Notes: This story is written with love by both LexiTRone and Ssergit (Darsynia), but the interface here on FFN doesn't allow us to post joint authorship! Please, if you like this story, check out the rest of our stories! You can find LexiTRone's epic Bucky/OC fic 'The Stark Legacy' in Ssergit's favorites.
'Kintsugi' is the practice of repairing broken, valuable things with gold.
Chapter One: Kintsugi Memory
Bucky remembers the war a certain way. The espionage he'd engaged in during the 40's had been rudimentary even back then, but these days he has to be as careful and thorough as possible. That's why after rifling through his new neighbor's single suitcase and sparse belongings, he leaves her apartment by the front door and re-enters his own via the fire escape. It's also why he's scribbling down bits to remember, just in case his mind slides again.
A plastic bag of torn photos mostly ripped through along the faces. Street clothing. Basic toiletries, all real, not surveillance decoys. Laptop with almost pathetic security.
With this intel in 1945, he'd have put her in the 'safe' column. Bucky might have even considered her a safe option to pick up at a bar, except for one incredibly suspicious addition.
Three non-fiction WWII books. In English.
Bucky's real era, his native language, and a new young woman living next door to him at a shithole apartment complex, in a country occupied by the enemy/his handler nation until somewhat recently.
Bucky scoots closer to the thin shared wall between his apartment and hers, empty water glass to his ear and a lukewarm microwave burrito in his other hand. She's back now and talking with someone on the phone. He doesn't know if it's more or less suspicious that she's speaking in Romanian.
She sounds genuinely upset, so upset that he thinks maybe the person on the other line is trying to ramp her up. The thing is, she's hitting all the beats- the parents whose faces are symbolically torn in two, the hastily packed suitcase full of just sweaters, the complete lack of food in the apartment. There isn't even a towel in her bathroom. He half expects to hear about the grandmother who hand-crocheted the afghan he'd seen puddled up on the floor next to her laptop. Bucky spent the entire decade on ice the last time that color scheme had been popular.
He takes it as a subtle warning when the woman expresses concern that her apartment was broken into via the fire escape. It was, but he'd been careful. She tearfully ends the call, and Bucky pulls back from the wall. He doesn't need the glass to hear her sobs anymore.
Honestly, it's a bit overdone, but she's young.
The program he'd hidden on the laptop will take a while to index everything, so there's nothing more to do but sleep. Bucky takes the precautions his next-door neighbor should have, securing all of his windows so no one will get in. If they manage it, he'll wake up. Tomorrow he'll find out if the young woman crying on the other side of the wall deliberately left her apartment vulnerable, or if she's a gumshoe agent from one of many sources. If the latter, she's not being very sneaky, but maybe that's meant to disarm him.
He chuckles. His Steve would have found that one funny.
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His neighbor leaves the building as soon as he hears her stir the next morning, but he doesn't take the bait. Bucky notes the shopping bag noises on her return, the creak of her window, and the distant flushing noise of the toilet. By evening his notebook is full of mundane shit, and she's stayed put.
He stands there and frowns at their shared wall for a few minutes before dragging his mattress over. No way is he going to forego sleep over his suspicions, but neither is he willing to miss the chance to hear her validate them. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, he'll break in again and retrieve the results of his program on her computer. He'll know then.
Bucky wakes up to the sounds of a woman in distress.
His own nightmares are mostly silent. Whether his body had learned it was useless to try to drive frozen vocal cords to vibrate or his mind has given up on vocalizing terrors that recur so often, he doesn't know. It's convenient, at least. So far, his read on the woman next door is that she has either carefully crafted this image of a lost, miserable person, or she is a lost, miserable person. Both could have nightmares.
Her sounds are louder than they'd been minutes before. Bucky sits up. The low 'mmms' that woke him have transitioned to sharper 'ahhhs,' as if her fearful cries are from an open throat. He cocks his head, listening. Is she being attacked? Is she still alone?
He clambers up from his mattress and grabs the glass to listen at the wall until he hears her cry out, "Ahh, fut-" which breaks off into a long, pleased groan. Bucky pushes back from the wall so vehemently he trips over his blankets. She's- He can't even think the words, because his brain's too busy rearranging about twenty different expectations across two genders and seven decades.
The gouge he leaves by breaking his fall with his left arm doesn't matter in the long run; he didn't pay a security deposit, and this landlord doesn't seem like the type to return one anyway. It's loud, though, far louder than her… her moans of ecstasy. Bucky forces the words through the propriety filter in his brain. If he had to point to something of his that a grandparent hand-crafted, that would be it.
Soldiering is in many ways about compartmentalization. You kill men in one place and slap their doppelgangers' backs in a bar mere hours later, based on not much more than differences in birthplace. Sexuality is equally separated for him, always has been. The distance that should exist between where he is and what he just heard is striking him all at once. His guts have dropped into a chasm, and the only way to retrieve them is to navigate his mind through hundreds of kilometers of understanding.
The word 'kilometers' strikes him like a floodlight, harshly illuminating his own wide disparity. The English word for a Russian mindset.
"Dracu' să te ia!" Bucky rumbles, conscious that the intruder (oh, she hasn't entered his apartment, but she's in his mind, now, and that's far worse) will be able to hear him consigning HYDRA to the devil if he's not careful. He's really taken to Romanian profanity; it's got the heart of his grandfather's sacreligious oaths wrapped in the casual attitude toward women and sex that passed for therapy in the army. The words feel at once familiar and distinctly foreign, just like his own mind does.
The clock on his ancient stove flips over the next number. It's 3:35 AM, and the satiated woman on the other side of the wall is probably there to take him out.
He needs to calm down.
Tucking his legs up into the lotus position despite the way his blanket is wrapped around one foot, Bucky pulls in a deep breath. He'd read about how to trick your brain to believe you're calm based on your breathing, the way you don't vomit around terrible smells by stretching your lips into a ghoulish smile.
"Well that'll do it," he mutters. Bucky tosses his hair back, but it doesn't all go, stuck on the tacky sweat on his face. He reaches out with his metal hand and drags over the corner of his blanket to scrub it off.
There was a time when sweating around other people had probably been related more to pleasure than pain, but those memories had been wiped from his mind as casually as his blanket swipe. Not just sex but camaraderie, he's sure, and the stronger the bond, the longer-lived those frayed threads of recollection. All Bucky needs to revive them are a spark of recognition- a name, a face, a smell, a type of sound. That's why they'd kept him frozen, he's concluded. A weapon with the ability to remember morality is more of a liability than not.
In Bucky's mind, morality has a name.
It's 'Steve.'
You don't let morality drown, and he didn't, even though he's dunked its metaphorical head underwater more times than his swiss-cheese brain could ever count.
Fuck, he thinks to himself. That's in English, at least.
The train of thought is working, but it's not enough. He'd been so desperate to regain his humanity in those first weeks that he'd chased down his scattered thoughts no matter where they led. Following each tributary has its drawbacks, though, and tonight they're guiding him back to his neighbor's broken cries.
The problem is that Bucky's been 'performing' humanity lately, and that part of it is overdue. He remembers enough to know he wasn't celibate.
Can he even pretend he has any qualms about picturing what she might look like?
The clock ticks to 3:58 and Bucky gives up. Settling onto his mattress, he tugs his clothes down, taking himself in his flesh hand. In this new life of his, each memory he makes ought to be distinct, but he doesn't end up letting himself voice his pleasure. Old habits die hard.
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The next morning, Bucky steps into his dingy shower and finds out that all the water is running cold. He'd been limiting hot water use after overhearing that the boiler was failing, figuring the grimy look would help his cover, but after years of skipping showers in favor of being frozen until the next job, it's a blow not to be able to feel clean. Jamming on a hat, shrugs on a jacket and grabs his keys.
Since he left from the front door the last time he went to this job, Bucky intends to go up the fire escape, across the roof, and down the other side today. As he steps onto the metal landing from his side of the balcony, though, something squishes under his foot.
It's a grape- and it's not the only one.
Bucky's balcony is at a right angle with his neighbor's at the edge of the building, one on either side of the corner fire escape. The grapes are scattered at regular intervals leading up to his neighbor's door, so obviously placed that it feels like a message just for him.
He pulls out the cloth handkerchief he always carries and cleans up the sticky residue, snagging the rest of the grapes and tucking them into his pockets to throw away later.
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There are new grapes the next day.
Bucky scoops the grapes up and leaves his apartment by the front door this time, dropping them right outside the apartment's entrance and stomping each one just to make her wonder if they are the same ones. With the groceries he buys that afternoon, he gets a package of black grapes, despite the extra cost. That night, he scatters those on her balcony and the fire escape.
When he hears her open her creaky balcony door the next morning, Bucky waits, listening intently.
Her softly spoken 'What?' sounds baffled.
He smiles.
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It's four days before Bucky breaks in again.
He recovers data from her laptop (which is still in the apartment, so whatever outside job she might have does not require one; point for spy again) and notices she still has no towel. This makes him irrationally frustrated because he knows she has spent untold minutes strategically placing individual grapes along a grated walkway, but she can't be bothered to have anything more than an old t-shirt as a dishrag in the kitchen. Really?
He returns to his apartment to check on what he'd gathered. Her laptop is not very secure, it seems, and he can see what porn sites she visited a few days ago.
He is vaguely, minutely, less sure his neighbor is a spy.
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Bucky gets on with his odd-jobs lifestyle, including taking a look at the water heater for the super, but it's a total loss. He turns down the request to set up purchase and delivery of a new unit and writes down what he can for the grungy old man before returning to his apartment.
It's a beautiful evening outside. At a park a few blocks away they're holding a concert, and Bucky knows he could hear it better from the roof. He hates the crowds but he loves the music.
The sunset is visible from the west side of the building. He's not the only one who thought to enjoy the view because right against that side of the building sits a dark-haired woman. She doesn't see him, but she hears him walking over.
She's leaning back on a beach towel laid out under her, with dark jeans and a white tank top on. Bucky notices she has pristine, creamy skin, and his gut clenches like half of his insides are trying to run away while his mind presses forward.
The music is a bit garbled because of the echo acoustics, and it's not dark enough out to see any lights from the stage. Bucky sits cross-legged a good distance away from the woman so he doesn't disturb her peace. He takes in the sunset before closing his eyes to just listen. This is his best form of exposure therapy: Bucky can imagine he's in the crowd in front of the small stage or on the street below, but he doesn't have to panic if one of the sloppy tourists bumps into him or someone picks a fight too close to be ignored. It's not real. He can make it as good or as practiced an interaction as he wants. He can even swing the dark-haired girl into a dance-
Buck, watch it. Moral compass Steve dings him on that fantasy. Steve's always right. Bucky can't remember how he knows that, but he knows.
It's a shame really. He can remember having some sort of -how would Steve put it?- encounter with a brunette in a theater before he was captured. She'd been his type. Still is, if he counts himself as human.
A yelling match between two tenants in an adjacent building snaps his eyes open. It's not Romanian and too fast for him to understand, but the passionate anger stirs a little uneasiness in him. He'll feel better indoors.
The pretty girl is gone, but the screaming doesn't fade until Bucky climbs onto the fire escape. Inside his apartment is dark. He almost kicks the cabinet. He'd spent so long troubleshooting the damn water heater that he never picked up any food during the open-air market this time (which considering how many faces come and go is the best place for him to shop). He knows he'll have to find an alternative during the heat of summer; he can't walk around in three layers with gloves and a hat on and not be noticed. Perhaps more frozen food from late night grocers?
For now, he only has what's left of the black grapes he used to mess with the girl next door, so he pops the container open and returns to his balcony to sniff the air. Street meats. That's what a few drunk boys (from the concert, most likely) are fighting over at the curb. They call each other horrible names. The worst he ever called anyone at that age was 'punk.'
He should go write down some of the flashes of memory that come up at that thought, so Bucky turns to-
The woman is standing right there on the landing between balconies, dark hair pulled back, head cocked and staring at the container in his hand with a finger pointed. She starts to say something at least twice while Bucky contemplates fucking bolting and moving to another country. What roots him to the spot is an understanding: that's where her towel was. Her head tips the other direction before stepping an angry foot out onto his balcony, bringing her inches away from his face.
"You tell my parents I'm never coming home," she spits in Romanian. "No," she corrects as Bucky shifts his frozen jaw around a mouthful of sweet juice, "you tell them I found a better home. And I'm never going back there."
Bucky swallows hard, a loud, wet noise that digs at the silence between them where there is very little space left. She's shorter than him, short enough to have to lift her chin this close. Her voice is rich (and he shouldn't think about this, but she's close enough to… don't do it, jerk) so instead he raises a hand, ticks the corner of his mouth, and offers her a grape.
His jaw tightens, waiting for a response, until she lets out a flustered whine of frustration and sweeps her hand out, knocking the grapes away. She storms off and climbs back into her apartment before Bucky lets himself exhale.
She's definitely not a spy, because every single piece of that was against protocol. He knows he could have (and should have) handled it better, but of all the handlers and shadows Hydra ever gave him, none of them were his type and this...uh, what would Steve say again? Vocal.
Just to be careful, the instant Bucky gets back into his apartment he packs up all of his stuff; it fits into a rucksack with room to spare. He'll come back in a few days, see what's left, decide what to do from there. His notebook starts to fall when he slides it off the counter and his metal hand sweeps beneath it, pinching it backwards in mid-air. He hears the spine snap. Whatever, that's what the elastic band is for. He listens at the door for a moment-she's seen him coming from the roof so it's actually safer if he leaves by the front-before he casually rushes into the hall and down the-
The dark-haired beauty is right there again, teary-eyed and scrunched on top of the first stair. She walks straight at him, begging in Romanian for him not to report on her, explaining that "they just can't understand the life I want for myself," and gripping the seam of his leather jacket.
She's beautiful and he is in so much trouble. Bucky still can't think of anything to say because she's close enough that he can smell her shampoo. His body is trying to run while his gut is heaving him closer, so he holds himself still a board to compensate.
The girl -woman, he should say, now that he has a front-row view down her tank top (what happened to all those sweaters? Those would help right now)- stops talking and tries to pull his left hand up. It doesn't move. That arm doesn't work like that anymore. Instead of asking, she looks up at him and starts to laugh, covering her mouth after a small snort.
"You don't," she starts in English, "really understand me, do you?"
Bucky did understand, but he'd chosen not to comprehend at first, so he nods. He must look spooked because she steps back and clasps her hands in front of her.
"Meaning you don't know...my parents, or me."
Absolute idiot basket-case that he is, Bucky pops his right hand up in a wave, and replies in Romanian "Hey, neighbor."
She's so young that his awkwardness doesn't even register, and she waves back, shy in comparison to the threatening invasion she mounted minutes ago.
Bucky digs deep for something normal, friendly, and hopefully smooth to say. His brain grasps at "Can I offer you a drink" while she smiles and hugs her bare arms.
Quit looking, Brain-Steve barks, but this only forces a reluctant smile to Bucky's lips, one filled with a smugness he hasn't felt in decades. He opens the door for her into his exceedingly meager and empty apartment without much further thought (which he'll chastise himself for later), when he's rethinking everything about today.
"Grab a mug," Bucky says, catching himself at the last minute before he remarks on her own lack of dishes, something he shouldn't know about. The Soldier never had to make small talk. She hesitates, then delicately opens the cabinet to pull out the only good one he's got, a coffee mug with the Dodgers symbol on it. "If you pick that one, you gotta tell me your name," he tells her, pointing with the juice bottle. At first, her reaction makes him think his Romanian is more rusty than he thought, but then she smiles, and the simple beauty of it whistles across the kitchen to strike him in his gut.
"Ileana," she says with a flash of white, even teeth.
Cynically, Bucky thinks that maybe her parents are angry at the failure of their investment. Good dental work is expensive here. Her pause tells him that it's probably a fake name, but he nods, takes the mug from her, and pours out some cherry juice, enough to try.
"Did you pawn the tiara or did the dragon get it?"
"What?" she breathes, brows furrowing.
"Go on, drink," he instructs, holding the mug out. "Princess Ileana. Romanian fairy tale or something, right? Good solid fake name, I approve."
"It's not-" she stops, pressing her lips together.
Bucky tells himself he's not looking forward to seeing whether the crimson juice will stain them. Knowing she's not his enemy (could still be an enemy, of course) has landed like a grenade in his carefully constructed bunker of fantasies, scattering possibilities like shrapnel. An arched back, a kiss-bruised neck, the sound of a delighted gasp.
"What's yours? Wait, don't tell me. You thought I'm a famous Romanian heroine, yes?" she asks, both hands curled around the mug like a talisman. She hasn't sipped yet. "So who…"
"Drink your juice," he rasps. "It's-"
Before he can say 'James,' feeling like the truth is somehow less fraught, she interrupts him. In English.
"Steve. Right? Steve Rogers, American hero."
That actually hurts a little, which is, goddamnit, progress. The only way out is through, though. Fuck, this lovely girl might just innocently drag him back to ordinary humanity and make him grateful to boot.
"Nah," he answers in English, rushing to refute both the name suggestion and its corresponding ache. "Captain America's too pure for the thoughts running through my mind lately." Bucky's (mostly) referring to the plans he's had to make if he's spotted, the kind of risks and casualties that might arise, but the girl —Ileana, he corrects internally— blushes. It's exactly the wrong thing to calm the part of him that remembers what she sounds like mid-orgasm.
"I'm sure he'd never disobey orders and steal their tech. He would stand up to them, tell them why they're wrong," Ileana says bitterly, throwing her head back defiantly mid-sip, her throat working in a way that burns into his retinas.
Bucky can't let it pass. "He would. He did."
"You don't have to rewrite your fairy tales for me."
"I wouldn't," he tells her truthfully. At the last second, he remembers to pour his own serving into the cup he'd gotten for himself instead of drinking out of the juice bottle. It's new enough that he hadn't yet. As he lifts the cup to his lips, Bucky sees a flash of a dingy, raucous bar room full of fellow soldiers, laughing beside him as he drinks a beer. That James Barnes is vital, whole, unscarred. He's as real as a Russian fairy tale.
Bucky shakes his head to clear the memory, but it's close enough that he wants to pay it homage. Those men had been his men. Those men had lived because of Steve.
"He stole a car to rescue-" he stops himself from saying 'me' just in time and takes a loud gulp to cover the error "-a group of captured soldiers in enemy territory. Against orders. Went in singlehanded, killed a lot of Nazis to get us-" Bucky finishes off the juice "-those soldiers back."
A native speaker would recognize his sentence configuration- 'get us those soldiers' -as slang, but would she?
"Actual Nazis? The tale is not a…" Ileana lapses back into Romanian, searching for a word. "Beletristică?" Brows furrowed, she sets her lips on her own cup of juice, clearly frustrated at her inability to precisely describe what she means.
Bucky puts down his mug and casts back in the sieve of his mind. Seems that word hadn't fallen completely through, he remembers it, but the context is about as far from an international fugitive's dingy apartment as a person could get. Beletristică. People studied that kind of writing in fancy colleges, wrote essays, did analysis, that kind of shit. Were people writing high-art stories about the work the Howling Commandos did during the war?
Ileana seems to think this is about Steve himself (or maybe Bucky's Romanian proficiency, because she's back to English). "I thought the earlier stories were not real. A made up person, revived by a good man taking up the shield."
"A fairy tale, you mean?" Bucky asks with a rough chuckle. "No. He's real."
Just then, Ileana's hair tumbles from the ponytail she had it in. She lets out a vituperative swear, definitely too strong for the situation. Bucky sees that where the strands lay on her tank top, they leave streaks of tan color. He jogs off to the bathroom and grabs the black towel he'd used most recently. It's still damp, but the bone dry ones are also bone colored, and he suspects she'd reject using them. He recognizes impermanent hair dye when he sees it.
At least her grateful expression hits higher in his chest than some of her earlier reactions did.
"You are a savior," she says a few minutes later. Pulling a rubber band from her wrist, she swiftly braids up her hair and twines the elastic around the last remnant. "Should hold better this time. I did not think they would find me this quickly with dark hair," Ileana says, dropping her hand from the braid. She looks defeated.
"There's no sedative in the juice, Ileana," Bucky says. He's always been shit at reassurance. "I'm not here for you."
"No, no," she tells him, hugging her arms and shrugging her shoulders up. "Someone has broken in. More than once maybe? Nothing taken, so not a thief."
Shit. She's no spy, but she was clearly abused by hypervigilant parents. They had forced her to become aware of things for an entirely different reason.
"Need me to take a look?"
She takes a small step back, but the movement sends a big message. "No, you are very kind. Maybe there is nothing worth stealing and I am being foolish. I will wash out the rest of the dye tonight-"
"Without hot water?"
She swears in Romanian again. Bucky can't help but wonder if she'd learned those words from one of her parents. He hides the angry fist he wants to make by gripping his mug and reaching out for hers.
"I hate not looking like me," she sighs as she hands it over.
He rinses the mugs, tracing his eyes around his meagre kitchen before shutting off the tap and grabbing something, holding it up for her.
"Heat water in this. Stop up your sink and use a cup or something to pour it over your head. Better than nothing."
"How do you know I don't have a pot?"
Bucky catches his breath in dismay for a split second before she grins, a touch of devilish challenge in her eyes.That definitely hits him below the belt. He holds the pot out in front of him like a spear and starts toward her. Ileana stays put, so he makes contact with the curve of the pot.
"This shirt, I saw a pack for sale when I got a pack of work t-shirts a month ago. A girl doesn't flee her rich family with pots and pans but not enough clothes."
She pulls in a breath and lets it out, still regarding him with that brazen impishness. "How do you know they're rich?"
Bucky moves the pot. She stays put. He takes one step, then another, and all she does is lift her chin resolutely. With Steve screaming in the back of his mind, Bucky lifts his hand and traces his thumb across her chin, just under her full lip. Her skin is flawless; his still sports a cut from his day job, and the nail is cracked and dirty.
"Your mouth-" fuck, fuck, FUCK "-teeth," he corrects. He's going to hell with her as a witness. "Dental work." He's actually blushing, and Brain-Steve has probably passed out.
Bucky drops his arm and steps back, sidestepping a few more times so he's not between her and her inevitable escape through the front door.
Ileana draws in a breath to speak, her cheeks tinted red, eyes wide- but a rough, excited voice calls in Romanian out from the stairwell on the other side of the door.
"Boiler truck just pulled up, hot baths for half of us tonight, am I right?"
"Take the pot anyway," Bucky tells her in the same language, tossing it from one hand to the other, so he can offer it handle-first. Thanks to his glove, there's no metal-on-metal sound to freak her out. "And the towel. A lot of selfish fucks in this building."
"Makes good cover for a knight in armor?" she suggests archly, taking the proffered pot.
"Soldier," he corrects gruffly. "Different kind of armor."
"I see." Ileana pauses at the doorway, faced away from him. "My stepfather calls me a 'Daddy's Girl' even more now that my father is dead." She turns to glance back, and all impish flirtation is gone, replaced with a bleak stubbornness that he recognizes all too well. "Different kind of princess."