There are many names in history
but none of them are ours.
– Richard Siken, "Little Beasts"
The manhunt is cumbersome and tiring.
They spend the first week camped out in some shitty little motel outside of New York, then a hostel in Austria where all of three people speak English. But however Pierce did it, he covered his tracks well, because Sam and Steve spends weeks digging in the snow for footprints. For something long erased.
Steve doesn't give up.
In Slovakia, a peasant woman with a soiled eyepatch flinches like their words are acid burns. A red star over his tricep, a metal arm, a black muzzle is met with downturned eyes of grief and the rushed language of fear. There is a blood trail, infinitely long, in his wake, and survivors scatter it like road signs: WINDING ROAD AHEAD. DEAD END. DO NOT ENTER. People in the north know him, the Winter Soldier, and the slaughter to his name, but not Bucky.
This would mean that there is no one left in the world who knows Bucky Barnes except Steve – not even Bucky himself. The thought scares Steve more than anything ever has.
Steve is resilient and relentlessly optimistic; he dodges every deterrent, every discouraging remark, as they cross out dozens of assassination spots on the map and move on to the next. He won't give up – he can't give up – until one night, in Latvia, when they learn that the Winter Soldier burned fourteen people alive in a church.
That night, Steve says they're going home.
After that, Sam can see something's died in his eyes.
Natasha is as gentle as she can be when they come back, but Steve isn't looking for gentle. What he's looking for is somewhere he can't find. Something Sam nor Natasha, as well-intentioned as they are, could ever give him.
He shuts himself in his room for a week. They leave him alone.
Stan's surprised at how many visitors they got. Granted, it's not the most popular exhibit in the museum – those restored biplanes and WWII fighter jets take the cake every time – but every day, a whole mess of people flood in. And there are tons of regulars: old ladies chuckling with nostalgia as they tell their burbling, bright-eyed grandkids about how they remember the original "Captain America craze," fathers with their sons making proclamations about how heroic Rogers and his fleet were, teenage girls who were dragged along secretly sighing over the chiseled-jawed photographs, and people far and few in between admiring the original, in-tact uniforms (and thank God no one notices that chinsy replacement they had to give Captain America's mannequin after that bizarre cat burglary a few months ago.)
The politer people nod to Stan and say hi, and once in a while a kid will run up to him and ask for one of the Captain America propaganda pins he keeps in his pocket, which he'll fix onto their shirts as he tells them that he saw the real live Captain America with his own eyes once, yessir, and he looks great for a ninety-five year old, wish some of us coulda been frozen for seventy years.
A lot of kids tell him that Captain America's their hero; one little boy last week, wearing a replica of the leather helmet Rogers always wore into battle, said in a lisping, five-year-old voice, "When I grow up, I wanna fight crime." At that, Stan affectionately ruffled his hair.
The next day, HYDRA headlines blanketed the Internet like ash.
The young man starts coming in not long after that.
He spends all day floating around the exhibit, rewatching newsreels and rereading the digital posters over and over, and Stan is fascinated at how interested the kid looks. Around closing, he doesn't even react to the announcement over the loudspeaker. It's like he's in a different world.
Stan ambles over to where the man stares up at the mannequins.
"It's closing time, son."
He actually flinches, as if pricked by a needle. "Easy," Stan laughs. "Didn't mean to scare ya. But we're closing up. You'll have to come back tomorrow."
He murmurs something.
"Pardon?"
"I – I knew him."
"What's that?"
The man blinks, still looking like he's far away. He points to the Captain American mannequin.
"I knew him," he repeats.
"Oh yeah? How'd you meet?"
The guy frowns. "I don't know."
"I...okay." Stan keeps smiling, trying to be polite. The kids looks tired as all hell.
"It was a long time ago."
"Aw hell." Stan grins. "Couldn't have been that long ago." He's just met with a grim look.
If you perked the kid up a little bit, and cut that hair, Stan swears he'd be a dead ringer for that Sergeant Barnes fella.
It can't be him, even if it is.
It says that he was born in Indiana, in 1917 – an orphan. It does not tell him how his parents died, or if they just left him behind.
Friends since early childhood, Barnes and Rogers…
It's not him. He's looking at the biography of someone else. He tells himself this, and not because it's true – because he needs it to be. Being a monster is what he knows, and he needs to believe that he was not a man who became a monster, but a monster who was born.
Except –
Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.
They even managed to rip his name out of him.
The except is, he had a place in the world once. Proof stares him in the face. He was a man, and he once raised his gun to shoot monsters like the one he stands as today. He once stood beside Captain America, not before him, a dagger in his hand.
What would James Barnes think of him now? Would he spare him, as Steve tried to? Would he look into his own eyes and see life where dozens of others have seen nothing but their death?
The film strips scare him. It's him, with shorter hair and brighter eyes, talking about Steve. Talking with Steve, and Steve is smiling at him and clasping his shoulder, and even he can see that they're best friends. Just like the exhibit tells him. He watches over and over.
You're my friend.
Steve could say that to him, three-fourths of a century later, when Bucky was poised to kill him. You're my friend. Not were.
He remembers: NO not without you –
His voice. Steve's face, compassionate, afraid, and frustrated at the defiance. He pieces it together, and yes. They were. But he doesn't know if they can be.
He has a brand on his collarbone: Steven Rogers. That's the name that glows on every exhibit sign, over the picture of the man from the helicarrier. He has to touch it over and over to make sure that it's there, and his fingers spill across the dented skin like braille. Steven Rogers.
HYDRA never bothered to burn it off. They spent years carving him into the Winter Soldier, and still, they left it there. It meant nothing to him up until two weeks ago.
He used to think names were unimportant, until he learned his own.
The thought persists.
He can't be James Barnes again. Not after what he's done. His real name is the echo of a decorated ghost, and the only name he's ever known is a blood smear in history. Things can't go back the way they were; this he's sure of. The kid from Indiana is dead along the bottom of a Swiss canyon.
But then there's Steve. Steve is dead at the bottom of a goddamn ocean – at least, he was supposed to be. He's doing remarkably well for a ghost.
I can't be someone who's dead, Bucky is thinking. But he could. He could be.
He comes back every day, all day, for weeks.
He never gives Stan a name, and he's not much of a talker, but he listens, endlessly fascinated by all of the Captain America stories Stan has to tell, and manages a smile at the jokes.
"You know what I heard?" Stan tells him one day. "Captain Rogers is living somewhere in New York City right now. 'Course they don't say where, but I think that's the damnedest thing. A superhero, living not a thousand miles away." At that, the kid's face lights up like the Fourth of July.
Stan doesn't know it yet, but it'll be nearly a year before they speak again.
But he can't. The thought roars back to life in Pennsylvania; he can't be Bucky. He can't be Steve's friend, and he can't even remember half of what he's supposed to. He remembers the war – anything will blood sticks, but he doesn't remember the sunlight. He doesn't remember going to Coney Island, or all those times he spoke of on the films, saving Steve's ass from the neighborhood punks.
Steve's smile, at that, had an appreciative and nostalgic edge. Bucky had scrambled to find the evidence behind it, and his mind echoed. Empty. Inked out by HYDRA's black pen.
They tried, once. He remembers that. The first time Steve appears in what little memory he has left, he was strapped to a table, not far away from becoming the Winter Soldier. Red Skull knew he was more monster than man the moment he saw Bucky. One monster to another, seeing a familiar face in a gentle, human crowd.
Steve saved him from that. Bucky knows, even now, that he's still trying to.
Finding the brownstone is easy. The whole country knows Captain America's home address. Walking up to it, though, is not.
He stands there on the sidewalk, staring at the door. The city used to comfort him like a mother's arms, but it rejects him now, unfriendly and exotic. It's changed more than he has; he passes by the neighborhood where he and Steve grew up without realizing what it was until three blocks away. People on the street flinch at his long hair and his heavy, tired eyes.
He is not James Barnes anymore.
"You look different without the suit."
The redhead. The one who was with Steve, back on that overpass.
Voice –
Fearful – And the tape cuts out there. Just like the rest of them. His memory is a broken quilt of shaky, wounded sounds.
He doesn't look at her.
"I won't tell you that you don't have to do this, 'cause I get the feeling you've figured that part out already." She comes further up the stairs of the basement unit. "But Steve won't be furious with you if you walk away right now."
She couldn't possibly know that. Bucky's not the one to be in a position of distrust here, but he is anyway. And Natasha sees that.
"Look, Bucky –" The miniscule wince. So unused to be treated like a human. "– if you don't wanna be found, you don't wanna be found."
"What the hell would you know about it?" he asks suddenly, face flashing with a stunning bit of rage. She remains cool before the heat.
"People get lost. You're not the only one."
"Not like this."
"Думая, что ты один, Это худшее одиночество," she says evenly. Thinking you're alone is the worst loneliness of all.
Glaring, he just looks away.
He's weak. Anyone could see that. If she was selfish, she could knock him out – force him to stay. The pain of losing him once is what gave Steve his first taste for blood; losing him again, when Steve was so close, is destroying him.
But, more than the grief of loss, Natasha knows the agony of being unmade.
Bucky's not there in the morning. The clouds over Steve's face are darker than ever.
A heavy rainstorm hits the city hard.
The power cuts out one night, and Natasha comes up from the downstairs unit to find Steve sleeping on his couch. Not sleeping; he's awake even before she walks in, eyes already trained at the door. Waiting for someone.
Not her, of course.
During the day, he sees homeless people darting under overhangs and ducking into bus shelters, and he thinks of Bucky – dirty and alone. Nowhere to go.
Steve hated rain as a kid. Too many puddles and mud; snow was worse, where slippery sidewalks always had him on his ass.
Bucky loved it, but he was different. Braver and fearless. On the mornings it would rain, Steve could always expect Bucky to knock on his door with an umbrella and a sly smile on his face. After he loses him, Steve finds himself still opening the front door in the morning, expecting Bucky to be waiting for him.
It's like this all week. Weather fit for mourning.
Four days of rain. When Steve opens his door that night, his hopeless heart kicks the naive thought that it's Bucky. Then he sees.
It is him.
He falls past Steve, into the foyer, dripping and shivering in his paper-thin clothes.
It's Bucky.
Steve fights to say something, or to move away from the still-opened door, where rain is beginning to pour into the house. But Bucky is here, and alive, and shaking hard, and the words won't come.
For so long, Bucky was the one; he always protected Steve. He was the roof over Steve's head.
This time, though, Steve's the one with the umbrella.
Bucky just stands there for the longest time, without a word, dragging his eyes along the inside of the brownstone. Steve finally manages to shut the door, and by now, Bucky has a left a puddle of rainwater on the linoleum, but it's not like Steve can even think about that.
Buck turns to him, slowly.
"I...I know you."
Steve fights to catch his breath. He does. He does know him.
to be continued