Notes: FULL DISCLOSURE: stories like Long Range Reconnaissance have done a fantastic job with Bucky's coming out of Winter Soldier and back into himself. I'm not going to try to replicate that. This fic is concerned with living after he remembers who he is. This chapter is the bridge.
Chapter 2: For Everything (turn turn turn)
SHIELD pumps Steve for as much information as he has about Bucky. Steve can't think of anything useful for the longest time; his brain keeps coming up with useless tidbits like his favourite colour (blue) or how he likes his coffee (black) or the different kinds of smiles he has and what it means when his eyes crinkle or his eyebrows skyrocket. It takes several hours before he manages to give them the kind of information they want, skills and psychological profile and everything else, and after all that, they forbid him from getting involved any further and tell him to go home.
Steve survives for months on official SHIELD reports, hearsay, some questionably-legal eavesdropping and even more questionable intel given to him by Tony, who writes a program to get into Fury's systems and manages to pull as many files as he can before he's caught. After that Steve is given an official reprimand courtesy of Fury himself, but he doesn't care, and the fact that Captain America is practically insouciant about committing grand insubordination is serious enough that at the end of their talk, Fury says he'll try to keep Steve more informed, at least as much as possible.
None of the news is good. Clint and Natasha sit down with Steve and give him first-hand accounts of their experiences with brainwashing and mind control, and Steve gets sick to his stomach just listening to it, never mind imagining what it must be like for Bucky. Natasha tells him of the day agents found her and told her she'd never been a fashion designer, or a ballerina, or a schoolteacher, of letting SHIELD into her head to pull the Red Room out, of still having memories that no one could decide the truth of. Clint talks about looking into the eyes of the man who gave him a job and pulled him from the brink of self-destruction, only to fire directly at his chest. When Steve panics, Clint tells him that Loki compelled him to take a headshot but he hadn't done it, he'd found enough of himself in there somewhere to aim for the kevlar hidden under Fury's suit. There's hope, Clint says. A chance, Natasha adds.
Steve hasn't had nightmares for a while but he does now. They still don't let him in to see Bucky.
He spends his second twenty-first century Christmas in the hallway outside Bucky's room armed with a deck of cards, some old comics, photos of the Commandos, and two bottles of beer.
"Aw, Cap," says Clint, dropping down beside him, probably from the ceiling tiles or something ridiculous, and collapsing into a cross-legged position. "That's just sad."
Steve shrugs. "It is what it is," he says. He knows this is Bucky's room because he asked, but the cell doesn't even have a window, and everything is soundproofed or he'd try to pass something in morse code. Honestly, that's probably why they took that precaution in the first place, but who knows.
"What'd you guys play?" Clint asks, taking the cards and slipping them out of the cardboard case, shuffling them with flash that Steve would expect more from a circus performer and not a master spy.
"Snap," Steve says. "But you need more than - oh."
The 'oh' comes from looking up and seeing Natasha sit down next to Clint, folding her legs beneath her in a smooth, deadly motion and setting down a bottle of vodka; Bruce and Tony standing behind her with snacks and drinks, which they scatter around before Tony drops to the ground with all the coordination of an elephant and Bruce settles himself gingerly on Tony's far side.
"Guys -" Steve says, and his eyes sting.
"I call dealer," Tony says, grabbing the cards out of Clint's hands.
"That means he's going to cheat," Bruce says meditatively.
"I'm the only regular guy between the super-soldier, assassin twins and you, buddy, which means I'm going to have my hands smashed or cut off at the wrists if I'm not careful. I would've brought a gauntlet if I'd known, but there you go. Hell yeah I'm going to cheat."
"It won't help you," Natasha says serenely, and she offers Steve a sip of her vodka. It goes down clean and burns his throat. He thinks about Bucky's age-old complaint that alcohol should be like a naked woman, beautiful even without her clothes on, not needing stupid things like orange juice and liqueur to make it interesting, and wonders if that's changed.
After the new year they move Bucky to a room with a window - one way - and Steve is allowed to look at him through the glass. His hair is still long and shaggy, hanging almost to his shoulders - the old Bucky would never have put up with that, even in the army as soon as he got away with it he didn't even bother to shave more than once a week, and taking care of hair like that would've been ridiculous - and his body, what Steve can see of it in the white medical uniform, is criss-crossed with scars that Steve doesn't remember. His left arm is gone, the sleeve folded up and held with thread, not pins.
He stalks the room like a caged tiger, taking the corners with military precision, never stopping.
"Is that him?" Steve asks, sensing Natasha behind him despite never hearing her coming, even with augmented hearing. "The one you knew, I mean."
"In a way," she says, and her face is still but Steve is beginning to read her now, and her eyebrows furrow in a way that means she's just barely holding on. "The James I knew - he was angry, yes, but there was always something else. Something deeper. Regardless of the Red Room, he was - kind to me. I don't see that now."
Steve sucks in a breath. Natasha unfolds her arms and brushes his wrist with her fingertips. "We'll get him back," she says, steel beneath her voice. "Even if I have to crawl into his head and drag him out myself."
It's nice, in a horrible, useless sort of way, to know that Steve isn't the only one who loves the man prowling behind the glass.
Fury calls Steve into his office in the beginning of February. "I'm going to tell you this only because I'm sure you'll find out somehow, and I don't want you to get your hopes up," he says, continuing his streak as SHIELD's resident ray of sunshine.
Steve swallows. "Sir?"
"Our people think they've gotten all the triggers out," Fury says. "Of course it's too soon to tell, but as far as we know at this moment, we've managed to dismantle any conditioning the Red Room left behind."
There's something very disturbing about discussing putting Bucky's mind back together using the same vocabulary that he might describe taking apart an ugly table. Still, Steve nearly collapses with relief. "So what's the bad news?"
"We've taken the Red Room out, but that doesn't leave very much left. At best, what we have is the blank-slate mental state they would have put him in between missions, before giving him new programming. The James Barnes you knew is, at this moment, gone."
Steve holds his ground. "That's not all."
"No, it's not. We have - an artefact," Fury says carefully, and Steve wonders how many meetings they had just to agree that he could say that much. Steve will probably have to sign something before he's permitted to leave the office just in case. "It doesn't matter what it is or where we got it, but we believe it can be used to draw out what might be left of Barnes' old memories. Depending on what the Red Room used to suppress them in the first place, if anything remains, we should be able to bring them back."
Steve's hands tighten into fists at his sides, but he does his best to keep himself as neutral as possible. "What are the odds of it working?"
"I prefer not to calculate the odds," Fury says. "Odds can be manipulated, and expectations skewed. The point is that if his memories are still there, this should be able to get them out. The problem is that if they used something similar to wipe them, there won't be anything to retrieve. The other problem is that the device doesn't differentiate. It will bring everything back - from childhood all the way until he was last put to sleep. That means that all his missions, all his assignments, will come back as well. If he's still as good a man as he was when he fell off that train, there's a high likelihood that these memories will cause him a significant amount of trauma."
Steve's jaw twitches, but he forces himself to remain steady. "So what are you saying, sir?"
"I'm saying that even if he does come back, there's a chance he'll lose his mind out of guilt," Fury says, and Steve might be imagining it but his voice seems to lose some of its edge. "I'm sorry."
Steve nods. "But you're going to risk it?"
"Yes."
"And can I see him? If it works?"
This time Fury's expression definitely softens, something like regret around the corners of his mouth. "I think it's best if someone with presence in his more recent memories is there to help him through it first," he says. "If he does react badly to the knowledge of what he did as the Winter Soldier, he likely won't want to see you. Agent Romanov, at least, was with him at that time, and shouldn't be as much of a shock."
A frisson of something - jealousy? panic? - runs through Steve, but he wrenches it back. "I understand, sir. I only ask that I be allowed to see him as soon as it's reasonably expected he'll be able to survive the shock."
"Of course, son," Fury says, despite having a birthday some fifty years after Steve's, and Steve almost laughs at the sobriquet because everything in his life is so surreal. "I'd like you to step up your sessions with your therapist, in the meantime. You're under a lot of stress and we don't want that to get in the way at the wrong time."
Steve is not about to break down in tears in the middle of a battle - he continued fighting Hydra when Bucky's death was still fresh and raw in his mind, thanks - but he knows better than to argue. "Yes, sir," he says.
Later, Steve barely remembers the next few weeks. He doesn't starve, so he supposes he eats; no one attacks him with a sponge and a bucket of soapy water, so he must bathe; he doesn't develop bedsores, so at some point he obviously leaves the house, but it's all a blur, a litany of Bucky's name, of hopes and fears and prayers. Steve wears out the knees on three pairs of sweatpants, crouched on the floor with his head on his hands, sending his requests skyward. The other Avengers would mock him for that, he's pretty sure - Tony and Clint, definitely, Natasha might just roll her eyes in private, and Bruce would likely sit him down for an unintentionally patronizing lecture on Asian deities and world religion - but Steve takes comfort where he can.
Everything is a fog until the day Natasha finds him at the gym, where she waits for him to stop pummelling the punching bag before stepping in. "We have him," she says, and gives Steve a cautious smile. "Full recovery will take time, but he's here, and he remembers you."
The bag sways, and Steve grabs hold of it with both hands to steady it, not to mention himself. "Can I see him?"
"Not yet." Natasha tosses her head, flicking hair out of her eyes. "He's ashamed of what he did as the Soldier, but we anticipated that. I'll let you know."
"Thank you." Steve's fingers grip the canvas until the rough fabric digs into his skin. "Tell them - all of them - thank you."
"I will."
It's the first week of March when they bring Steve into the facility, with the knowledge that if anything goes the least awry, if Bucky's brain activity spikes the wrong way, they'll be pulling Steve out before he can finish saying 'what the -' and resistance will not be appreciated. Steve agrees - he'd agree to go in wearing one of those sexy Captain America dresses he's seen girls wear on Halloween if it means he gets to see Bucky - and has to keep wiping his palms on his slacks.
Bucky has lost weight, and his cheekbones are even more stark against his face than usual. They've cut his hair and allowed him to shave, but his left sleeve still hangs loose and empty. Steve's breath leaves his body like when his plane hit the water all those years ago, and for a moment he has to struggle to stand.
"Hey, punk," Bucky says, with a small, hesitant smile, not wide enough to show his canines; the one he used to have after they argued. "You're still wearing those stupid slacks, huh?"
They pull Steve from active duty for the next month, because it's clear he's compromised and will be no good on the field. Steve argues with them because he feels like he has to, but nowhere near hard enough that they take him seriously, and he supposes that, like his earlier sassing, it's probably a sign in itself.
It means he gets to spend his time with Bucky, who, as Steve expected, has good days and bad days. There are days when they play cards and swap stories and share memories - Steve knows it's as much a tool for recovery as it is about nostalgia, helping Bucky slot things into their proper places, giving him confirmation that what's in his head is really real. There are also days when the guard at the door shakes his head no, and Steve looks through the window to see Bucky curled up on his bed with his face against the wall, clutching his empty sleeve.
Four weeks after Steve and Bucky sit down for the first time with four feet and seventy years between them, Bucky's various psychologists and psychiatrists recommend that he be moved somewhere with more regular social interaction, in order for him to be acclimatized. Steve calls Tony so fast he's surprised his phone doesn't complain about him mashing the speed dial, and after rounds of paperwork and bureaucracy that make Steve want to chew off his own arm - hey, he and Bucky can be a matched set - they give dispensation for Bucky to take a room in the Avengers Tower.
It's not that much of a stretch - it's already been retrofitted to accommodate any random Hulk-outs that Bruce might have, not to mention all the possible ways Tony's inventions might go crazy and kill everyone - and it has as many cameras as the SHIELD base, possibly more. Steve has a room there that he uses when on assignment and can't be bothered to take the train back to Brooklyn twice a day, and it doesn't take long for them to set things up for Bucky.
That doesn't mean things are normal. Bucky is quiet, withdrawn, and easily spooked; seeing Natasha when he doesn't expect it sometimes sets him off. The good thing is that in a house of superheroes, someone is always there to take him down if he loses control.
The hardest part for Steve is reminding himself that this isn't just picking up where they left off, that just because they spent months knee-to-knee in the trenches and back-to-back on hard ground, because they pooled the pay from the four jobs between them for a tiny apartment in Brooklyn and slept curled together to generate more body heat, that doesn't mean that's all right now. Not that Steve would even try - there's a wall between them now, invisible but no less real, and Bucky isn't the only one adding bricks.
It does mean that each night Steve lies awake, the bed that never used to take up much conscious thought in his head now feeling much too big, until, finally, that changes - just not the way Steve thought it would.
"Excuse me, Captain Rogers?" JARVIS' cultured tones, as well as that wake-up chemical he puts into the air that smells like coffee, drag Steve out of sleep. "I beg your pardon for disturbing your rest, but you did ask me to notify you if Sergeant Barnes' condition changed significantly. His heart-rate and cortisol levels have spiked. I do believe he is experiencing night terrors. He is not presently a danger to himself, but intervention would be prudent."
Steve scrambles out of bed, bare feet slipping against the smooth floors. Gotta get a rug put in or something. "Thanks, JARVIS," he says. "Doors?"
"Locked from the outside, as per instruction, but your code will open them."
"All right." It's not far to Bucky's room, but Steve's hands are shaking and he mis-punches in the code three times - it's like back after he first had the serum, his body too big for his muscle memory, and the first time he tried to dial a telephone he ended up throwing it across the room in frustration. This isn't even a real set of buttons, just painted light on glass, but finally something beeps and the door slides open.
Bucky takes his arm off at night - SHIELD says there are no more triggers left in his brain and JARVIS has control over whether it's activated, but he says he sleeps better if he doesn't have to worry about it - and while at first the thought distressed him, now Steve is grateful for it. It means less for Steve to think about as he climbs up onto Bucky's bed. "JARVIS, bring up the lights, slowly," Steve says, and the room brightens just a little, the glow soft and orange. "If there's anything calming you can release into the air, do that too."
Steve has had meetings with the psych department about Bucky and his nightmares, and he knows that he's not supposed to shake or startle him awake. It's disorienting enough for someone having a regular bad dream, and even before being frozen in the ice Steve remembers being jolted awake, sweating and terrified and completely unaware of where he was. With Bucky, still trying to knit together the pieces of his brain and identity, Steve has to be much, much more careful.
Talk to him, they told Steve. Establish physical presence, non-threatening but obvious, that will filter through to his subconscious. Steve finds Bucky's hand and squeezes it in both of his. "Hey," he says, his throat squeezing. "Hey, Buck, it's me. It's Steve. I'm here, and you're gonna come back to me, okay, so just listen to me and follow me out."
He talks while Bucky thrashes and cries out in Russian - Steve's been taking lessons from Natasha but she's not a very patient teacher, prone to frustration, and anyway they don't really have time and so he has no idea what Bucky is saying - and gradually JARVIS brings up the lights to a comfortable dim level.
At last Bucky snaps awake, but when he does it's not Bucky who stares at Steve wide-eyed. Fortunately Steve has combat-reflexes and plenty of experience, because he's off the bed and prepared by the time Bucky launches himself at him, teeth bared and snarling. The unexpected lack of one of his limbs throws Bucky off, but Steve is at a disadvantage in that of the two of them, he's the only one trying not to hurt the other person.
"Shall I call for security?" JARVIS asks, as Bucky slams Steve against the wall, only to fall back when he goes to take a swing with his missing arm.
"No!" Steve shouts. "It's fine, just give me a second!"
It takes him more than a second, but eventually Steve gets Bucky pinned on the floor, one arm across his chest just below his throat, and the wildness drains out of Bucky's eyes and the fight from his body. "Hey, Buck, hey," Steve says, throat tight, and Bucky sags and lets his head fall back against the floor.
"Bad?" Bucky asks, voice rasping.
"Nah," Steve says, and holds him down for a few more seconds before letting him up. "You're okay."
Bucky brushes Steve off with a sharp gesture when he tries to help him, and he gets himself up and drops down onto the bed hard enough to make the frame creak. "I'm fine," he says, his voice tight. "It's fine. You didn't have to come running."
"Yeah, I did," Steve says quietly. His own nightmares have shifted lately: now it's less the crackle of ice above his head, freezing cold all around and the whistling of Arctic wind in his ears; no longer Bucky's fingers slipping from his, watching him pinwheel as he careens down into the ravine below. Now it's Bucky's eyes gone hard and grey as he slips back into the Winter Soldier and raises his gun at Steve's head, only to shift at the last second and fire at his own temple instead. "I'll always find you, you know. Wherever you go. I hope you know that."
Bucky flops back on the bed with a grimace, massaging the stump of his left arm. "You oughta get that sentiment checked out, Captain Rogers," he says, closing his eyes. "Looks like you've got a terminal case. Something like that could get you drummed out of the service."
There's something about the twist of his voice as he says it that makes it sound less like a joke than he probably intended, and Steve swallows. "Move over," he says. "I'm staying."
"No you're not," Bucky says, shooting straight back up like someone jammed him full of electricity. "This isn't our tiny apartment in Brooklyn with room for only one bed and no heat, Steve, this is the Avengers Tower, with beds the size of swimming pools and cameras in the toilets so JARVIS can monitor how much fibre we're getting. No way."
Steve's heart thuds. They're skirting close now to that thing they never talked about because it would be suicide to talk about, suicide by fists and boots and improvised weapons, and later on by dishonourable discharges and public disgrace. "You're right," he says carefully. "This is the Avengers Tower. Which is exactly why I'm staying." Bucky starts to protest again, but Steve holds up a hand. "No, you don't - we're broken, all of us, and we all end up sharing beds more often than we like and it doesn't mean anything."
This time Bucky straight-up raises his eyebrows. "I'm impressed."
"What? No!" Steve would flush if this weren't important, but it is, and he beats the embarrassment back. "Not like that, come on. I just, all of us here have reasons why we don't want to sleep alone sometimes, and nobody's going to judge anyone else for it, I swear." He's not going to talk about the others or their reasons - it's not his place, and he only understands the surface level anyway - but he has seen them. No one who's lived in the Tower for more than a week can avoid it: Bruce and Tony collapsed against each other on the sofa, their faces lit by the soft blue light of the arc reactor; Natasha and Clint curled against each other like they're one person, Natasha's arm slung across Clint's back with a beretta clutched in her hand.
It's not decided who takes comfort with whom, either; Steve has walked in on Bruce, asleep with his head in Natasha's lap, her fingers in his hair, while she sits, half awake with her eyes lowered to green slits. Steve himself has fallen asleep at Tony's workbench, head resting on his folded arms, watching the man tinker into the late hours of the night, neither of them speaking, and woken up to the sound of Dummy struggling to lower a blanket that turned out to be a grease-stained rag across his shoulders. Steve knows that despite the odd mix of banter and sudden, brooding silences, Clint can work a neck massage like nobody's business and prefers to keep one arm curled tight around the other person's waist.
They all tear each other apart, true, and sometimes they need far less motivation to do so than they should for a team that saved the Earth together, but sometimes the thing about broken pieces is that they find ways to fit together.
Unfortunately Steve has no way to explain that to Bucky - or himself, really - and so he shrugs and twists his hands together in his lap. "I'm just - nobody's going to judge, or even assume anything. We all of us could have our own sitcom and keep all the shrinks in New York in business just with our issues alone, it's not. I don't know. It's not like that." He swallows. "Plus I'd like to wake up and not have that minute where I think I've dreamed it all and you're still dead, if my being selfish would make it easier."
"Yeah, that's you to the bone right there. Pure selfishness." Bucky snorts, but he moves over to give Steve room. It's more the gesture than necessity - the bed is half the size of their old apartment, just stick a sink on the end and there it is - and Steve tugs the blankets out from under them and sets them to rights. "Watch those hospital corners, soldier," Bucky says, looking up at Steve through half-lidded eyes, and Steve chuckles.
"I still make my bed that way," Steve says, and finally he crawls under the blankets. "I bounce a quarter off it to make sure I've got it right, just in case. The others laugh at me but I can't help it."
Bucky rolls onto his side, facing away from Steve, and it feels like walking downstairs absent-mindedly and expecting there to be one more step. They never slept like that back in Brooklyn. Bucky always lay with his chest against Steve's back, curled around Steve's smaller form with one arm folded on top of his side to maximize the transfer of body heat. Steve used to chafe at it, the obvious show of protection and clear evidence of Bucky's physical superiority, but at the same time, it was warm that way and his lungs seemed to do better when he could feel as well as hear Bucky's slow, calm breaths, and so he never argued much.
Funny that he misses it now, but at the same time, Steve finds himself wanting slide an arm around Bucky's waist and hold him steady, so maybe it's not just Bucky who's been dropped head-first down the stairs.
"These mattresses are weird," Bucky says out of nowhere. "It's like I can't sleep without that big spring sticking into my side."
"I used to brace my knee against one of them, to keep it from sliding," Steve says, and he wonders how much time they spend reminiscing and what, if anything, they're trying to prove by it. Desperately clinging to what they know while the rest of the world moves on at breakneck speed, or something, he's sure his shrink would have something to say. "Tony calls it memory foam. I've got one too, and yeah, it is weird."
"The hell kind of name is that? Is that a StarkTech thing?"
"Apparently it's everywhere, just meant to sound more futuristic than it is." Steve's fingers twitch against the blankets as his hand tries to move to touch Bucky of its own accord. Steve grimaces and forges on with the conversation, pretending it's not strange to do this staring at the back of Bucky's head in the darkness. "Listen, uh, Tony says it's supposed to be good for people who have to share a bed, if the one person kicks and fusses it shouldn't wake the other person up like a normal mattress. So you don't need to worry about waking me or anything."
He means that Bucky doesn't have to stay all the way over there with his nose practically in the wall, but Bucky just tosses off a salute high enough Steve can see it. "Roger that, Cap," he says, and he doesn't change position.
Well, no sense in pushing it, and Steve isn't even sure what he wants to happen. "I'm here if you need me," he says, and that sounds kind of pathetic and useless even in his own head, but too late for that. He almost says 'sweet dreams' but catches himself just in time. "Wake me if you have to."
"I will." A moment of quiet, then Bucky lets out a breath. "Hey, it's fine, I promise. Stop it with the Steve Rogers puppy eyes."
"You can't even see me!"
"I don't need to." Bucky turns just enough that Steve can see his smile, small though it is. "Yeah, that face, right there. Cut it out and get some sleep."
"You don't get to order me around, Sergeant," Steve says, but he lets himself brush a hand against Bucky's shoulder.
Clint catches them leaving the room together the next morning, but one look at Steve's face and he snaps his mouth shut. "Tony says he's replaced all of the kitchen appliances now," he says, falling into step with them as they head down the stairs to the kitchen. "Not sure if that means there'll be less bugs or more fires, but either way, I'd stand back."
Bucky doesn't say anything - it's not that he dislikes Clint, Steve's pretty sure, but he's protective of Natasha and hasn't decided whether Clint is good for her yet - and so Steve sighs. "Thanks for the warning," he says. "Maybe I'll just stick with cereal."
"That's probably a good idea."
Bucky snorts, but subsides when Steve squeezes his elbow.