Proverb of Wolves
He'd earned his wings, he'd weighed the faults in his stars, the pain of his stripes. It was a good day, and it gave way to a good night sitting there beside the sea. His family and other friends had long since gone to bed. They two sat there in silence, as the sea prayed beside them, around them, within them. The prayer chant of the sea rolled through the old fishing boat and Sam smiled, knowing the song, the mantra of the words.
Inspired by the divine, Bucky suddenly shifted where he sat, sipping his drink. He sat it down and leaned back on his palms looking at the stars.
"You ever think about how it will be the last time you die?"
Silence. Sam didn't really. He looked at him. The stars were burning in his silver eyes, swords at the throat of those werewolves his memories were always at war with. He was smiling softly, strangely at the moon. Sam understood why the Wakandans called him the White Wolf now, as the moon burned in his pale face that looked deceptively young, but only now belied the old man beneath it. His spirit howled at it with all the pain that blazed still in his eyes, and Sam knew that the moon answered. The moon understood.
"No, but I take it that you do?" Sam smiled at him. He rather liked his company now. He was willing to admit it at last.
"I'm old, Sam..." Bucky's voice was soft and sad, as if admitting to something terrible.
"Hell yeah, you are...you're 106..." when Sam said it, he suddenly realized the weight of it. Bucky didn't look like an old man and so sometimes he forgot that he actually was.
"I know people get a little upset when they hear other people talk like this...and when they are young, it makes sense. You've got your whole life ahead of you because you are young and the fireworks are in your eyes...You believe you can change the world then...But me...I'm starting to feel it...As soon as I was free, I realized it at last. The weight of a century sort of found me...with all that fire and ice I passed through, and all those world-endings I was there for...somewhere in the middle of all that I have grown old." Bucky drew a deep breath. Sam stared at him dumbfounded.
"I think about the end sometimes...No, I'm not about to go jump off of a bridge or anything like that...but I think about it, and I realize...I'm ready to go now. After all I've seen, and all I've done...and all that's been done to me...If it was today, I wouldn't complain. Do you understand?" He looked at Sam. Sam looked back at him and for the first time he understood why Steve had handed him the shield. Because Steve had felt the same. He was old too, though Sam never realized it with his youthful face and demeanor, more lively than Bucky's reserved staring silence.
Bucky pointed to the ocean.
"I know how I want it to end..."
"You do?" Sam swallowed.
"I want to fall into the ocean..."
"You wanna drown? Well, I mean it would hurt less than some other things..."Sam teased .
"No, not the actual thing that would kill me about it...Think about it...It would be like being unmade by the snap, but natural...If the ocean were your grave, you would be unmade, unravelled, by the gentle hands of the universe...Eventually the sea would crumble to atoms all of this ridiculous shape that serves as my body, all metal and all of the organs of it that are only alive because of mad science..." Bucky looked at the sky and silence fell. Deep, deep silence...Sam almost wanted to ask him what he meant about his body. He'd never thought about it that way, that Bucky was suspended in animation inside the body of the Winter Soldier, but in a way he was.
"You know, you've technically died twice. Once, when you fell off that train...and once when the snap happened..."Sam heard the rasp in his voice.
"I died three times..."Bucky smiled, and his eyes followed the move of the sea under the shadow of the night.
"What do you mean? When would the third time have happened?" Sam looked at him, wondering after him. Those 70 some odd years that he was in and out of the ice were filled with mysteries...
"Didn't I ever tell you how the Winter Soldier was made?"
Bucky looked at Sam in earnest. He smiled, as if he knew the idea was scary. Sam held his breath.
"By the serum...?" Sam shrugged.
"That's how they remake the ridiculous Frankenstein's monsters that serve as our super soldier bodies...no...That's not how Winter Soldiers are made..." Bucky looked at the stars and the sea again.
"You spend so much time apologizing for what you do when you are one, you spend so much time making it right...that you forget to apologize to the Soldier too...but I owe him an apology, I realize, for being unable to rationalize or make real what he was...the puppet of bones and the whirrling cyborg mechanism that gave him a brain in my living death..." Bucky lay back on his palms again and smiled. Sam wondered for a moment why he was telling him all of this. He held his breath, because he was pretty sure that even Steve hadn't heard all of this. Why would Bucky tell him something that he couldn't have even told Steve?
"No, I'm not just unloading on you or using you as a free shrink...There is a reason why I'm telling you all of this..."Bucky read his mind.
"Okay, so why?" Sam swallowed.
Bucky nodded.
"I want you to understand what that's like so that you will never be molded. The symbol you are carrying has the weight of all of that too...They will want you to wear so many thorny crowns. They will braid them for you and disguise them as roses. I didn't tell Steve because Steve was an angel, and nothing could break him or mold him...But you and I are just a couple of guys...and the roses pierce us, don't they?" Bucky smiled.
"I...um..."Sam was getting a bit emotional, why he didn't know. He was forgetting whatever he wanted to say just then.
"The Winter Soldier, they made him by torturing me...they needed a symbol and so they made one. They needed a face and so they made one, but I was not him and he was not me, not at first...So, the way, the technique, the lightning jolts to the brain, and the carvings in my skin...Over and over and over until I died on the table and they put the code stuff in my head..." Bucky nodded.
Sam stammered.
"I-I never realized you remembered."
He did nothing but stare, but the hollow look in his eyes told Sam the truth. That's where the stare had come from. He remembered the Void and unmaking. He remembered everything.
"You've seen with your own eyes the kind of games that they play...And I'm saying all this to tell you, that while you are fighting for America by being the symbol, don't forget that Sam Wilson is part of America too...Don't let them try to cut away a new face from the diamond that they've dug up out of the pile of all their failed experiments...you need to fight for your life...these people in it...And if I can pass on any little pearl of wisdom from my old age before I slip into the sea, then...Promise me you will remain who you are. Not a perfect symbol, but a good man..." Bucky smiled.
Silence fell.
"You know something...they say you shaped the century, and they were right, but not in the way they thought you did..."Sam said softly into the night, delayed response rolling like a stone along his tongue. Bucky looked back down from the stars, brows raised.
"The world and the hour that needed him made Captain America as the symbol. But you...You were the one that lifted up a little sickly kid from Brooklyn with that can't back down from a fight spirit...Everything I was taught, everything I am now as this new Cap...?I learned it from him. And now I realize, and I never did before...so much of you was alive in him all along, and everything he did he did it for you. You shaped the century when you shaped the man that rose to that challenge...I got you, Bucky...I've learned the lesson." Sam smiled.
Bucky thought about it for a moment. Then he breathed a heavy sigh of relief. He would die one day, and, with wisdom passed on, he was ready to go. Now he could go in peace.