Title: (mis)remembrance
Pairing: one-sided Steve/Bucky
Rating: M
Warnings: canon-typical violence
Spoilers: post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Wordcount: 2134
Summary: Who are you chasing: your old friend, or memories of a ghost?

A/N: Love to Sara and Jenny for handholding & advice.

"You sure about this, Cap?"

It's the first time Sam's said anything, even though he's had plenty of chances before: Steve poring over the Kiev files before bed and spreading maps on Sam's living room floor like he's planning a mission.

"He saved me." It's a fact Steve's been clinging to all these weeks, because it means that somewhere inside an unfairly familiar face, Bucky's still there — he remembers.

"I know," and Sam says it almost too kindly for Steve to bear. "Just." He makes a move to touch Steve's shoulder but stops midway. "That might not mean what you want."

Bucky's standing in the middle of a safehouse in Geneva, his back to the door.

"Bucky," Steve says carefully, and finally Bucky turns around. His hair's still long and face still dark with stubble, but Steve's already learning to be as familiar with this face as he is with Bucky's old one.

Bucky doesn't say a word, just rolls back onto his heels. Steve takes a step towards him, both hands raised.

"It's okay," he says. "It's me, Buck, it's—"

"Watch out!" Sam shouts; if not for him Steve might've missed the way Bucky shifts his weight on his feet. As it is, the metal of Bucky's arm misses Steve's throat but crashes into his jaw with enough force to make him drop, heaving up bile.

"Come on, Bucky," Steve spits out. He instinctively brings up his shield arm, tries to swipe at Bucky's feet as he blocks the next punch. "How can you not remember—"

"I'm not," Bucky snarls, his teeth bared like something feral. "I'm not him, I'm not, stop it—" He's got his knife out in his other hand, is aiming for Steve's stomach with every word. It scrapes across the polymer with a jagged sound.

"Man, this is such a bad idea," Sam mutters into the comm. "Here I go—"

The whirr of the Falcon's wings swoops very close, and then Steve sees Bucky's feet flailing, Sam dragging Bucky off with an arm hooked around his neck. In Steve's ear, Sam's muttering about flight clearance and damn low Swiss ceilings.

With a crack Bucky wrests himself out of Sam's grasp, leaps backwards into a window. Steve crawls over broken glass to catch a glimpse of something dark whisking around a corner.

"Well." Sam says reflectively. He helps Steve to his feet, thumps his back. "That...didn't go so well."

"He's confused," Steve gasps. There are tears in his eyes but he's not sure when that happened. "We've gotta help him, that's all."

They split up in Bastogne, reconnaissance only, and that turns out to be a mistake. One minute, Steve's certain the house is deserted; the next he's on the floor with the full weight of Bucky crushing down on his torso. Bucky's wild-eyed, almost like he doesn't really see Steve at all, and his metal fingers are beginning to wrap around Steve's throat.

"Bucky, this isn't you," Steve chokes out. "They did something to you, you've gotta remember—"

Bucky growls wordlessly, tightening his grip — but not enough to stop Steve breathing, not hard enough to kill.

"You're not sure," Steve says, triumphant, though it comes out in a whisper. "Keep fighting it, Buck — I know you, you can do it—"

"No," Bucky says in almost a whimper. He rocks back, shaking his head vehemently. "I can't, I don't want to—"

Steve takes the opportunity to slip out from under Bucky, grappling with him from behind. "I know, Buck, I'm sorry," he says, resting his forehead between Bucky's shoulderblades. "But you're gonna have to."

With a frustrated roar, Bucky sinks his teeth into Steve's hand. Blood starts trickling down his wrist but he manages to keep his grip until Bucky jabs his metal elbow into his chest.

Bucky backhands Steve hard enough that he slides into the wall. "You don't know me," Bucky says. A bitter sneer is twisting his mouth — an expression Steve's never seen on that face before. "You don't even know you."

He leaves Steve coughing on the floor. Sam finds him like that, blood dripping onto concrete.

Steve's used to sleeping fast and deep, but he's having trouble sleeping now. Sam had cleaned the bite mark on his hand but it's still throbbing dully, and he keeps remembering Bucky, looking at him like he hates him.

He shifts in the sleeping bag, focusing on the sound of Sam's soft breathing across the room. "Jeez, Cap," he'd said as he'd examined the wound, "anybody'd think you liked being beaten up."

"Well, you know me," Steve had tried for a grin. "Can never run from a fight."

But a flush runs through Steve now as he remembers Bucky pressing against him, eyes hot and breathing hard, and to his shame he can feel his cock stirring.

Before — before the serum, before the war, before everything when things had been uncomplicated, Steve had sometimes looked at Bucky in the afternoon light, head tossed back and laughing gleefully, and wanted. He'd sketch him, filling in the line of Bucky's jaw and shoulders on paper until they were so familiar he could trace them in his sleep; then he'd shake his head and turn them into other people, strangers and neighbors walking down Brooklyn streets, because it was too much to want that from Bucky when Bucky'd already been the best thing that happened to him.

Steve didn't deserve Bucky then, and he's still trying to deserve him now, but he can't resist slipping a careful hand into his boxers. It might have been seventy-odd years to the rest of the world, but to Steve it's just been a few short years since he'd slept in a cold European forest, shivering and pressing hard against Bucky as if that might stop the chill creeping up from the ground. Steve remembers it so clearly, the warmth and solid form of Bucky against his body and the realization that this was it, this was the closest he was ever going to get to having him.

He's fully hard now, and he jerks up into his hand, keeping his jaw clenched against all the sounds he wants to make. It doesn't take long but he's thinking about Bucky's cold metal fingers ringing his throat when he comes.

He lies there, breaths coming fast, and feels like he's never going to be clean again.

In Moscow, Sam wrenches a shoulder trying to dodge a power line.

"I'll be fine," he says, but Steve can see the grayness of his face and the way he moves like he's planned everything in advance.

"You should go home, Sam," he says with some regret. "You've done more than enough to help and this—" he looks at his feet, "this isn't even your fight."

"Are you kidding me?" Sam shoots back. "I'm thinking saving Captain America's ass kind of is my fight. Especially when he's a personal friend."

Steve can't help smiling, but he insists, anyway; and in the end Sam agrees, though not without giving Steve his number first.

"You miss calling one day," he waves a threatening finger, "I'm coming after you. And I've got a lot of friends, Steve Rogers."

"Thanks, Sam," Steve says, and watches him walk through the airport gate; when he's finally out of sight, Steve's not quite sure if he feels more or less lonely.

Bucky's been making his way south quite a while. Steve tries an ambush at Lille, but Bucky must've seen him coming, because he turns first, catches Steve's arm and twists him around, slams him into the wall.

Maybe Bucky had nicked a razor somewhere, gotten a couple of decent meals, because his face looks cleaner and less hollow; even his eyes are brighter, somehow. But it's the same old knife that he presses to the underside of Steve's jaw.

"Good to see you too, Buck," Steve tosses out.

Bucky's grip is suddenly much tighter around his wrists. "I can't," he rasps into Steve's ear, "I can't be Bucky."

This close, Bucky smells like cigarettes and cheap alcohol. Steve has to push away the memory of trying to get drunk.

"You are," he insists. "It's you, you just gotta find it—"

"No," Bucky snaps. His eyes dart constantly, but the hand holding the knife is perfectly steady. "Bucky was...then," he says, each word heavy with effort. "Bucky wouldn't have...done things. It's different."

"I don't care." Steve swallows hard. "It doesn't matter."

"Doesn't it?" The cold blade presses harder. Steve's mouth is very dry. "I was meant to kill the Black Widow and the Falcon. I could have."

"You didn't," Steve coughs.

The knifepoint digs in suddenly, a sudden bloom of warmth. "I could kill you," Bucky says.

Steve turns to look into Bucky's eyes. The movement makes the blade slice deeper into his throat but he doesn't care. "You won't."

Bucky shoves Steve away, hard. "Why?" he asks, plaintively, like a child. "Who are you?"

"It's Steve, Buck." Steve grins, dredging up old memories and trying to match them. "I just wanna help you."

"Steve," Bucky says, like it's a foreign word. The he turns and runs; Steve watches him go with blood soaking into his collar.

Here's a fact: Steve tipped his head back under the blade and put his life into Bucky's hands, and it was the most alive he'd felt since he woke up off the ice.

Here's a fact: that night he imagines a different flick of Bucky's wrist, the knife slicing cleanly into his throat, and comes with Bucky's name trapped between his teeth.

In Milan Steve catches Bucky while he's sleeping, wrapping his arms around Bucky's torso.

"Stop chasing me," Bucky says, but he almost sounds tired.

"Then stop running," Steve says into the juncture of Bucky's shoulder where metal meets flesh. "I can't leave you, not when there's a chance — I need you, Buck."

"But why?"

"Because..because you're my best friend, and I've known you for all of my life—" and Steve's next words come out hot and wet, "and Bucky, you're it, you're all I've got left."

"What if," Bucky says, "what if I don't want to remember."

Something cracks in Steve's chest. "Do you?" he hears himself asking, from very far away.

When Bucky kicks out viciously, Steve doesn't bother resisting. He's not sure if Bucky ever answers.

He goes home.

(Home?)

"Maybe you've been going about this the wrong way," Sam reasons.

Steve flinches. "I pushed him," he says miserably. "I wanted him so much, I couldn't stop."

Sam crosses his arms, gives him a considering look. "Yeah, if it was Riley, I might've done the same thing," he admits. "But look, the guy's been through hell. And it can't be easy, remembering."

"What if Bucky's just." Steve closes his mouth. Opens it again. "Gone?"

And that's what he's afraid of, isn't it, the thought he'd tried to bury all these months. That after all this, Bucky might not be Bucky anymore, and what would that even mean?

"He might not be the Bucky you remember," Sam corrects firmly. "But he's still gonna be Bucky."

He runs in the mornings. Goes to the gym in the afternoons. Draws sometimes, but never from memory.

He tries not to think very much.

Then, Sam calls him up one day. "Hey, just a heads up," he says. "Been talking to one of my buddies, and apparently some potential national threat just landed on US soil. And from what I've heard, it kind of sounds like your friend—"

"Bucky," Steve breathes.

"Yep. So I'm just sayin', might wanna get on that."

Bucky, apparently, has decided to visit Washington, D.C. Steve runs, heart in his mouth.

By the time he gets there, there are two helicopters and what looks like an entire company of soldiers surrounding one lone figure. He struggles past them all, stumbling to a stop in front of Bucky, at last.

Bucky's gotten a haircut, and cleaned up, somehow. It's not hard to pretend that nothing's changed at all, save for the bright glint of sun off the metal arm.

"How've you been?" Steve asks, hands in his pocket.

Bucky looks down at his arm. "I was in the mountains," he says, halting. "There was—there was a train—"

Steve bites his tongue so hard he tastes blood, because he's not going to say anything, he's not going to push him—

"Steve," Bucky pronounces carefully. "I'm—my name is Bucky Barnes."

And that's good enough, Steve thinks: that maybe Bucky doesn't remember the whole of it, them, whatever — but that's okay, Steve can do it for the both of them.

Bucky doesn't resist when Steve pulls him into a hug. "Yeah, Bucky," Steve says, mouth wide even though his eyes are wet, "yeah, it is."