Winifred Lancaster stands in a wheat-field. She lets the wind blow her dark hair back, lets it toss the length of her skirt around her strong legs, and feels it on each fingertip. She loves the West, but she does not know it yet. She dreams of bigger things.
She meets a boy named Barnes adjacent to the Ferris wheel at the county fair the summer that she turns eighteen. She falls in love with his smile. She lets him drag her across the country before he leaves her to die in a city that she hates.
James Buchanan Barnes is conceived in a wheat-field. The young lovers hide, and bid each other adieu. A twister tears the field apart. Winifred's stomach begins to swell. They marry under a weeping willow and disappear into the night.
Steve is watching Bucky breathe. The slow rise and fall of his chest and stomach, his pulse beating lightly, the soft exhale/inhale of his nostrils – it's amazing. It's an absolute miracle. The way that - the way that Bucky could be here in 2014, alive, with Steve, no matter what – no matter what –
Hows he doin? Sam texts.
He's asleep, Steve replies.
Sam does not reply immediately, but when he does it is a resounding EXCELLENT.
The apartment is quiet and dark. It is new – Steve's old one was bugged to hell and torn apart. This one is bigger, slightly older. Sam got it for him by calling in a favor. Steve told him that it was unnecessary. Sam shook his head and said "Dude, nobody is gonna be mad about me calling in a favor for Captain America." Steve likes Sam. Sam's not afraid to acknowledge him for him, every part of him.
He thinks that Bucky will like Sam, too.
But right now Bucky isn't in the state to like anyone. Or speak with anyone or interact with anyone. He is catatonic, despondent. Crouched over shaking, or on the defense, or completely motionless. His eyes are wide and empty or wide and brimming with a mix of fear and disgust. It's like – it's like –
It's like during the war. It's like after Steve got big and saved Bucky. It's like carrying him out of the HYDRA base, shouldering him back to camp. It's like the mornings Bucky didn't shave out of apathy. It's like every time his uniform – so well-manicured, well-pressed back at home because he always cared about his appearance, always made sure to look his most dashing – was laughably under regulation, wrinkled and stained and hanging off of his body. It's like the nights of drinking together alone at a table, Bucky clutching his bottle and staring into the void. It's like the emptiness of his jokes, the bizarre listlessness of his movements.
It's like he's frozen.
He came home without trouble. He was subdued. They lead him back to the US like he was a blind dog on a leash.
"какова моя миссия?" he would repeat.
Natasha would not reply.
"какова моя миссия? какова моя миссия? какова моя миссия?" Again and again, each more desperate than the last.
Finally, "Jesus, Natasha, I am about this close to learning Russian just so I can answer this poor son of a bitch!" from Sam.
"какова моя миссия?" he repeated.
Natasha, with an unreadable sigh, said, "вспоминать."
Steve looked it up. It was spelt incorrectly, and from memory, but the Internet gave him an answer he did not like. "What is my mission?"
"What did you tell him?" Steve asks Natasha. Natasha does not reply.
Bucky stirs in his sleep. Steve's breath catches. Outside, there is silence. The night is clear. And Steve thinks, this is crazy. Here we are. Together. Because –
Together it was always like they could operate. They lived in each other's spaces; they carved out the air around them for each other. In Brooklyn, or during the war, it didn't matter. Where one went, the other followed.
Even to the future. Or, present. Steve has got to stop thinking about this as 'the future'. It's not like he's going to wake up one day, back in Brooklyn, tell everyone "Hey, I've been to the future. You will not believe what happened." This is reality.
Bucky is here. Steve is here. It is 2014. They are alive.
Never thought I'd make it to 95, did you, Buck?
Steve pauses, thinks of Bucky staring out across the city lights on hot summer nights or gazing down the snowy heights in Europe.
Never thought you'd make it to 95, did you, Buck?
He closes his eyes, presses his hands to his forehead. He really shouldn't be happy about this, he shouldn't. Bucky is – is so – suffering. And Steve is so god damn selfish to want this, to be happy with this. He chokes back a dry sob. He's too exhausted to deal with issues of morality tonight.
He treads lightly to his room down the hall, quiet enough not to wake Bucky but loud enough to let Bucky know where he is going if he is listening.
Steve wakes up in his bed, conscious of the soft blue beams of early morning light falling across the roo, and of the heavy weight pressing down beside him on his mattress. His heart hitches. His fingers twitch with panic. He rolls over slowly, and carefully, to find Bucky lying beside him.
He is above the covers and awake, lying flat on his back and staring up at the plaster on the ceiling. His eyes blank, body still, Steve is worried for a split-second that Bucky is dead. "Bucky?" Steve murmurs.
Bucky shakes his head. It is a slow, deliberate action. He's not dead. "Not Bucky?" Steve steels himself, thinks of all of the ways he could defend himself from here. The man who used to be the Winter Soldier has been non-violent, docile even. So far. Steve knows that could change. "What can I call you?"
"I don't have a name," he replies. It is the longest coherent English sentence Steve has been able to get out of him since he came home.
"Yes, you do," Steve says. "Your name is James Buchanan Barnes."
Something violent passes over his companion's face, but it is subdued. "Then my name is James Buchanan Barnes."
"Can I just call you James?"
James thinks for a very long time before saying "Yes."
(Natasha tells Steve later, "Weapons do not have names. Names are for targets. Names are for people. You are a weapon, not a person. You forget what it is like to be named. You forget what it is like to have a name. You do not have a name because you are not a person. You allowed him a name. You allowed him a choice. You told him that he could be a person.")
James has his own room, but he has nightmares. He cannot sleep in beds. They restrict him. He cannot sleep on his own because he screams. He finds his way to Steve's floor, to the space at the end of Steve's bed. He sleeps fitfully, on guard. He is like a watchdog.
It's almost, Steve thinks, like sleeping back in Brooklyn.
They had one bed, back then. And at first Bucky slept on the floor, and then the couch, but by winter they had taken to sharing the mattress. "Gotta keep you warm, Stevie," Bucky had said once. But they stayed together throughout that spring, and then the summer (even when it was so hot they were stripped and sweating and pushed to the farthest corners, they did not separate), and then on until the war called them.
Layered in clothing, that first winter, like they were boys. Bucky facing Steve's back, pulling the smaller body toward his chest. Bucky ran hot. Steve was always cold. It was an arrangement. And Bucky would place his chin on Steve's head, and they would find their legs entwined. It was natural. It was home. They stayed like that, conjoined, until it was the only way that they could sleep.
After months of empty beds – the lonely one in the apartment, the cold ones at basic, the uninviting hotel beds along the road – Steve had thought, in Europe, they could finally get their rest. Bucky, walking dead on his feet and turned out from medical with a stellar rating for a soldier fresh off the torture rack, had seemed to think the same. Words were not spoken as they climbed into bed together.
But Bucky's arms couldn't wrap around Steve like they used to it, and his body could not protect the other's. And he fidgeted, the frustration growing more apparent with each passing moment. They did not fit. They did not fit together, and –
Finally, Steve rolled over. They faced each other. Bucky looked tired, so tired, barely there. Steve wrapped his arms around him, entwined his legs like they used to.
There was a moment of silence, of calm. Then Bucky unraveled. He reclaimed his legs, fought out of Steve's arms. Rolled to the far corner of the bed. In that moment, Steve realized, he would have given everything that the serum gave him – everything – back for this.
They slept separately for the rest of the war.
But they found each other on missions, in taverns. Bucky always had Steve's back. They always sat together. Steve would flit from table to table, meshing seamlessly with the Commandos and officers, but he would always return to Bucky.
And Bucky – Bucky would drink – drink like –
Steve does not know this. Steve never met Bucky's father; he died before the remaining Barnes' moved in down the street. Steve would not have wanted to meet Bucky's father.
Bucky would drink like his father. George Barnes wasn't violent, but there were other ways to hurt people; he often found himself stuck in stasis at the bottom of a bottle while Winifred paced around him. From his spot at the kitchen table he would watch Bucky, bark a quick "C'mere boy," and ruffle his hair or raise a fist that never fell. Bucky would listen from the room over, holding his sister and brothers, and waiting for the fights to be over.
"Have you been looking for a job?" Winifred would say.
"I've been looking," he would reply, and she would continue with "I just don't want it to be like last time," and things would escalate until, with a quiet graveness of tone and stiffness of body, Winifred Barnes would say "I should have never married you."
"Well, you're here ain't you?"
"You took advantage of me."
He would smirk and say "You seemed to be enjoyin' it."
And she would break and say "I was just a little girl! I didn't know any better!"
And he would sneer and yell, with a slurring voice and snarling countenance, "If you're so unhappy, send a fucking letter to that dyke sister of yours and tell her about what a bad guy I am! Until then, shut the hell up and sit down."
Bucky would hold onto Rebecca and shut his eyes, and in the morning his father would be apologetic and gentle through the hangover, or he wouldn't be there at all. He'd return days later with a black eye and gifts, and kiss Winifred and Rebecca, and shake Bucky's shoulder while whispering tales of the Barnes family back through the centuries, until he died, like a pig, in Brooklyn, abandoning Winifred and leaving Bucky with the responsibility of continuing a family line that stretched into eternity.
Bucky would knock back another glass, sitting at an oak table much like the one that seemed to sit in the center of every kitchen of every childhood home he ever had. A little boy would pull at his sleeve, and whisper warnings and reminders, and Bucky would emphatically tell him to "Fuck off." And he would nurse a drink, next to Steve, who wasn't really Steve anymore, was he?
Of course he is, Bucky would tell himself. You're just being a dick because he's not all yours anymore. Agent Carter would make eyes at Steve from across the room. He would watch Steve make eyes back. He would knock back another glass and sleep alone and wake up and kill someone.
George Barnes killed people. He was in the army. It was the only thing Bucky liked about his father – an imagined bravery, a noble heroism. Now the thought of his father behind a rifle makes his stomach churn.
George Barnes was born in Chicago to a woman who died before she ever saw his face. His father smoked cheap cigars and ruined people's lives for money. He had two brothers, both older, and together the four of them crisscrossed the country leaving chaos in their wake.
George was handsome. He was the cutest of the Barnes boys, he got all the ladies. He split with his father after an argument. He joined a traveling circus. He met a girl named Lancaster adjacent to the Ferris wheel at a country fair the summer that he turned twenty-four. She was young and beautiful. He fell in love with her eyes. He romanced her easy, fucked her in a wheat-field and missed his ride out of town. He found a job as a farmhand, cursed the locals under his breath and fucked her a couple of more times.
She came to him in tears one night. He thought about running, weighed his options, and decided maybe a kid could be fun. He married her under a weeping willow. It was all very romantic. It was her idea. They eloped, caught a train out of town. Met with his dad in Milwaukee. Had a kid in Cleveland. Went to war. Had another kid in Tampa. Had two more in Virginia.
And as time rolled on for him, for them, money got tighter. And things got less bright. The things that he used to chase – get rich quick schemes, drugs, women – stopped rewarding him as often. And Winifred turned away.
He died like a pig in Brooklyn. Winifred paced around the apartment.
James paces around the apartment. He does not stalk, he paces. Steve is just happy to see him doing something distinctly Barnes-like.
It is the only Barnes-like thing he is doing.
He sleeps two hours a night at the foot of Steve's bed, spends the rest of his time alone in his room or pacing in the living room. He eats with his hands, refuses to use utensils or sit at the table, he perches in the corner and devours his food whole. Steve's never seen him bathe. He doesn't smell or look particularly dirty, so he must get clean somehow, but he's never heard the faucets running. Never seen a towel he didn't use himself in the hamper.
Steve talks to him. Steve talks to him a lot, about all kinds of things. Memories, observations, New York. It is a one sided conversation. James doesn't talk a lot. Sometimes he murmurs half-words. Usually, he screams in Russian while he sleeps.
There is no space to carve out between them. There is the lack of space. There is a lack of connection. Steve's breath is shallow. James blinks slowly. Steve wonders if there is anyone in there at all.
One day, he is talking. It's a warm evening, and the sky is a soft grey. There is a storm front moving through, but it has not hit yet. He's talking about – well, he's talking about an old fight that they had, the one that he spent a four hour run trying to remember and howled at with laughter when he finally did. He's chuckling as he's retelling it. Out loud, putting words to it, it's even funnier somehow. He thinks that Tony would probably appreciate it. He knows that Bucky appreciated it; he can remember rehashing the story on a hot summer night spent on top of their apartment building.
James is staring.
Steve is getting to the best part when is interrupted.
"I'm not him," James says. He is abrupt in manner. He is matter-of-fact.
Steve furrows his brow, caught off-guard.
"I'm not him," James repeats. "I am not your friend. That is not me. I do not know him. I am sorry. It is apparent that you cared about him very much." His face is devoid of emotion.
Outside, it starts to rain.