Sam retrieves the notebook James used weeks ago to record the list of upsetting things. He turns it to a blank page and hands James an ink pen.
"Pens used to look different," James remembers, turning it in his hands. He can't quite recall how they were different—more pointed on the writing end, perhaps?—but he is sure that they were.
"I don't doubt it." Sam places the notebook before him. "We're starting a new list. Once a day, I want you to write down something you like about Bucky Barnes."
"But I don't want to be Bucky Barnes."
"And you don't have to be. You can be anything that you want." He says this while guiding James's hand to the page, which seems to be a contradiction. "But you were Bucky Barnes, and that's something you're gonna have to come to terms with. You've got this habit of rejecting ideas that don't fit into your pre-conceived worldview and since you think you were a bad person, we need to actively challenge that."
"I don't reject things." He thinks he might have declined to drink a soda once in the time that he's been here, but that is the extent of any rejection. Apart from trying to return to HYDRA. And disagreeing with Steve and everyone else about the character of Bucky Barnes. But those don't count; the others aren't privy to Barnes's thoughts the way James is.
"Uh-huh. So how is it that I introduced you to Tony Stark and you came away thinking his name was Howard?"
"You did?" That first morning in the tower seems so far away, though it hasn't yet been a month. Days are much longer now that James is regularly conscious for them.
"See, and this is what I'm talking about. Just write one thing for now. Anything."
Bucky Barnes was funny, James writes, because he was. James is still struggling to grasp the exact concept of humor. If there were one thing he'd want to emulate from his past self, he supposes it would be an understanding of comedy. "That's it?"
"I'm guessing you don't want to be called Bucky anymore?" Sam asks.
James hadn't considered that. He shouldn't want to be; if he is distancing himself from that person, continuing to use the name can only be counterproductive. But there is something pleasant in having a diminutive of his name, like an audible sign of affection. He didn't have that as the Soldier. He was simply Soldier, or asset, or sometimes Winter Soldier. Technically, Soldier was the diminutive, but James doubts there was affection in its use. He doesn't think anyone had ever called him Winter. Or...Winnie? Winnie is almost familiar, a term he seems to have carried inside without conscious thought. Had someone called him Winnie?
"I don't care what I'm called." James sets the pen down. "He wasn't the only Bucky in the world. I think. And I like the way Steve says it."
"Okay."
"Did you ever have a dog?" Barton asks.
They are out of the tower. James is holding Lucky's leash with his right hand, left hand concealed by his glove. There has been a collective agreement that he looks sufficiently different enough now from the media images of the Winter Soldier to go outside without fear of arrest. There's also been an agreement that it's better for James to go out in the sunlight, supervised, than it is for them to inject him with vitamin D as HYDRA used to do.
James notices that Steve texts him much more frequently when James is out of the tower than he does when James is in it.
"I don't think so?" Neither the things he's read nor Steve's stories mentioned a dog. The only dogs in his memories are the kind that attack.
"You're good with them," Barton says.
They are walking to a yarn store, because James has run out. Barton, they have decided, will do the speaking if there is any speaking that needs to be done. James doesn't trust his ability to hold casual conversation with strangers yet, particularly strangers who are trying to sell him things.
"Do you feel guilty?" Barton asks as they stop at a crosswalk, waiting for the light to change.
He feels guilty for worrying Steve and for having been a bad
[I am not bad]
friend in the past. He doubts that is what Barton is referring to. "I don't know." He did not like killing people, and he does not like thinking about it now. But James isn't haunted by it the way he is by thoughts of his shortcomings as a person.
"It hasn't hit, then," Barton says. "You'll know when it does."
"Should I feel guilty?" Lucky puts his front paws on James's leg and he reaches down to pet behind the dog's ears.
"No, you shouldn't. You had no choice. Just promise you'll say when you start to feel it, would you? You wouldn't be the only one who's been there. Me, Nat, all of us, we can help you through it."
"I promise." The light signals them to cross.
Bucky Barnes, James writes that evening, got to choose the causes he fought for. He had convictions. So does James, but his are about things like being human and not dying. To enter a war due to moral beliefs is a concept he can barely grasp.
He sets down the pen and goes back to the knitting needles.
Two sets of mittens, two pairs of socks and one sweater later, the paint on his nails is rather chipped.
Tony didn't understand why his sweater was fuchsia until James explained that Barton had called it Tony's favorite color. The list entry for that day had been Bucky Barnes could understand sarcasm.
James's left hand is not quite capable of the small, delicate movements necessary to reapply nail color without also spreading the polish on his skin. Steve is an artist, so James gathers the polish and remover and heads to his floor of the tower.
"How many bottles of nail polish did Natasha buy you?" Steve rubs at his nails with acetone, the color coming off in streaks.
"Every color in the rainbow. And black and white."
"Did she buy you any other makeup?" A pause. Most of the polish is gone now. "I don't care, just—I won't know how to apply it."
"She didn't." Though James has researched makeup online and the thought of having his face as a canvas, the ability to change his appearance on his own whims, is intriguing.
"What color do you want this time?" Steve asks once the green is fully wiped away.
James glances at Steve's shield, gleaming at the foot of the bed. "Like that."
He does not fully recreate the shield on any of James's nails—they aren't the right shape—but there are stripes of blue and red and white, and stars.
"Did we know anyone named Winnie?" James asks.
Steve has one of those smiles that is real but also sad. "That was what your dad called your mom. Unless you mean the bear?"
"Bear?"
"I'll show you later."
Winifred. Winnie. James is looking at his nails, but his thoughts are full of yarn and peppermint. Winnie. He has no way to be sure, but he doesn't think the name is a newly recovered memory. It seems that some things, as with the recollection of Steve, could not be fully wiped away.
Once his nails are dry, he writes Bucky Barnes had a good memory.
There are cartoon based on the books about the Winnie bear that Steve introduced him to. James is watching one such film and trying to work out the meaning of the word "blustery" from context when Sam walks in.
"Eleven," he says.
James turns his head away from the Piglet stranded in the water onscreen. "What?"
"You have eleven friends." Sam counts on his fingers. "Me, Steve, Tony, Pepper, JARVIS, Dum-E, Butterfingers, U, Clint, Natasha, and Lucky."
"That is eleven." James nods, unsure of the significance.
"You said that there weren't a dozen people who'd be your friends, remember? You're just one away."
James has a twelfth friend: Rumlow. He does not mention this. The last time he brought up Rumlow and friendship and amnesty, Steve had led James back to the punching bags and asked him to please elaborate on Rumlow's positive qualities. He had then destroyed two of the bags and would have done more had James not refused to continue.
"Oh," he says, and returns his attention to the Hundred Acre Wood.
Romanoff enters just as the credits start and shakes her head at the television as James stands. "No. First of all, I can feel my blood caramelizing and secondly, the Soviet adaptations were better. Why'd you get up?"
James stares at his feet, unsure of why he's standing. "I—that's…what you do…for dames?"
"Not in this century." She commandeers the remote, pushing him back toward the couch as she sits. "You do watch things that aren't Disney, don't you?"
"Most movies are…restricted."
"TV?" She begins flipping through the options.
"I don't like commercials." Advertisements make bodies, particularly those of women, into commodities and objects. It's unsettling.
"You can fast-forward through those."
A shrug. Most television is also restricted.
"What about ballet?"
"What is ballet?"
Romanoff grins, presses something on the remote, and brings up a video. "This is ballet. You'd like it."
It is a film of a stage performance. There is a woman in a white gown, dancing. Her shoes are strange, elongated at the toe, and she can balance on them.
"I've seen ballet." The memory is in flashes. An opera box where his target is seated, drawing a garrote around the target's throat, glimpses of shoes like that on the performers below. "I had a mission."
"Did it involve tights?" Tony asks from the doorway. He is wearing the sweater. James is not sure how long he has been standing there.
Suddenly remembering an intense hatred for tights—damn USO comics—James flips Tony the "bird" hand gesture.
"Well, excuse me, Coppelia. I just thought you might like dancing."
"I dance. Danced." James glanced back to the screen. The woman is no longer in the gown; her costume has changed and now it involves white feathers. "Not like this."
He can feel Romanoff's eyes on him. "Then how?"
At some point while he is teaching Romanoff to Lindy Hop, Tony disappears down the hallway. James registers the movement, but remains focused on the steps. Romanoff's right hand is on his shoulder, and his on her side. Their left hands are joined. "I start with my left foot, you with your right. Eight counts. And rock-step, triple step, walk, walk, triple step. Rock-step, triple step, walk walk, triple step."
Romanoff understands it immediately. He wonders if she danced ballet. He thinks she moves like a dancer, though he isn't sure how to articulate what that means. "And then what?"
"Then you get really good at that…" James begins again, but midway through he swings Romanoff back toward himself and flips her over his shoulder. She lands on her feet behind him. "And I do that. Things like that."
Romanoff sweeps her foot out and James is abruptly lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. "Warn a girl before you throw her next time."
He nods. From the doorway, there is a sound of laughter. Tony has returned and Steve is with him.
"Can you do that?" Tony asks Steve. "Because if you can, I'm taking you clubbing. The both of you."
"Bucky was the dancer," Steve says. He crosses the threshold and helps James up. "I've never tried."
"But you and Agent Carter—" James cuts himself off. Steve froze days after James fell. There wasn't an opportunity for dancing. And of course by the time Steve had woken up, Peggy Carter had died. Stupid, insensitive—
"I think she's got enough on her plate without me stepping on her feet." Steve has another of those sad smiles.
James tilts his head. "She's alive?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I didn't tell you?"
"Twelve friends!" Sam calls from somewhere down the hall.
He is not sure of Peggy Carter's birth date, but she must be very old. "Can she stand up? Can she walk?"
"She can. She doesn't often, but if she had to, she could. I should take you to see her, Buck, she'd be thrilled that you're—"
"And you haven't danced with her?" James feels what he thinks is indignation.
"I—"
"What the hell, Steve?" What the hell. It's an idiom, a crude emphasis, and suddenly it makes perfect sense. "You can't get a lady excited to dance with you and then not follow through!"
"Bucky, I don't think—"
"Yeah, obviously. Seventy years later and you're still clueless. This is your girl, here. You looked at each other like—like—look, she's gettin' dancing and flowers and if you won't do it, I'll have to."
Steve looks sheepish—as he damn well should—and also amused and other things James isn't sure of. "Bucky, I can't dance."
"No, you never bothered to learn." He rolls his eyes, grabs Steve's wrist. "You're such a punk, you know that? Here, I'll be the dame, you lead, and if you step on my feet, I'll slug you."
Steve does not step on his feet, but beyond that he is useless and doesn't begin to grasp the steps until the fourth or fifth walk through. It's a good thing Peggy Carter is too old for anything fast or vigorous, because James can't imagine trying to teach the man to jitterbug.
There is a sound of music, a humming, and James realizes it's coming from him. He pauses, both the sound and his feet, blinks. That song…it's a new memory, but it's clear. The song had been real popular when men were shipping out; he must have heard it at least a hundred times. "That's…that was 'We'll Meet Again.'" He glances to Steve. "Right?"
"That's right." Steve grins. His hand is still on James's waist and he pulls him into a hug. "That's exactly right. You've got it, Bucky."
James pushes lightly at his shoulder. "Well, one of us has to be on top of things. Now move back, you've got steps to learn."
Bucky Barnes, he writes later, was bossy and had rude. But he still managed to be a good friend to Steve despite that. He examines the entry, then crosses out the last two words. It doesn't feel as if Bucky Barnes had overcome poor qualities to be a friend; it is more like those qualities never mattered.
A/N: In Bucky's day, either fountain pens or dip pens would have been the standard. While ballpoint pens existed in his lifetime, they were not reliable and not widespread.
In 1969, Soyuzmultfilm made a Russian animated adaptation of A.A. Milne's Winne-the-Pooh stories. It's cute, although quite different from the Disney films (for example, Christopher Robin does not appear). Then again, it also includes some things left out of the Disney adaptations, such as Winnie the Pooh being accidentally shot (but unharmed).
Coppelia is a ballet that involves a scientist making lifelike humanoid robots. The ballet that Natasha and James were watching was Swan Lake. And speaking of Swan Lake, am I the only one who can't watch Sebastian Stan's scene in Black Swan now without thinking, "Hey, it's Bucky and Jane Foster hanging out"?
Depending on which of Natasha's comic back stories you read, she was either a ballerina or had memories of being a ballerina implanted into her head. The step that James demonstrated to Natasha is a swing dancing move known as a swing out. If you've never seen a Lindy Hop performance, they can get quite intense and acrobatic. And impressive.
"We'll Meet Again" was a 1939 song by Vera Lynn that became very popular during WWII, when men were being sent overseas.