Recognizable characters belong to Marvel/Disney. No copyright infringement intended. Any similarity to events or persons – living or dead – is purely coincidental.
Notes – Haven't written in a while. Maybe this'll shake the dust off. Thanks as always to the one and only Cindy Ryan, one of the greatest friends a geek gal could ever ask for – so glad you're my pal! All mistakes my own.
The Ghost Across the Hall – Bucky struggles to find himself. Takes place post Winter Soldier, pre Civil War.
He liked this building. It was unassuming from the outside and filled with quiet tenants. Best of all, he had created seven unique escape routes. Some took him across neighboring rooftops. Others took him underground. They were solid escapes, offering a slim chance of getting caught.
The best chances he'd ever give himself were slim. Even he couldn't account for everything though he tried.
The reality of his situation settled like an ache in his chest. Absently, he rubbed at it as he checked his mail in the entry. There was never anything there for him. Just junk mail addressed to the previous occupant. He wasn't even sure why he checked it. All his expenses were set up to auto-pay, all from different accounts, none under his given name.
But, checking mail was normal. While he'd never be normal again – ever – it gave him some semblance of the sensation. Everyone checked the mail.
Including the little boy from across the hall who was currently jumping down the entry steps to the mailboxes. "Hi!" he announced cheerfully.
People didn't say hi to him. No one waved. No one nodded. In fact, people tended to go out of their way to avoid making eye contact with him, and why shouldn't they? He was an assassin. A cold-blooded killer. A science experiment gone terribly awry.
Undeterred, the boy slid his key into his box. "I got new glasses today. Mom says I'll grow into them," he said, sliding the loose frames up his nose. The boy looked up at him expectantly for a moment.
He could only stare back, a study in shocked silence.
The boy pulled out a stack of envelopes, closed the door and locked it back before grinning up at him. "See ya!" he declared before racing back up the stairs and down the hall to where his mother waited.
Maybe those new glasses weren't working right.
Inhaling slowly, he started up the stairs deliberately. When he reached the landing, he froze. The boy's mother caught his gaze for the briefest of moments before following the boy into their apartment.
Letting himself into his place, he let out a shuddering sigh. That was enough social interaction to last him a while.
He dropped onto wooden chair by the battered table. He'd picked up the mismatched pieces at a thrift store. After so many years with nothing and in pain, creature comforts felt foreign. He just needed a place to sit, eat something, and sometimes try to gather his thoughts.
Bucky Barnes struggled especially with that. He flipped open a notebook and uncapped his pen. "Why did I want to call her Sarah?" he wrote in careful letters, making sure each word was in English. Sometimes the words came out in Cyrillic. Sometimes they filled his brain in German or French or Japanese.
He was still sorting through three lifetimes of broken memories and fractured feelings.
Everything he'd read online had said journaling would help. He still wasn't so sure about it, but he'd do anything at this point. He longed to have a train of thought that coasted seamlessly. To feel grounded. To belong somewhere, somehow. To feel real.
Even though he'd hefted Steve Rogers from the Potomac, so often he felt like he was still adrift in the debris-filled water with all hell breaking loose around him. Like he was drowning. Like he was already gone. Like he was a ghost.
He pushed the notebook away from him. But that's exactly what he was, wasn't he? A ghost. Someone who should've been dead so long ago, someone all but forgotten, someone twisted and wrong. Could he haunt himself?
Considering how his head pounded, he guessed he could.
It started to become a thing. He wasn't sure how he felt about it. Even though he operated on a carefully crafted, randomly generated non-schedule, he always wound up at the mailboxes the same time as the boy almost every day for weeks.
And the boy always spoke to him. Sometimes, the boy would tell him what happened in school that day – getting second place in the spelling bee, playing basketball in gym – or if his mom made his favorite dinner – macaroni and cheese with chicken nuggets and green beans because vegetables were a necessity, though he wasn't entirely sure he believed his mother's explanation as to why.
"You know," the boy said one Saturday. "Halloween is coming. I'm trying to convince Mom I'm big enough now, I can be something scary. What scares you?" he asked, looking up at Bucky.
"Everything."
The boy froze for a moment, his jaw dropping open.
Bucky wasn't sure if it was because of the answer or because he'd finally spoken back to him. He really hadn't even meant to say anything, but the word had escaped, unbidden. Silently, he was thankful it had come out in English at least.
"But, you're an adult..."
He looked down at the boy. "Adults get scared of lots of things," he said. "And it's okay to be scared." Not that anything, really, was okay with him. It was, possibly, the longest conversation he'd had with anyone since the helicarrier. He swallowed hard. "But it's not okay to let being scared stop you."
The boy nodded after a moment. "Maybe I'll be something else instead. Like a super hero!" He looked at Bucky for approval, getting the slightest of smiles in return. "What about you? What will you be for Halloween?"
Bucky swallowed hard, a phantom pain zinging down his left arm. "Maybe a robot."
If there was ever a physical embodiment of excitement, it was that kid. "Ohh," he breathed. "I want to see that!"
"Maybe. If you come trick or treating," Bucky relented. Memories started to filter through the dark shadows of his brain.
"Yeah, definitely!" grinned the kid, bounding back to his mother.
Bucky had to stumble back to his apartment but he was able to fill a whole page with a spooky stream of consciousness.
Steve's building was filled with Irish immigrants. Halloween was always fun there. Everyone baked amazing treats, everyone dressed up, and there were always blinking, winking jack-o-lanterns and games to play.
This pale girl lived on the floor above Steve. She had an older sister who gathered up extra apples after we had finished bobbing for them out of this icy cold tub. I'd almost fallen in the damn thing, pushing my apple to the bottom to keep it still so I could bite it. I can't remember what I wore, but my costume was soaked, ruined. I got the apple, though.
The sister told us that we can learn the first initial of our true love with the peelings, but only on Halloween night, only when the veil was thin, whatever the veil is.
I knew Steve liked the girl. She was all right, I guess. I didn't know her well. (Mary? Martha? Molly?) When her sister handed her the apple and the knife, her hands were shaking. She managed to get the knife around the apple maybe a time and a half before the peeling separates from the flesh and everybody stopped moving, watching it fall to the ground.
Her sister proclaimed that it was a J. Like James. Like my name. I don't know the other boys who were there. Any of them could've been a John or a Joseph, but Steve deflated.
"No, lookit," I told them. "The top curves, too. That's an S."
I think that's the only time Steve was ever scared on Halloween. He and the girl both turned as red as the apple peeling.
The boy looked defeated as he opened his mailbox. "Mom says I can't go trick or treating. I really wanted to see your robot costume." He huffed a sigh, shrugging a little shoulder. "It's not all bad, I guess. Mom says I can have a Halloween party instead, but I have to invite everyone in my class."
"That seems fair," Bucky said with a nod.
"Yeah," the boy said with a frown. "It's just, there's this one boy in my class, he's mean. He's a bully. Sometimes he bullies me."
He always figured it was just a byproduct of the cryochambers, being put away, stored, between missions. Or maybe a side effect from the brainwashing. While it might have been caused by what Hydra did, the fact remained – time fluctuated, became fluid. For a second, he could've sworn he was eight, and the boy with the glasses was his best friend Steve. Clearing his throat, he crouched down, to be the boy's height. "You know, it's important, right..." He caught himself, before calling the boy Steve. "To stand up to bullies, to stand up for what's right."
The boy nodded solemnly. "I know," he said. "Mom says maybe he won't bully me if we become friends."
"Maybe," Bucky agreed. "Or maybe he'll learn from your example, pal."
The boy smiled. "Are we pals?"
Bucky tilted his head slightly. Could he be friends with anyone anymore? Honestly, the old term had just slipped. Maybe he was longing to have an eight-year-old boy conversation with Steve and then go play stick ball. Maybe it was just that his humanity tried to show around the boy. Apparently, he still had some left. That revelation nearly bowled him over. "Yeah," he managed quietly. "Yeah, I think we're pals."
The boy nodded slowly. "If we're pals, you should come to my Halloween party in your robot costume," he said. "I mean... it's only fair. To invite all my classmates and my pals."
He wasn't entirely sure he had that much humanity left. "Maybe you should check with your mom first. Just to be sure it's okay."
"But, we're pals," insisted the boy.
"I get that you're the man of the family," Bucky began slowly – he'd never seen anyone with the boy other than his mother. He watched as boy's eyes shimmered with sadness for a second, and his lower lip threatened to quiver. He continued quickly: "But, doing the right thing is also listening to your mom. Family is everything, no matter the size."
The boy nodded after a moment. "She's going to say it's okay..."
Bucky gave him a small smile. "It's nice to ask."
"I'll ask," he promised.
For once, Bucky walked up the stairs with the boy, and he nodded slightly at the boy's mother, who gave him a slight smile from the doorway.
The boy dashed ahead, practically skipping. "Mom! Can he come to the party, too?"
Bucky wondered what the mom thought. A strange man with shaggy hair, unshaven cheeks, living in an apartment without much of anything? Speaking to her child? No wonder she lingered, watching their interactions. He scratched at his whisker-covered jaw nervously, coming up with a hundred awful thoughts she was probably having about him. Easily ninety-nine of them were right.
"It's Saturday night at six," the mom said, meeting Bucky's eyes as she eased an arm around her son. "Though, I'd understand if you had a better offer someplace other than an apartment filled with two dozen kiddos high on sugar."
He swallowed hard. "I, uh... No other plans right now, so..."
She chuckled softly. "Maybe we'll see you then," she said softly.
The boy waved, and Bucky found himself waving back as the two disappeared into their apartment.
Then it hit him.
Sarah had been Steve's mom's name.
No wonder he wanted to call the boy's mom Sarah, if he wanted to call the boy Steve. He rubbed at his forehead as he headed into his apartment.
Maybe this was bad, living across the hall from people who reminded him, so much, of those he'd lost.
Maybe he hadn't lost Steve entirely. The slight boy he'd grown up with was gone, replaced with a super soldier, someone seemingly immortal.
Not for the first time, he wondered if he could die.
He dropped onto his wooden chair, staring at the notebook. He didn't write those kind of thoughts down. He struggled to keep the darkness at bay. Besides, he didn't need to be reminded of his bleak future. The past was what he was desperate to find, to string together in some semblance order, to fill in the holes that plagued him.
He flipped open the notebook and scribbled only two words. Sarah Rogers. He underlined her last name until he nearly tore the page with the ballpoint.
He watched the time on the oven clock in the kitchen, mentally counting seconds. It wasn't the same as watching a second hand spin. At a quarter to six, he could almost hear the bonging of the old westminster clock his father had placed proudly on the mantle in their apartment in Brooklyn.
He hadn't thought about his father in a while.
His old man had told him to enlist voluntarily. Bucky hadn't felt the same encouragement that Steve had from Uncle Sam's pointing finger.
Why can't you be more like Steve?
He'd never figured that out. If he had three more lifetimes to ponder it, he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to come up with an answer. Maybe he could avoid his father in the hereafter and continue to dodge that question.
When he heard the knock he'd been waiting for, he closed his eyes. Getting to his feet, he picked up the full-size candy bar he'd bought at the bodega around the corner late that night. He hadn't been able to sleep, so he'd just gone for a walk. Even after buying the candy for the only trick-or-treater he knew he'd get, he hadn't been able to sleep.
Maybe it was this moment that he'd been dreading.
The boy was dressed in a red-white-and-blue Captain America costume, and his eyes were so hopeful for the briefest of seconds before the expression shattered. "You aren't in costume."
He struggled to stay in the moment. His father's voice echoed in the back of his head, and seeing the boy dressed as his best friend, it was too much – worse than he'd even imagined it. He swallowed hard, against bile, against memory, desperate to be present. "Here's your treat," he said, and he knelt down after the boy took the candy. "Now here's the trick." Bucky rolled up his sweatshirt sleeve.
Even in the dead of summer, Bucky had worn long-sleeves, his left hand shoved into the pocket of his jeans. Now that it was cooler, and winter was well on its way, he'd traded button-ups for sweats. He'd been careful not to show the metal arm to anyone. He hadn't wanted questions he didn't to answer.
The boy's eyes grew large.
Bucky had been wearing gloves, but he pulled them off, first the right, then the left.
"You're the best robot ever," breathed the boy.
He laughed a little. "Only partially a robot," he said. "I guess a cyborg." He flexed his silver arm, letting the servos quietly hum, then held his left hand out, open, palm up.
"I didn't know cyborgs were real," the boy said reverently, carefully touching Bucky's metal fingers, pressing against each one in turn before slapping his palm with a high-five.
"As my pal, as Captain America, you'll keep my secret, right?" he asked the boy.
For a moment, he remembered Steve's shocked expression – when his mask had fallen off, when they'd seen each other for the first time in ages. He struggled to push that memory out. That wasn't new. He'd explored that, in depth, in his first notebook. He was working on the third one now.
The boy solemnly nodded. But then he paused. "You won't show Mom?"
Bucky shook his head, rolling his sleeve back down. "I'm not one for parties, pal," he said quietly. "I'm really sorry."
"It's okay," he said quietly. "Your arm is cool."
Bucky rested his hands on his knees, meeting the boy's eyes. "I want you to have a great time tonight, and have a lot of fun with your friends. Everybody's coming?"
The boy nodded. "Even Carson." He lowered his voice. "He's the bully. Only, I'm going to teach him how not to be one."
"I know you can," Bucky told him.
"He's coming as Iron Man. Captain America and Iron Man, they're buddies, right?"
"Yeah," he said, swallowing hard. "They're pals, too."
The boy gave him a soft smile. "Thank you for my candy," he said, and he looked at the candy bar for a moment, seeming to weigh his options.
"Your guests are arriving," called the boy's mom from across the hall.
"You'd best go," Bucky said quietly, hearing the front door down the hall buzz open.
"Yeah," the boy whispered, but he hugged Bucky suddenly – tightly, fiercely – but only for a moment before dashing back to his apartment. "Look what I got!" he said, smiling up at his mom.
He couldn't remember the last time he'd been hugged. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been touched in something that wasn't anger or fear. Shoving to his feet, he swayed a bit, overcome with emotions he wasn't prepared to experience.
He could feel the mom's worried gaze, but he melted back into the apartment, closing the door just as the first guests scampered to the party.
He wasn't sure how long he'd been sitting stock still. He'd just let the feelings come. His cheeks were still damp, but he'd stopped crying at some point. Everything had hit all at once, he'd been powerless except to let it run its course.
Sleep sounded good to him. Exhaustion permeated his muscles. Maybe he'd finally rest.
No sooner had he allowed himself the idea of getting up and falling onto the mattress – bare except for a sleeping bag – he heard it. His door handle attempted to turn. The lock kept it from turning a full rotation, but someone on the other side attempted to shove against it.
He heard murmurings, words he couldn't quite make out.
The exhaustion left him, replaced by adrenaline, a sensation that something bad was about to happen.
There was a backpack in the closet. His go-bag. It held the two filled notebooks, a bottle of water, MREs, a change of clothes, cash, two or three passports and IDs. Maybe Hydra had made him paranoid, but the training was beyond ingrained at this point. It wasn't just part of him, it was him.
For the first time – in a long time – he knew he couldn't just run.
He had to make sure his young pal was all right first.
Moving silently on cat-like feet, he eased to the door, stealthily opening it and peeking out.
His jaw tightened when he saw three figures, all in black, wearing rubber masks. Two rushed into the apartment across the hall while the third shoved and restrained the mother against the door. Terrified shrieks of the boy and his friends followed.
Bucky reacted.
He was across the hall in the blink of an eye, yanking the figure away from the mother, throwing him back into the hallway, hearing him crash into the wall.
In a graceful move that almost – almost – reminded him of dancing to big band music, Bucky gently spun the mother into his side, an arm around her protectively, effectively moving her into the apartment with him. In the same moment he released her, he caught the second intruder, shoving him into his accomplice who was trying to get back to his feet.
Bucky's jaw tightened when the one left in the apartment flashed a knife, backing away, nearly losing his footing as he stepped on and crushed the boy's plastic star-spangled shield.
Without hesitating, Bucky advanced on the final intruder, letting his left arm take the brunt of the feeble attempt to cut him.
While the mom had cried out, seeing the attack, the boy's eyes had just grown large.
"Call the police," Bucky told her firmly, throwing the third out of her apartment before heading out himself, closing the door behind him.
It wasn't what he'd wanted to do, but it was apparent what he had to do, once he heard the sirens approaching the apartment.
The three were baby-faced criminals. Old enough to know better but apparently not smart enough to do right. In annoyance, he punched the wall over one of their heads, causing all three to cringe and the plaster to crack, crumbling into the unruly hair of one of the intruders.
He quickly disappeared into his apartment, grabbing the notebook off his table, taking his backpack from the closet, and opting for one of the rooftop escapes. He'd liked this apartment. He had picked it, the first time he'd chosen a place of his own in decades. The weight of that felt heavy, like an anchor around his ankles as he shimmied up the fire escape. Plus, he had a pal. The first one he'd made in ages.
He'd never asked the boy's name.
The boy had never asked his name.
He's not sure what he would've said, had the boy asked.
Not that it mattered now, he realized, grunting as he leapt from his building to the one next to it.
Once he reached the neighboring rooftop, he settled onto the tar, stretching out, letting his weary head rest on the backpack. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but he chuckled at the thought of saving a Steve-like pal from a fight he couldn't win. Maybe there was a way to get back to who he was. Somehow.
He waited on the roof, listening, letting his eyes get adjusted to the nighttime. He could catch the glint of the blue flashing lights off the windows of the office building across the street, so he watched, waiting for the police to leave. They'd knock on the door. They'd rouse the landlord. They'd chase down strange leads to nowhere.
They wouldn't find him.
Unless one of them had a crazy gut feeling.
It was always possible.
As soon as the lights turned off, he listened as the police cars pulled away, and he let sleep take him – blissfully dreamless – there on the roof.
In the morning, he cleared out his apartment. He'd gotten too comfortable. There were a few too many things he felt he needed to pack up, to get rid of, to clean up. He'd do better next time.
Before he could leave town, though, he made one quick supply run. It was probably a bad idea, but it seemed better than the alternative.
He jumped down the entry stairs to the mailbox, fully expecting to see his cyborg pal looking at pizza coupons and sales catalogs. But, he wasn't there.
Frowning, he looked out the big glass security door, but he wasn't coming up the sidewalk. He peeked down the hall, but he only saw his mom, who was looking at him curiously.
He bashfully grinned, then returned to the task at hand, unlocking the mailbox.
There were the usual things – envelopes for Mom – but there was also a large padded envelope addressed to him! Okay, so it wasn't his name, but it was addressed to Captain America.
"Mom!" he gasped, barely getting the mailbox locked again before practically tripping up the stairs. "Look!"
She blinked as he nearly barreled into her.
"It's from him!" he said, pointing at the apartment across the hall. He'd gone over to say hello on Sunday after the party, after how scary it had been, to thank him for saving his mom. But the apartment had been empty.
"Well... I guess you should open it," she said, watching as he immediately tore into the package.
He giggled, pulling out a brand new toy shield. "It's even better than the one that got broke..."
She knelt when a piece of torn notebook paper flitted to the floor. "There's a little something more."
Just one line, in carefully written block letters: "Keep being a hero, pal."
End.