tips the cap off of your head, and that brings your mind back, to a small cave with a mirror, two wolves pacing in front of you.
The arm is attached to a table by linked cobwebs, your arm sitting loosely on top of it. The wolves growl and pace and bark, they jealously guard the exit. You watch them shift on their haunches, mangy. You wonder if they smell the movement deep below them. If they can feel the ash in their fur.
They bark words at you. Terrorism. National Security. Al Queda. ISIS. There is a throbbing in the veins of your temples. Something violent is contained in you. You want it to stay contained. You regulate your heart and lungs. You exercise the newly dusted pieces of your mind. These pieces which say, steve, penicillin, summer in the softest of quakes.
If you are very still, the wolves pause and quiet. If you are very, very still the wolves pace carefully towards you.
Is he dead. Is he even breathing.
"I am alive." You say. Softly. Falling like kisses on their pointed ears. Their snarling, yellow teethed, stomachs pressed against their spines. Hunger and desperation moves their bones, but you. You can feel the deep parts of yourself dragging apart with only the desire to burn alive.
"I am very alive."
When the arm pulls from the webs, the room shifts around you.
You drown in a viscous rage-
OO
sliding away in a magma of time and space and sharp memories, snapping, breaking through your skin like white diamonds you are the earth itself and they are the dust you breathe in lungful roars
OO
You wake in a place with tarmac, a clear gray strip of stone, unbroken. You are outside. You are running. And there are wolves and large, large metal birds with a million eyes that scream into the sky and cover the sun. Wolf teeth buried in your lungs, white hot fire, blood down your side, down your leg. And the wolves bark at you and the birds wail, puffing at the smoke of your breath, stirring the hot rust which spills from your mouth, a surging like everything under the earth flying up-
-And then the Man on the Bridge is in front of you.
Black sweater. Blue jeans. Blue eyes like the sky reborn.
His arms are held out to you, and you swallow your fire and your ash and everything in you that was molded for the purpose of molding.
"Bucky." The Man says. "Bucky it's all right. I'm here. It's okay."
There are birds. Birds and wolves in piles. Bones under your skin again. You are on fire. You are on fire.
But the Man on the Bridge, he moves around them with a winding step, soft hands on reaching out for your face. They wash the red from your chin.
"Come home." The Man says. "With me. You'll be safe there. We can figure this out, Bucky."
"I'm alive." You warn the Man. "I'm alive."
OO
You shouldn't be.
A/N: This isn't Narnia, but it is based on a very awesome movie that I highly recommend to all freaks and geeks (AKA "Captain America: The Winter Soldier of My Breaking Heart"). Half a year later, and that film still gets me. If you haven't seen it because Cap ain't your jam, try it.
Hope you're all doing well!
As Always,
-Tonzura123