Steve still looks the same.
Steve still looks the same, all pale skin and blonde eyes, sharp angles and lips just a little too plump, too soft for his face, and somehow it's the worst thing in the world. Why, Bucky doesn't know; it doesn't make sense.
Not when Steve isn't breathing.
They call him back to his commander's tent the second he steps out of the train, his fellow soldiers calling out lewd jokes and earnest exclamations of joy behind him and a bright future ahead of him. A bright future at home, still healthy and with Steve.
Steve, who will be waiting in their stuffy little apartment with a smile and a fond glint in his eyes; Steve, who will hug him to give them both a moment of time to blink back the tears, to just hold each other. Steve who is his friend, could be his brother, and always will be the one who holds Bucky's heart.
Bucky follows the sergeant who has come to fetch him, and there is a spring in Bucky's step, a smile on his lips - one which doesn't belong to anyone who sees it here, but Bucky still lets them have it; he's happy enough to keep smiling for days and knows that Steve won't mind sharing.
The sun is bright and he will be home again soon.
A stranger is waiting for him, tall and dark, with a sullen look and unreadable eyes; he hands Bucky a letter and when Bucky reaches out to take it, he realises that his hands areshaking. That his fingers are.
That the smile has dropped from his lips, because it's a letter he has seen in other people's hands so often before, printed with cheap ink on thin paper, and holding news no one ever wants to hear.
His fingers are shaking, still, when Bucky tears the envelope open, telling himself that this means nothing, that Steve is still waiting for him in their stuffy little apartment with a smile and a fond glint in his eyes.
He can almost see the other, pale skin and blonde hair and sharp angles and lip which look a little too plump, too soft for his face, in front of him, as the words on the thin paper tell him that Steve won't be waiting for him anymore.
It takes three men to take Bucky down, who is no man, but an open wound, a throbbing nerve; three men and the promise that they'll take him there. That he'll be allowed to take Steve home.
They keep their promise. Sit him down in a car, then a train, then a car again, and Bucky, who still is no man, but a broken shell, doesn't thank them. Doesn't take the food they offer, the water, doesn't sleep and doesn't answer questions.
He doesn't think, either, just feels; there a gaping hole in the middle of his chest, right where he used to be, where his flesh grew warm and tingled when Steve looked at him. Steve will always hold his heart, and he has taken it with him.
It's another army camp, one which looks and feels familiar although Bucky has never set foot in it. A woman waits for him at the gates, tall and pretty, with red lips and red-rimmed eyes, and he wonders if Steve loved her like Bucky loved him, if she loved him back; he doesn't want to but can't help but feel jealous.
This time, it takes five men to take Bucky down and even those have to fight; he lands a good, solid punch in the colonel's face, who hardly even flinches. It feels like nothing, doesn't bring any satisfaction, nor any pain – every single of his nerves is burning up with agony, nothing so mundane as bruised knuckles can faze them anymore.
In the end, he's restraint and pressed against a wall, and the colonel tells him that Steve wanted this. A doctor, who sounds like the soldiers Bucky killed, tells him it was a serum and that it was his fault; that Steve was so good a man that they had to try, because the serum amplifies everything inside a person, turns good to better, bad to worse.
Bucky spits into his face and tells him to go fuck himself. Steve was so good a man that they shouldn't have even considered using him like this.
The woman tells him he knows how he feels; the only thing which keeps Bucky from ripping out her throat is that he was brought up better than this.
Steve might have been her sweetheart for a few weeks, but he was Bucky's life.
The next morning, they let him into the morgue, or the small room they use instead, and Steve is just lying there, naked, all pale skin and blonde eyes, sharp angles and lips just a little too plump, too soft for his face, and somehow it's the worst thing in the world. Why, Bucky doesn't know; it doesn't make sense.
The doctor from the day before explains that it's the serum which keeps him from rotting like any other corpse, that it's taken hold of his cells, just didn't transform them, but Bucky isn't listening. Instead he brushes a strand of soft, fair hair from Steve's face, letting the touch linger a little too long.
Back when Bucky was still a man, not a dead body carrying a miniature black hole inside of him, he wouldn't ever have dared to, but now he doesn't care; he has never told Steve he wanted to, so it doesn't matter if the men and women around him know.
They say that the dead look peaceful, but Steve doesn't, he looks like he isn't able to wake from a bad dream, and part of Bucky wants to try and shake him awake, another wants to lie down next to him and try to wake from his own nightmare. He keeps looking until he has memorised every detail of Steve's face all over again, then turns around.
"Try it on me", Bucky says and his voice isn't loud, but steady. There are only two ways this could go: if he survives, Steve will get what he wanted, if not, Bucky will.
It's pain like he has never felt before, hot and searing, as if his body was molten down to be built anew, and Bucky is faintly aware that he is screaming.
Bucky has always been tall, but now he's even taller; he's always been strong, but now he is even stronger. The doctor calls it a success, a girl he has never seen before a miracle, Bucky doesn't care either way, but instead just imagines coming back home and finding Steve like this, tall and strong and turned into a weapon.
It's enough to make him shudder, because Steve has always been too good for this, too precious for something as crude as war, as death, and the doctor was right, the serum does amplify everything. But while Steve's good would have gotten better, Bucky's anger turns into liquid, poisonous wrath, his torture into hell.
He kills seventy-three men on his first mission, the first fifty with his gun and the others with his bare hands. There is blood everywhere, soiling the blue and white they put him in, making the red shine slick and dangerous, bits of bone and marrow are stuck to the fabric and between Bucky's teeth, under his fingernails.
The colonel is pleased, Steve's old sweetheart horrified, but when they strip him of his uniform, Bucky can hear them whispering, planning.
They can't call him Captain America anymore, that's what they tell him the next morning, and Bucky doesn't care, clenches his hands to fists until his muscles protest, because he aches all over.
Sometimes, at night, he dreams of Steve. Dreams of coming home and finding the other on their small sofa, blonde hair tousled and the two top buttons of his shirt undone, a smile spreading across his handsome face when he sees that Bucky has come home.
Usually, Steve gets up and hugs him just a little too long, a little too tightly, and Bucky drops his bags to hug him back, the frail, thin body so familiar and so right in his arms.
But sometimes – and Bucky hates those dreams as much as he loves them, maybe even a little bit more – sometimes, he doesn't. Sometimes, Steve gets up and rushes over, wraps his arms around Bucky's neck and just clings to him, hides his face in Bucky's neck.
Breathes out, "God, I missed you so much."
Bucky hugs back, always does, and they stay just like that for far too long, until Steve breaks away, with a smile on his lips and a hint of pink on his cheeks. That earnest, determined look in his eyes which Bucky has gotten to know so well.
In those dreams, Steve kisses him, softly but without a hint of doubt, of hesitation, and Bucky kisses back.
He often wakes at that moment, right when their lips touch and a hint of Steve's warmth still seems to cling to him when he finds himself back in his new bed, but from time to time, when life crueller – more merciful? – he doesn't. Instead kisses Steve back and tells him he loves him like he never could in real life, leaves his bags behind to carry Steve to his bed and tell him he loves him a thousand times more, in a thousand different ways.
Before their next mission, they dress him in black leather and put a dozen new guns to his belt, in his hands, and Bucky goes out and kills until they stop him. He never forgets, but someone else's blood spraying on his face makes it easier to remember; they are the bad guys, he knows that much, and that pleases the part which still tries to please Steve inside of him.
They call him soldier, not captain, and it fits; Steve was supposed to be the captain, the leader, Bucky is just a soldier following orders.
Time passes and people die, and then Bucky is somewhere in the alps, still clad in black, and they send him and a few others to take over a train. There is no reason to it Bucky can understand, but he has long since stopped caring; he used to be a man, but now he's just a gun the military can point, a weapon ready to be fired.
He's fuelled by anger, by pain, and so he hardly ever notices when two of his men die, one of them shot in the back, another right in the face. His blood makes the floor slick when Bucky barges on, but he doesn't even stop for a second.
And then he is falling.
The snow is cold and Bucky is tired; he sees Steve's face with his eyes that are blue but still as warm as the sun, and although he wants to roll up and sleep forever, dream of Steve until he forgets he cannot touch the other anymore, he gets up. Because Steve would want him to, because Bucky hasn't yet finished what Steve started.
His arm is only broken bone and torn tissue, hanging off his body uselessly, holding him back, so Bucky cuts through the last few layers of flesh and sinew and leaves it behind in a pool of red, trudges on until he can see their camp again, crawls when he doesn't have the strength to walk anymore. There are awed whispers all around him when he finally arrives, but Bucky hardly pays them attention; he hasn't slept in more than two days and eaten for almost as long and his body is dying, his mind delirious.
When he wakes up once again, he curses the doctors who worked hard enough to keep him there, but still listens to what the captains and commanders have to say. They call the mission a success, the men dead casualties, and tell him that his new arm an improvement, and while Bucky clenches his new, metal fingers to a fist, he wonders why he cares so little.
Of course it hurts, there are metal wires threaded along his spine and ribs, they needed to cut him open and fuse his body with the new limb, but Bucky is used to being shot, stabbed, kicked, to having his bones broken and his flesh torn apart, so it's nothing new.
The Winter Soldier that is what they call him afterwards, because he almost froze to death, and because he is still frozen inside, and Bucky thinks it fitting. A lot more fitting than Captain America could ever have been.
There are more missions afterwards, more corpses Bucky leaves behind, clad in uniforms of so many colours, and he should care about them like he knows that Steve would have, but can't.
Bucky is, always has been, too selfish, only cares about his own pain, his own loss, and steps over bodies upon bodies and doesn't think of anything but Steve and the way his smiles showed in his eyes before they ever reached his lips.
He loses track of the time which has passed since he has gone through the procedure, since Steve has died, and it's a horrifying feeling, but Bucky doesn't know how to stop it. There is nothing to ground him here anymore, everything is just killing or running or waiting to kill again; when he isn't on one of the mission they send him on, he just waits, sits in the small tent they gave him and stares ahead. Sometimes goes and trains with the other soldiers, who are scared of him, knocks a few of them out while they spar until someone sends him away again.
It makes Bucky feel a little bit better, because it soothes the anger gnawing away at his intestines, but only for a few moments, never long enough.
A scientist, a leader, rises and the Americans want him gone, so they send their best weapon to cut off the hydra's head. They send others too, as cannon fodder, as a distraction, so that, while they fight and die and keep the soldiers busy, Bucky can get to Schmidt.
He doesn't try to hide – that is what he was trained to do, but not what he has been doing these past months – just walks through one door after another, shoots people coming at him and leaves them dead or dying. Not sparing them another glance, but knowing that Steve, could he see him like this, would be horrified.
Schmidt doesn't want to fight, maybe knows that he wouldn't have a chance, so instead he tries to flee instead. Bucky follows, but doesn't rush, walks while Schmidt runs, and finds the man in a plane, doused in strange, blue light and frantically pushing buttons.
Bucky aims to put a bullet into his head, but Schmidt is not alone; he has brought his men along and they try to take Bucky out before he can do the same to them.
While Schmidt starts the plane, gets it off the ground, Bucky shoots eight of his men into heads and thighs and chests, crushes one man's neck under his boot and slices three or four throats. There is at least one bullet in his side and one in his thigh, dozen of cuts and bruises strewn across his body, but Bucky doesn't care, just continues to walk towards Schmidt.
Shoots him in the head and watches brain matter and blood and bone splinters stain the controls.
And yet he's not fast enough.
There are no orders, no commands, because his headset is dead, but the plane is in the air and Bucky does not know how to land it. He has been trained to fight, to follow, not to think.
A small screen on the control board tells him that he has seven minutes until the first bombs are launched.
Every button, he has tried every button twice and thrice, but nothing worked; the bombs will start and there are just three minutes left. Millions will die, and Bucky is sure that Steve would know what to do, how to safe them, but he's no captain. He's a soldier, he's a weapon; he used to be a man, but now he's a knife too blunt to slice through even a sheet of paper.
Maybe they'll kill him too, for not being able to stop it, but maybe they'll just put him into a cell, let him rot there, all anger and pain and loss, and the thought alone is almost enough to make Bucky scream. There couldn't be anything worse than that, a room where he's alone with his memories and his misgivings and the knowledge that he failed Steve and cannot even apologise for it.
Bucky's eyes fly open although he wasn't even aware he closed them before, looks around. Steve's image is still as clear, as vivid in his mind as it was the day he left New York for the army, and Bucky doesn't know how to safe himself, but he might know how to safe everyone else.
The impact sends Bucky flying against the control boards; there is blood in his mouth and in his eyes, his body is aching, but he pushes those feelings aside, even as water starts seeping into the cockpit through cracks and rips in the metal, the glass.
Steve might have found a better way, probably would have, but Steve isn't here and this is all Bucky can do, all he can think of. And sacrificing himself for the sake of a million seems like a fair trade.
He won't be missed, Bucky realises, but the thought holds no horror – there are no friends left who won't already think him dead, no family. Steve is buried in a cemetery not too far from their old apartment and Bucky wanted to join him, stay close to his heart and the one who holds it; he won't now, but Steve would forgive him, so Bucky forgives himself as well.
Maybe he should get up, try and find a spot further up so the military would find him sooner, should they look, so that the ice won't get to him as quickly as it will now, but he doesn't. Stays and watches the water rise higher and higher, turning the black leather he is still wearing stiff and cold and waits.
Closes his eyes and thinks of Steve, who used to be all pale skin and blonde eyes, sharp angles and have lips just a little too plump, too soft for his face.
It almost feels like coming home.
The light is too bright, and there are voices all around him, although it should be quiet, he feels warm although he should be drowning in icy water. Should be dying to safe New York and to, maybe, see Steve again in heaven, if this last sacrifice was enough to erase the sin of killing so many.
Slowly, he pries open his eyes and lets them focus on a man he has never seen before, with blue eyes and a dangerous smirk on his lips.
Hands pull him up until he is sitting, naked and broken; he used be a weapon, but now he is not even that. He is empty, shattered, can't die, and Steve's face, which used to be so clear, so vivid, is fading, no matter how much he tries to cling to it , pull it back.
"My name is Alexander Pierce", the man says and he wants to rip out his throat just to soothe the pain inside him a little. "And I think you are just what we have been looking for…"