Enjoy!


There are bad days.

Days when he has to stand with his back to the wall and where sightlines are more important than comfort when it comes to seating. When he only gives one-word answers or stops talking altogether, even though he tries-God, he tries-because Steve is terrible at hiding the sad disappointment in his eyes. Barnes knows the disappointment isn't for himself, but it still hurts to see.

On the really bad days, he sweeps the Tower over and over again in a never ending loop, eyes scanning for threats, until his feet hurt and he grows dizzy with sleep deprivation. Steve found him in his loop at two in the morning once and dragged him back to their floor, but usually it's Romanoff that catches him.

"On patrol?" she asks, two coffees and a muffin balanced carefully in her arms. He nods. He wants to keep walking, but she's holding out one of the coffees for him, and he could use it. They sit huddled in a stairwell and drink.

"What is it?" she asks, delicately peeling back the liner from her muffin. He knows what she means. Sometimes she asks, and sometimes she doesn't; maybe it depends on how disheveled he looks.

"Rogers had the news on when I came home," he says slowly, carefully. "There was...a hospital. Infiltrated by HYDRA. SHIELD took down as many as they could, but the footage…" The children. The experiments. The equipment. The chairs.

"...was a lot," Romanoff finishes for him. He nods. "Well," she says cheerily, breaking off half the muffin and handing it to him, "This is for you, then."

It's blueberry. It doesn't change how on edge he is, but it provides a nice space, sitting across from Romanoff with their legs stretched out in companionable silence. She's pretty good at knowing when he needs that.


There are days that set his teeth on edge. He feels like they're all watching him-he doesn't know who they are, exactly, because it's not Rogers, and he doesn't care what Stark thinks of him. They are probably in his head, whispers of the decades of being constantly analyzed for deficiencies and scrutinized under the magnifying lens of thirty scientists like he was a sick dog. On these days, he calculates all the possible outcomes of a decision before making it, strategizes his every move until the hours tick by in a convoluted game of chess. He'll sit in the same spot for ages debating whether or not to take a shower. It's exhausting, and it's not even living. He's reduced to being an asset-

No.

He's an actor, playing his role how the omnipresent they want to see it unfold. He has vague memories of loving to act as Bucky. Not on stage, but in school, or in the middle of the street walking home, to make his sisters or Steve laugh. And he used to have to act as the Asset. It was necessary, so that he could go undercover, gain his targets' trust, pry loose information they wouldn't give otherwise. He'd craft meticulous characters from scratch and live in their skins for days, sometimes weeks at a time. It was the closest thing he got to freedom then.

Sometimes he wonders if that's all he's doing now, becoming something fake to lure his friends in. He confessed that to Romanoff over a bottle of vodka that didn't do much for either of them, and she told him all about how she felt-still feels, sometimes-the same way.

"Fakers never question if they're faking it," she said. "They just know." She patted his arm as she took another shot. The glass hit the glossy wooden tabletop with a dull thunk. "Believe me, you're not."

Even so, on these days he is, and he has to do it right.

He glances up from his laptop at regular intervals to show attentiveness to his surroundings. As he reaches for a glass of water, he forces his hand to steady so it doesn't visibly shake. When he gets up to grab a book he keeps his movements smooth, effortless. At first, Steve thought these days were good days. Barnes can see why; to any outsider he would appear perfectly fine; normal, even. But slowly Steve morphed from an outsider in Bucky's shifted life to someone who'd somehow managed to unlock every aspect of him without even realizing it.

"You have different types of good days," he says casually over breakfast. He looks like he's been mulling it over for a while.

"Yes." Barnes says. It's true. His range of good days has changed since he recalibrated. In the beginning, a good day was one where he wasn't being actively tortured by HYDRA. A bar so low you could probably trip over it. Slowly, as his horizons expanded, it became one where managed to have fewer than three panic attacks walking through east Manhattan. That would probably qualify as an okay day now, depending on what happened afterward.

Steve pours himself a tall glass of orange juice. "There's the really good days, where we hang out with the rest of the team or the Olds," he says. "And the good mission days, when you're blowing up HYDRA bases-" Barnes smiles, just a little. Those are good days. "-and your shooting accuracy is off the charts-" His shooting is always accurate, Rogers. Even when he's been shot. "-and then there's the ones where you're really calm. But not baking-calm or spending-time-with-the-Olds calm. It's...different." A calculated, forced calm. Rogers looks like he's considering it. There's a stretch of silence as he spreads cream cheese over a mountain of bagels. "...Those...aren't good days, are they, Buck?"

He shakes his head. Steve's face falls.

"I'm so sorry, Bucky, I didn't even realize. God, and to think I was trying to drag you all over the place every time, and never saw it…"

"It's okay," Barnes says. "You know now."

Rogers gets better at picking up when it's that kind of day, when he feels like he's very small with a big red target on his back, and he feels like he has to justify everything he does. He stops asking Barnes if he wants to go to the farmers market and puts on an old movie instead. It's a nice distraction to watch real actors do their work. It helps remind him he's not on a set.


Occasionally, he has a storm day.

That's what Sam calls them. The name fits. Everything feels clouded, the air thick in his throat and lungs and his head heavy. His chest feels like it's caving in with the echoes of all the things they made him do, the cries of the children he strangled with his bare hands, the sickening cracks of their skulls, the howls in the streets as he dragged his victims away. It hurts and yet, he can't look away. The images in his mind flash over and over again, shocks of lighting, and on some dark days, he makes himself watch them all. He deserves to feel the pain of what he'd done.

He sleeps a lot. Well, he lies in bed on his side with his eyes closed. Real sleep brings nightmares, so even though he barely moves he's still weary bone-deep. Steve knocks twice on the doorframe every couple of hours to drop off another tray of soup or sandwiches that will go uneaten.

"You gotta tell me when you get sick, Buck," he murmurs, pressing the back of his hand to Barnes' forehead. Surprisingly, the touch soothes him, and he finds himself leaning into it. He's sweating hard from the exertion of yet another round of vivid flashbacks, and Steve's hand is refreshingly cool.

"Not sick," he mutters.

Steve hums unhappily. "You're not warm, but..."

"Not sick," Barnes says again. He taps his head. "Jus' dark."

Rogers understands. Barnes can hear him having a muted conversation with Sam over the phone that evening.

"Just be there for him, man," Sam's voice crackles through the tinny speakers. "I can't tell you what's best for him, you gotta ask him that yourself. But for now, give him space when he wants it, make sure he's staying hydrated, stuff like that. You'll both pull through."

And they do. There's a brief patch in the end where he has a meltdown and sits in the closet, but Clint sits on the other side of the door and reads Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, replacing Alexander's name with Barnes' until Bucky's shoulders shake with disbelieving laughter instead of fear. Clint reads like he's simultaneously trying not to laugh and trying not to get punched by a metal arm, and there's a lot of ad-libbing involved. Barnes is able to come out not long after. He'll remember the ghosts of his past later. For now, it is enough to just carry them.


Rogers has storm days, too. Stark tells Barnes he got them a lot more before Barnes came back, and there's a hint of something poorly masked in his voice, like regret and acceptance meshed together. A few weeks later, Steve sleeps in until noon instead of going for his five a.m. run, snaps at FRIDAY to leave him alone, and doesn't join Barnes for lunch in the kitchen. Barnes knows this pattern-it's different from his own, yes, but he sees the similarities, and he knows what this is.

How to help, though.

He goes with what Steve does for him: food, water, company. He sits by the bed and plays podcast after podcast, content to sit and listen while Steve lies unmoving with his back to him. Every once in a while, his shoulders will shake with repressed sobs, and Barnes will rest a hand on them until they stop. Aw, come on, pal, the old Bucky-voice in his head whispers. He's severely out of his element here, but he's trying, and maybe that will be enough. Barnes recalls how heavy the ghosts get some days, and of how Steve never leaves when it gets real bad, and thinks, I can help carry yours, too, Rogers.

Sometimes on Barnes' storm days, Steve will talk to him for hours, stories about everything and nothing until his throat is hoarse and Barnes opens his eyes to tell him to drink some damn water. After the fourth podcast episode ends, he finds himself speaking. He's unsure at first. Words are difficult for him even on the best of days, and he's not keeping up a steady stream of one-way dialogue so much as a stilted commentary on what he did in the gaps between the day he recalibrated and the day he reunited with Steve for real. It gets easier after a while, until he realizes he's been talking for a solid half hour without pause. It startles him, and Steve stirs when his voice dies off mid-sentence. He rolls over so he's facing Barnes. Rogers looks like he just woke up after getting run over a good dozen times by a semi, but his red-rimmed eyes are brighter than that morning when he blinks up at him.

"Why'd you stop." he rasps.

Barnes gives a one-shouldered shrug. "Saw the time."

That makes Rogers look guilty. "Buck, if you have to go...you don't have to babysit me." That last part is said with a hint of defiance that sends memories ricocheting through Barnes' mind. All of them are of tiny baby Steve. "Go have fun, I'll be fine by myself for one night," and "Just some dust in my throat, 'm not coming down with anything," and "I said I'm not tired-what the hell, Bucky, put me down!" The memories provide him with further data for a conclusion he already knows: Steven Grant Rogers will actually, physically die before he admits he ever needs help.

Stupid, and not allowed.

"That's not what I meant," Barnes says with a half-scowl, "and you know it."

Steve closes his eyes. "'S still true, though."

"Well, I'm not going anywhere, punk," and at this Barnes' heart leaps at the twitch of Steve's lips, "So buckle up. I still have to tell you about my baking plans for the next six years."

They are, as it turns out, quite detailed. There are a lot of types of pie.


Good days. Bad days. Storm days. And the ones in between. They tick by one by one. Unlike the blurred together swaths that were his years with HYDRA, he can catalogue these, understand these.

None of them have to be spent alone.


Thank you for reading, and feel free to leave a review! They always make my day.