Closure

The phone rang downstairs, over and over, and was answered on the fifth ring. "Hello?"

"Hi, Matty. I'm just calling to check up on you," came the voice. The boy nodded as if his mother could see him. "I'm okay. Boxes an' me are watching Spongebob," he replied. His mother laughed on the other end. "Your cast isn't pinching or hurting? Did you eat something?"

"Nope-"

Boxes began barking suddenly and a string of expletives loudly erupted from upstairs. "Matty, what was that?" Matty either ignored his mother's urgent, worried tone or just didn't process it at all. "Boxes! Boxes, no!" he called, keeping the phone to his ear as he trotted from the kitchen up the stairs. "Matty, what's going on? Who's there? Is someone in the house?" his mother was shrilling. The barking was loud and persistent as Matty dragged the dog out of the steaming bathroom by the collar and closed the door behind him with an apology. "You're a bad dog, Boxes."

"Matty, please answer the phone," his mother cried. "Is someone in the house with you?" Matty sat on the steps and nodded again. "Yeah, there was this guy in our backyard an' he was bleeding so I let him in so we could put Band-Aids on him. He smelled really gross though, so he was taking a shower in my bathroom." On the other end of the line, though he couldn't see it, his mother was sitting at her desk, mouth agape, pale and frozen as if she had been made of ice. "Matty, stay in your room. I'm coming home right now. Don't come out for any reason, just take Boxes and stay. In. Your. Room. Do you hear me?"

Matty sighed.

"Matty, I mean it."

"Okaaay, mom," he exhaled in one long breath. "I love you too. Bye." He hung up the phone and nudged the yellow lab down the hall. "C'mon, Boxes. Looks like we have to play hospital in my room today."

The Soldier stood dripping wet yet again on the bathroom mat, grabbing one of the towels the boy had left for him. He would be lying if he said that the warm water running down his aching body wasn't a godsend in disguise. He threw the towel over his head and mussed it across his hair briefly before swiping it across the rest of him, all in silence, and tense posture.

It all crumbled when he suddenly leaned heavily against the countertop, draping the towel over his shoulder, his flesh one. He reached up with his human hand and found the point where man met machinery and massaged gingerly with his thumb and forefinger. He hadn't noticed the dull throb of pain in his shoulder since the helicarrier, and had been grateful for the hot water from the shower that erased it momentarily. Now that he was drying, the pain was slowly returning with the rest of his senses; the sound of pattering water had silenced the thoughts in his head while he stood, mostly stock still, under the thrum of water. 'Get a grip. You can't lose yourself now; you've got a mission for fuck's sake-'

With a pang of realization, the Soldier realized that that was wrong. There was no mission. Not anymore. Something in his mind entertained the thought that Hydra had pretty much run itself into the ground by the time the chip the Captain had was plugged into the helicarrier's computer-the Soldier didn't even know he possessed intuition anymore. Yes, he could process the sensation of being watched and had enough smarts and training to think ahead, but he had never needed intuition. If anything unexpected or foreseen arose, he would blow right through it with a bullet from his gun. It had become an extinct method of thought, and the sudden use of it now was a bit startling. 'You don't know that. Hydra's still out there-you can't kill a monster with many heads,' said the voice in his head. "'In a minute now, they'll come barging in, dragging you back to that icy hellhole, punishing you for your failure-'

The sharp sound of cracking jarred the Soldier out of his deafeningly noisy internal conflict and his head snapped up. He had pushed away from the counter then, easily tightening into a defensive position, his hands gesturing as though he held a knife in them. His eyes glued themselves to the bathroom door, hard and devoid of emotion, ready for anyone who might come rushing through it. When silence filled his ears for more than enough time needed for someone to attack him from the other side of the door, he slowly relaxed, straightening and glanced at the countertop. Where he had been leaning, there were finger-shaped marks in the granite, long, splintery cracks branching from each indent in the stone. The Soldier slowly blinked in annoyance and brought his metal hand to his face. He must've been so lost in thought that he didn't even realize that he had been gripping the sink like a vice. He balled it into a fist gradually, furrowing his brow when he noticed that the fingers wouldn't curl all the way into the palm and the thumb didn't even move at all. He tried a second time, strain visible on his features as he attempted to make a fist. The digits curled halfway and stopped.

Annoyance, one of the few emotions the Soldier was familiar with since the bridge and the sudden uninvited burst of recurring memories, bubbled through his veins and audibly growled under his breath as his mechanical arm failed to do as it was told. Annoyance and some other thing that made his stomach churn in a sickening way at the sight of his fritzing appending, but the Soldier wasn't quite sure what it was. He didn't like it.

A knock on the door had him diving back into attack position, despite his halfway functioning arm, and all traces of his earlier emotions wiped away to present a smooth, cold slate. "Hey, mister, are you dry? We should put the Band-Aids on soon," came the boy's voice. "My mom's on her way home." At first, the Soldier didn't recognize the tone or the voice on the other side of the door and had flown towards it at near blinding speed, intending to rip the door off its hinges and attack with brutal strength, but something clicked in his head.

It was just that kid. The tiny Steve with the green cast. Friendly.

The Soldier shook his head roughly and again relaxed his taut stance. "Y-yeah," he replied, then repeated with more force and volume after he had regained himself, "Yeah."

"I left some of dad's clothes outside. You can wear those if you want," said the boy, his voice growing softer and softer. He must've gone. The Soldier took his absence as a moment to open the door and grab the clothes the boy had left for him, shutting the door roughly again behind him. It was a simple pair of loose sweatpants, loose even for the Soldier-the kid's father must've been huge-a plain white t-shirt and a navy blue jacket. The Soldier dressed, fiddling for a moment with the pants ties as he struggled to get them to stay on his hips, and cast a glance at his discarded black clothes. He wasn't used to the looseness of the civilian clothes; they made him feel vulnerable and naked, almost as if he was being sent out to battle with no weapons or armor.

After a moment of thought, the Soldier strapped the knives from his uniform to his legs underneath the sweatpants, a minor comfort in his situation. He grabbed his clothes and wandered out of the bathroom, scanning for the boy in the hall. He padded down the carpeted hallway barefooted, away from the stairs, glancing into rooms as he passed them. One of them was a completely white bedroom, with stark white sheets spread neatly across a bed, blinding white carpeting and curtains allowing afternoon sunlight to brighten the room to near scalding levels. The guest room, maybe. The next room was painted deep blue, with a large bed in the center, a few pieces of furniture consisting of a dresser, two bedside tables, and an entertainment center. It was plain and well-kept, having a sort of military stiffness about it. The Soldier wondered briefly if the parents were military personnel, and was suddenly greeted with an unusually chipper voice. "Hey! Come in here!"

The boy was standing in the doorway of a room at the end of the hall, waving the Soldier over, a silly grin on his freckled face. "My mom said we have to stay in my room til she gets home, so we have to put the Band-Aids on in there," he was saying. The boy's room was an explosion of color; reds, blues, whites and yellows, and speckled with toys and books all over the floor and on the surface of every available piece of furniture. Boxes the dog lay curled contentedly on a sun warmed patch of the floor, glancing up when the Soldier entered the room. Posters were pinned to the walls, and it and the bed sheets, and nearly all of the toys bore the same face that wormed its way through his memories and seemed to be burned into the backs of his eyes since the bridge.

Captain America was inescapable it seemed. Irony was cruel in the way that even after walking and walking to escape the face that haunted his thoughts, he would wander into a room practically branded with it. The boy waved the Soldier over to his tiny bed, climbing up onto it and rummaging through the plastic bin he'd brought from the bathroom. The mattress dipped as the Soldier stiffly deposited his weight onto it. He briefly surveyed the room, staring all around from wall to wall as if searching it for some threat to come jumping out from the closet door or under the bed or through the window. "Looking for someone?" asked the boy, tugging on the Soldier's jacket. The Soldier tensed immediately, snapping around to glare at the sudden movement, then cast his gaze to his feet, almost in apology. "No."

The boy nodded and tugged at the Soldier's sleeve again as gesture for him to shrug his shoulders out of the jacket. He squeezed a small amount of an antibacterial ointment on the tip of a cotton Q-tip and poked at a scratch on the Soldier's right arm. "You should find Captain America," said the boy suddenly. The Soldier tensed visibly, but didn't direct his gaze to the boy, preferring to keep it glued to the floor. "Why do you say that?" It didn't sound like a question at all-more like a statement, deadpan and quiet. "Because you two are friends."

The Soldier blinked. 'Because we're friends!'

'I've known you all your life!'

'I'm not gonna fight you. I'm with you til the end of the line.'

The pangs of a headache were beginning to prickle behind the Soldier's eyes as what appeared to be the trigger words sent a wave of fresh memories and pain coursing through him. "You don't know that," he forced out through half-clenched teeth. "You are! Really! Look," the boy finished applying the Band-Aid to the Soldier's arm and hopped down from the bed, padding over to his bookcase. He reached up to the top and plucked down a pamphlet from the top of it, carrying it with him back to the bed, leafing through it and settling on a page. "Here," he said. He pointed at a photo of another picture that looked to be located in some museum. The Soldier recognized the face in the portrait as his own, but he didn't know at what time it had been taken. He knew who it was, but he didn't know who it was. He didn't know those lively blue eyes that held a certain spark, or the slight hint of a proud smile on those upturned lips. He didn't know who that warm skin that hadn't seen the harsh, unforgiving nature of the cryotube belonged to. The boy leaned forward a bit, looking up into the face of the Winter Soldier, past the long brown hair that curtained his face, and said softly, "That's you, isn't it? My mom took me to the Smithsonian a few months ago and we went to the Captain America exhibit, that's where I got this from. You and Captain America are friends. Says so on your exhibit-thingy. You're supposed to be dead too, but you're here. If I was gone for a really long time, I would want to go see my friends. That's what my dad does too, after he comes back home from his tours. He's a soldier, too, like you. Captain; he has to go away sometimes...I want to be a soldier just like him too, an' Captain America."

'What do you want to to be when you grow up, Bucky?' Steve asked, looking up at the slightly taller not-Soldier. The not-Soldier never missed a beat; he knew the answer to this question, had known for too long a time. He was bristling with pride as he replied, "I wanna be a soldier, just like my dad. I'll be the best soldier America's ever had." He smiled brightly, as widely as his ten-year-old face would allow and puffed out his chest. "What about you, Steve?" Steve glanced at the floor, inspecting the living room carpet. He picked with it, pinching the fabric between his forefinger and thumb, and the not-Soldier could see the gears turning in his little blonde head. He couldn't shake the feeling of disappointment and dread from his chest when those blue eyes redirected towards him and Steve said, "I want to be a soldier too." A smile slowly spread across his face as his confidence seemed to grow. "I want to be a soldier too, Bucky. We'll both be the best soldier's ever, right?" The not-Soldier forced a smile, past the pang of dread that had appeared in his heart. "Yeah, Steve. Yeah."

The Soldier stared at the photo for a moment, taking in the boy's words at the same time. "Where did you say you saw this?" he asked finally. "The Smithsonian downtown. There's a whole wing just for Captain America and the Howling Commandos. Cool, huh? Maybe after you costume party, you could go and check it out," replied the boy with a grin. The Soldier sat still in thought, wondering what he would do with all these thoughts that he was failing to suppress, what this growing curiosity in his chest meant. If he went to this thing, would the memories finally thin out? Would he find out who he really was? Who the Captain was, why he was so hell-bent on trying to get through to the Soldier? He wondered if this was what closure was.

The boy just continued to stick Band-Aids to him.

"Matty? Matty, I'm home!"

The boy's head jerked towards the door and he jumped off of the bed. "That's my mom," he said, opening his bedroom door. Boxes stood and bolted through it, down the stairs at the sound of a new voice. The Soldier was already shrugging into the jacket and grabbing his clothes, moving as swiftly as he was silent. He knew that if he stayed around long enough and was caught by the boy's mother, she would most certainly call the police, which was the last thing he needed. He went to the window and used his left arm to wrench it open, willing the fingers to cooperate enough to grab hold of it and actually pull the thing open enough for him to slip through onto the roof. The strength of the arm had not been done away with, thankfully, and he was able to pull it fully open. He paused momentarily, knowing that precious escape seconds were fleeting; he could already hear the footsteps thundering up the stairs. He reached over and snatched the pamphlet up from the bed.

Not a second too late, Matty ducked back into the room, his mother in tow and worrying over him with a vigor. "Yeah, it was him!" he was saying excitedly. "He's-"

He was greeted by nothing but silence when he turned back to the bed, his smile faltering momentarily as he realized that the Soldier was gone. He padded towards the window, blocking out his mother's voice as he gazed down the street. He could just barely see him now, but he smiled as he watched the Soldier run down the sidewalk and disappear around the corner.