Bucky liked Sam's place in New Orleans.
Or, Bucky liked Sarah's place in New Orleans because it happened to have Sam in it. The house was small, smelled a bit like fish, but it was the first night in ages Bucky hadn't slept on a floor. The couch was nice. The cushions weren't too soft; he never liked feeling as if he was sleeping on marshmallows.
He followed Sam out to the boat early the next morning, watching the sun as it peeked above the horizon. Bucky stood back to watch for a few minutes. The sky turned orange as the sun rose from the gulf. That had been one of the things he missed during his time as the Winter Soldier, there was no way to tell time. Hydra shut Bucky in and froze him until he was needed. He could have missed one day or two thousand, with no way to tell the difference. Bucky cherished every sunrise because he'd spent so long without them.
By the time he met Sam inside the boat, Sam had already gotten himself in the middle of a two-person job. Steve had been just like that, one man taking on a fight built for two. Bucky stood back and helped, at least the metal arm made him useful. Knowing the Dora Milaje could disable it at any time was terrifying. Not because he had an emotional attachment to it, but because Bucky-without-the-arm was only ten percent as useful as Bucky-with-the-arm.
"Loosen those bolts."
They worked quietly for several minutes. Bucky never really knew how to begin a conversation with Sam. There were so many things he could say. "Hey, sorry some asshole ripped your wings off ... again." Or, "Thanks for letting me, the world's most prolific assassin, sleep on your couch."
As always, Sam cracked the silence.
"I can hear your Terminator brain working. What are you thinking about?"
He shrugged and said, "Nothing."
"You're a liar now?"
Bucky laughed.
"Nah, just ... mornings."
"Well, I have been thinking about some stuff. About you."
I've been thinking about you, too.
"If Karli Morgenthau and her friends, now John Walker, if they're all super soldiers that makes you the first in a run of 'em. You're the oldest. You are basically limited edition."
"You planning to sell me on Ebay, Sam?"
"I'm just saying, you're like a second-generation iPhone. If you have an unlock code, does that mean Karli and John Walker have unlock codes, too?"
Bucky hummed softly to himself.
"You're asking about the words."
"Yeah, I'm asking about the words."
"There is a difference between being a super soldier like Steve was, or like Isaiah Bradley is, compared to being the Winter Soldier. I got dosed with similar stuff, sure, but the Winter Soldier wasn't a soldier, the Winter Soldier was a machine."
"How did they make Bucky Barnes disappear with just a few words?"
"That's the thing Steve never quite understood," replied Bucky. "I think he was always trying to separate the part of me that was Bucky from the part of me that was the Winter Soldier. It's never separate, Sam, Hydra needed all the important parts of me. The parts of James Barnes that knew how to handle a gun, the parts that could block a punch or assess a threat. The rest of me? The fact that I like forties music and hate spaghetti, they didn't care about that shit. It wasn't useful. Each of the words was like an off-switch for part of me."
"So you were little more than a meat suit with a cyborg brain."
"Exactly. Dr. Raynor told me to think of Bucky Barnes like a balloon inside a bubble. The words were one of the few ways Hydra had to pop the balloon without popping the bubble."
Sam paused for several moments before asking, "Do you want to tell me what they meant?"
"Do you really want to know?"
"I want to understand."
"Huh." Bucky put down the wrench and admitted, "Nobody's ever asked about it before."
"Well I'm asking."
"Желание is the first word, I suppose the best translation is 'longing.' Like, a wish, or something. Getting what you want. That is the foundation for everything else. I was not allowed to want anything. Machines don't get to want things."
"They started laying the groundwork." Sam nodded. "I see."
"Ржавый comes next, and it means 'rusted.' The first word was to remind me of what I had while the second was to remind me they own me. My independence was gone. Hydra owned my mind, but more importantly, they owned my body. Where would I be without them? If I escaped, I'd be a one-armed man decades out of his time with a useless hunk of metal attached to his shoulder."
"Hydra told you that you couldn't want anything, and even if you did it was too late for you to get it."
"Yes, that's what triggered everything else. Then the countdown began."
"Countdown?"
"Семнадцать means 'seventeen.' I had about seventeen seconds of consciousness left from that point."
"I don't believe that," said Sam. "They wouldn't throw out a number just to warn you."
Bucky nodded. Sam was irritatingly perceptive. He supposed if he was going to tell Sam about the words, he owed Sam the full meaning.
"Seventeen was my number of confirmed kills as Bucky. For years at the beginning, when I was lucid they would try to convince me they were not changing who I was, only making me better. 'Bucky Barnes killed people,' they said. There was no arguing with them because I they asked, 'Where does James end and the Winter Soldier begin?' I did not have an answer."
Sam tapped the toe of one shoe against the floor and asked, "You were a sniper?"
"Damn good one."
"Did you understand what you were doing when you killed those seventeen people?"
"Yes."
"Then that's the difference between you and what they made you. The decision to take a life is not one I have ever taken lightly, and I'm sure I can say the same thing about you."
Bucky nodded.
"Is that what worries you?" asked Sam. "Do you think the Winter Soldier is still inside of you?"
"How could it not be? If I'm here, all you've gotta do is find out which new switches to flip and the Winter Soldier rises again."
"Well the sequel is never as good as the first."
Bucky laughed and tossed a rag at Sam. He caught it and draped it over one of the pipes. God, Sam was pretty. Handsome, obviously, but he was pretty, too. His eyes, his smile, there was a delicate kindness that shone through even when he was pissed off.
"What's next, then?" asked Sam. "Seemnotsit, then what?"
"I, um ..." Bucky frowned. He'd just been thinking about this. "Рассвет means 'daybreak' or sunrise."
"Hey," Sam looked over at Bucky, concerned. "That one really gets to you."
"Yeah, I'd say that was the most effective punch. Hydra told me when to wake up and when to sleep. There were times when daybreaks were years apart for me. It establishes ownership of every part of me. They controlled me, my emotions, my environment—how do you overcome your enemy when they control time?"
Sam raised his eyebrows and said, "That's some deep shit."
"I was in deep shit."
Sam laughed and agreed, "Yeah, I suppose you were. They set the foundation, made you doubt your own heart, then they controlled time. When we were part of the Blip, I guess you were already used to it."
"The Blip wasn't even the longest I've been out of existence. From what I can remember, not that I really want to, Hydra froze me in 1963 and didn't let me out until 1970."
Bucky watched as Sam began to put the pieces together.
"You said 1963?"
Bucky nodded.
"In 1963 you were on a mission so high-profile that they couldn't risk you being seen for several years afterward."
"Exactly."
Sam blinked.
"That's the calmest possible way to tell someone you assassinated a president."
"He wasn't the first or the last."
"Wow, that's ..." Sam shook his head. "I'm thinking back to seventh grade when we learned about the assassination of JFK, and now that same sad bastard is fixing my boat."
"That was my other nickname in Wakanda," Bucky deadpanned. "White Wolf only came along because Sad Bastard never caught on."
Sam laughed. It was adorable, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners. Bucky wanted to reach out and touch him, as if that energy could transfer and somehow bring James Barnes back to life.
"Печь came next, and it means 'furnace' or an oven. That was how they attached the arm to my body; it was fused onto me. Hydra wanted me to associate Bucky and disobedience with pain. So every moment I am Bucky is literally painful."
"You spent all that time trying not to be seen, and thinking that being yourself was painful. The staring makes a lot more sense."
Bucky leveled him with a glare and Sam pointed at him with a wrench.
"That's the one, right there."
"Do you want me to keep going?"
"I feel like you want to keep going."
He wasn't wrong. In fact, this was as much as anyone outside Dr. Raynor had ever cared to ask. Bucky hadn't been seeing his therapist long enough to go through the trigger words. Hell, he wasn't sure Sam had been his friend long enough to go through all of this. Was Sam even his friend? Or was it more of an odd coupling. A couple?
No.
Definitely not a couple.
Bucky shook himself out of those thoughts and said, "Девять means 'nine,' so the countdown continues. It's regimented, segmented because it had to be a routine. It's like plugging in coordinates, but instead of coordinates they were locating synapses and shutting them off. That's our next word, Добросердечный, or 'benign.' Like a tumor. That's what Bucky Barnes was to Hydra. That's all I was from the forties until I met you."
Until you and Steve saved me. Then you saved me again. And here you are doing it again.
Sam insisted, "You were more than that."
"Bucky Barnes was nothing and I woke up with a shit-ton of memories of my hands literally choking the life out of people. I put bullets in undeserving people and had no choice in doing it, but my hands did it and my mind remembers."
"The burden of choice and conscience were not equally removed."
"Exactly. I don't know how I am meant to deal with that. It was the next word they used to remind me of it. Возвращение на Родину means 'homecoming.'"
"Homecoming is bad because ..." Sam shrugged. "Because you didn't know what you would come home to?"
"I didn't know who I would be coming home to, and I didn't know how much of me would be left when I did."
"Один-"
"Isn't that Thor's dad?"
"It means 'one.'"
"So we're back to the countdown."
"Only one word left. One moment left, really."
"So what'd they say to seal the deal?"
"Товарный вагон or 'freight car.'" Bucky winced. "Honestly, that snapped me back to my last moment as Bucky Barnes. I fell off a train and essentially died. From then on, Hydra kept putting my brain into a blender and making me into the world's deadliest smoothie."
Sam laughed and said, "Serve me some of that Bucky Slushie."
Bucky choked back a laugh and shook his head.
"I ... I truly have no response to that, Sam. I'm a hundred years old and Bucky Slushie might just be the worst thing anyone has ever called me."
"Oh, sorry, man, you know down here we respect our elders. You want a chair, Buck? Want me to help you apply for your AARP card?"
"I have my AARP card and I order the senior citizen breakfast at diners. And, I am too old for every life insurance company in America."
"Still have a full head of hair, though."
Bucky agreed, "Rinse and repeat."
Things were quiet for awhile. It was nice to work alongside Sam in silence, listening to the stuttering hum of the boat's machinery. He was satisfied to be useful to someone as good as Sam Wilson. Steve couldn't have chosen a better man to take over the shield, Bucky was certain. He'd spent most of his conscious life helping out Captain America. Why should the rest of his life be any different?
"Bucky?"
"Yeah?"
"Your hands might've killed those people, but your heart didn't."
Your heart didn't.
"Thanks, Sam. That ... That means a lot."
"It means a lot that you'd come all the way out here just to give me a present and help fix my boat."
"Pretty sure this is Sarah's boat."
"This is a Wilson family boat, Buck, and you are welcome aboard any time."