Archive of Our Own ^beta

Imagine. The city you grew up in, the streets you and your friend walked every day as if you two alone owned New York. How the sun would reflect off the faded brick exterior of the shop that sold the best kosher meat, and the butcher who knew your mother from Torah studies would smile at you from the storefront window as you passed. Your worn shoes scuffed the dirty streets without a care in the world because you were young and had your entire life ahead of you. You could be anything you wanted to be. It was as if the sun rose and set on you and that little kid from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight. The kid you’d do anything for, risk anything. The kid you were with until the end of the line. The kid who sketched pictures of you when he didn't think you were looking at him in English class and would always share half his mother’s homemade bread slice even though he weighed about 90 pounds and needed it more than you. Patrolling the sidewalks as you collected yesterday’s papers to stuff in his oversized shoes left to him by a now-dead father and grabbing him by the scruff of his neck as you pulled him out of fistfights as if you were his mother.

Your younger sister’s face when you would tell her a joke and the way she always asked you everything she couldn’t ask your mother, like where babies came from. Doing arithmetic homework in front of the fireplace as the radio played throughout the small apartment and thinking of the day you would change the world with all this knowledge you learned, once you made sure enough money remained to send Becca to school, of course. Being shooed out of the kitchen by your mother when you tried to help with dinner and Becca laughing at whatever program was on that night.

Staying by Steve’s side anytime he was bedridden with illness, which seemed to be every month, praying to anyone listening that this time he would make it. His mother giving up on trying to get you to leave and go home, but instead just watching with tears in her eyes as she wondered if this was the day G*d took away her only son, the only person she had left. Watching as he got better off the medicine you bought instead of lunch for a few days, telling Sarah Rogers that it wasn’t that big of a deal, you would do it again in a heartbeat. Reading to him when he was still resting, smiling when you did different voices. Telling him he couldn’t scare you like that again and calling him a punk when he told you to shove off.

Months fading into seasons, the autumn leaves falling around you like wild butterflies and the freezing snow crying from the heavens. Being older now, more mature. Those teenage years fading into your early twenties with the blink of an eye. Still looking out for that kid, even after he had become an adult. Sending him to art school and Becca to nursing school instead of sending yourself to college because they mattered more. They always came first. Working at the docks when there was work, but it was a nationwide Depression and money was hard. Bringing home a rare treat for that sister and teaching her to dance for when a young lad swept her off her feet at the club. Swinging her around the kitchen and living room, listening to her laugh as you and Becca danced to the beat on the old radio, your mother smiling from the kitchen stove with a look of pure love in her eyes, wishing that your father could see how much his son had grown.

Dancing with Steve when no one was around, because someone had to teach him. Steve stepping on your bare feet and mumbling apologies, but all you could think about was how perfect everything was at that moment in time.

Then the US entered that second world war as you and Steve listened carefully along as the news reels at the cinema. You had to enter the draft, and Steve was excited. You were terrified, but you couldn’t show it. You getting that 1-A stamp on your papers like you feared and Steve getting a inky-black 4-F, a sigh of relief swelling in your chest but never leaving.

That didn't stop him from wanting to fight, it never would, but you could hope and pray that they would never ship you or Steve overseas, wanting to cry when you remembered what the war did to your father and his, but you couldn’t because you had to stay strong for everyone. You were the strong one, you always were. You couldn’t go and fight, you had a 4”9 asthmatic friend who liked to pick fights in the dusty Brooklyn alleys and had just gotten his third 4-F, now Steve from Ohio.

Then the orders came and you cursed G*d, even though you said sorry right after because you felt so bad.

“Sergeant James Barnes. Shipping out for England first thing tomorrow.”

Maybe it was a double date with the gals, but maybe it was just for you and Steve. It could never be just you and Steve, but you could pretend. You’d gotten used to pretending over the years, and so had he. Maybe you just wanted one more night out with him looking at you like you hung the stars in the sky, that smile he gave you when Stark’s car levitated for two seconds. Finding him later at the recruitment station, knowing that he wanted nothing more than to go to England with you, that broke your heart. Knowing that this is where the best duo the streets of Brooklyn could produce had to part ways, that did too. You not knowing you would be seeing him very soon, much too soon.

“Don’t do anything stupid until I get back.”

“How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you.”

Hugging him. Not wanting to let go, because that would just make everything so much more real.

“Don’t win the war til I get there!”

A salute for your favorite soldier. A man braver than many you meet across the pond, as Agent Carter would say.

Not the Comandos, though. They were good men and had your back and called you Jimmy even though you told them your name was Bucky. Not James. Don’t call you James, that was your father. Or Jimmy. Jimmy was just so common, and there was nothing common about Bucky Barnes.

But don’t call you Buck either, no, never call you that.

Because that’s Steve’s nickname. Only Steve can call you that.

And you got letters from him, doodles on the margins of you punching Nazis and the Brooklyn skylines you missed so much. You hang them above your bed and Dum Dum asks if it’s from your girlfriend and you punch him lightly in the arm. The letters were getting fewer, and you worried.

There is no one to look after him anymore. Sarah had passed, you got the letter a week after Becca’s. Becca says she will watch out for Steve in her letters. She promises a lot of things, and you know she will keep those promises. She writes to you about how she wants to be over there helping the soldiers as you tell her that if you see her step one foot on European soil you’ll send her right back to the states. She calls you a few choice words.

One day Steve doesn’t write back and you worry. Weeks go by, and no letters arrive. The Commandos reassure you, but you’re still on edge.

“He’s busy, James. Probably got a girl, finally.”

“He’s fine, Jimmy.”

“Mail is slow, Bucky, you know that.”

One night half your unit is killed. The rest of you captured or escaped.

The Comandos don’t hate you, but you know they should. This is your fault. You’re in charge around here now. Everyone above you is dead. You’ll be a Private if you make it out of this alive. You don’t care about that, though. You’re afraid the guards will see that ‘H’ on your dog tags that you tried to scratch away when they marched your men through the fields of mud and death. This is no place for a Jewish boy, everyone knows that. You know that. You know what they’re doing. You’ve seen the yellow cloth stars pinned to threadbare coats, the pink triangles that also mock you as if they know a secret you do not yet obtain. The screams and the ash and the hurried prayers. G*d, do you know. You pray in your head so no one will hear you. You keep your head down, which is so unlike you. You count the days, your body slowing giving up.

Then the pneumonia comes. It leaves you in a shaking heap on the shared cell floor at nights after working hours in the factory as you lean against the machines, unable to stand on your own, coughing and running a fever. They shove all the thin blankets on you as you try to push them away, mumbling about how they must save the medicine for Stevie and how the apartment is too hot. Jim is caught trying to permanently remove the ‘H’ as you rest, cutting his finger in the process. The guards ask what’s wrong with you in German, not sounding like they care all that much. No one replies, so they drag you out, the Howling Commandos yelling and fighting to save their sergeant’s life because to them it’s the only one worth saving. Not to you, though. You can only think of Steve at that moment as everything became blurred and faded.

The guards see the ‘H’ that is barely visible against your name and number. G*d, how do they even see it? If you were fully conscious you would have mumbled the death prayer because you know this is the end for you. Jewish boys don’t walk into German work camps and live to tell the tale. They take you roughly to the back, where the other men keep disappearing to. You’ve heard the stories, mumbles of experiments and never returning are common during meals, and your eyes feel so weak as they blink in the misty darkness.

You wish you had one last chance to say goodbye, to Steve and Becca and your unit. You’ve been counting. It’s Friday, you’re sure of it. That hurts your heart. You whisper that Hebrew blessing your father taught you so many moons agon, knowing that this will be the end of the line.

But G*d never really listened to you anyways.

The doctor does not talk much and you don’t think you would be able to understand him anyway. He says you do not anesthetic because it would be a waste, so they let you scream. The blue liquid in the syringes hurt your body. You are strapped to a table for days on end, staring up at the electric machine they sometimes put down on your head and start. The one that makes you forget some things, like where you are and why you’re in the strange place. They never seem satisfied with the results.

They don’t want information. They don’t want to know where the other troops are.

You still only say what you were taught to under torture.

“Sergeant. James Barnes. 32557038.”

Then one day it is different. You think it’s the drugs that they pump through your fragile veins, but he’s there and he’s bigger, bigger than you. His blue eyes ring out among the grey and black shadows that dance across the dirty walls, his small smile the first you’ve seen in months. He holds you up as you wobble,

“I thought you were dead.”

You look at him, the little kid from Brooklyn that isn’t so little anymore. The boy you picked up from the dirt so many times. The boy that you taught to box and throw a baseball and swim. The boy that brought an orange to your Bar Mitzvah, by far your favorite gift that night. The boy that looked up to you. The boy you would do anything for.

“I thought you were smaller,” was all you could say. And he smiled. G*d, that dumb smile, that smile that you’d been wishing for since you were deployed.

The men are happy to see that you aren’t dead. Dum Dum hugs you tight and you almost lose all the air in your lungs. You are weak and you know that, especially as Steve wraps his now muscular arm around your shoulder to keep you from falling in the mud. All the boys want to know why you said Steve was small. You reply that you left him small and must’ve bulked up on Ovaltine.

Everyone laughs like they didn't just escape hell. Like you don’t have bruises from the electricity and needle marks dotting your arms as you try to hide them from Steve. You aren’t supposed to be the weak one, but suddenly you are and that scares you.

“C’mon, Buck,” he says.

And that name, the name you wished to hear everyday you wished to be back in Brooklyn, it’s like bright paper moon on a penciled black canvas of night, protruding through the clouds with determination. Steve is your full moon. You will follow him to the end of times, into any warzone or battlefield.

And by G*d, do you keep that promise.

Now imagine all of that disappearing by the flick of a switch, the fate of one fall that freezing day. Every memory, good and bad, leaving your mind, body, and soul. Making you into the empty husk of the man you were, leaving behind only what the war has made you learn. A part of you, your arm, replaced by foreign technology, its red star burning into the flesh you no longer possess. You aren’t a man anymore. You are a weapon, a machine. You are a loaded gun sent to shoot the ones you once protected.

You forget everything.

Those light blue ocean glass eyes that have a nickname for your nickname that would draw you on hot summer days and light candles with you in the winter months and the fresh Challah that your mother made. Your sister’s smile when she first saw you in your uniform. The grave of your father, a cold slab of stone that would never amount to the man that laid buried below it. The girls you took dancing and the boy you fought the world for in his honor.

HYDRA carries on with you, one frozen mission after another. Life around you continues as if you never existed. Life doesn’t stop for anyway, least of all you.

And that day, the mission that you were to take down Black Widow and Captain America, a voice you haven’t heard in seventy years tells you not to shoot the man with the shield.

“Bucky?”

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

That is the million dollar question for the rest of the mission. Who is Bucky? Why won’t they tell you who the man on the bridge is?

Why do you remember some things?

And why do you pull him from the river? You had orders to kill him, not save him.

Maybe it’s because he’s so beat up and he reminds you of someone long ago. You still look down alleys, waiting to see him in some fight. He’s never there. You don’t know why you remember this. It’s always in the back of your mind, like an itch you can’t scratch.

You don’t know your past. You haven’t had a name in so long. It’s always Soldat. Asset.

Who are you?

You are no longer HYDRA’s weapon. You are no longer James Barnes from the US Army.

You are Bucky.

You are quiet. Inquisitive. Careful. You watch and learn things, things you have forgotten and things you never knew.

You aren’t alone any more. You aren’t forced to stay quiet and accept things without a thought.

He tells you that it’s okay that you’re not the same man you were before you fell.

That you’re not a villain, no matter what anyone will try to tell you. And people do try to tell you, every chance they get.

His voice calms you. Helps you remember everything they made you forget.

You remember why Fridays are important and the prayers you learned as a child. The taste of matzo ball soup when you were sick and the mezuzahs that hung by all the doors in your old home. He is happy that you do and takes you to the Synagogue so you can remember more.

"Seek peace and pursue it,” the Rabbi tells you one November day after the service is over.

“That is all I can hope to do,” you think as Steve squeezes your hand in support. It’s the first time in a long time that someone touches your body and does not mean you harm. It’s… good.

You realize that it will be okay, not only in that moment, but many more like it. You have choices now. No one can make you do anything.

Steve sees the smile that spreads to your dusty blue eyes, and though he knows he will never get the Bucky back that he lost that winter day, he knows that the man he has now is healing. And that’s really all he can pray for.

You fall into a new Brooklyn routine. Farmers’ market for fruits and vegetables, but now you pay with plastic cards. People text now, so you must as well. You figure out emoticons and Twitter. Internet, so helpful. There is a Starbucks everywhere you go. You find that there are now flavors for your coffees. You prefer vanilla, because Steve does too. You find that you can watch movies in your own home now. Steve thinks it’s amazing as well. There is a Netflix. You enjoy the comedy shows set up in the workplace. Steve can quote many lines. He does the voices and it always makes you laugh so he keeps doing them. Temple on Fridays. Movie night is Saturday. Grocery shopping is Sunday, after church. Steve never lost hope in the “C” on his old dog tags and you smile as you remember his mother’s Irish accent that would slip out only when she prayed or yelled at Steve. You used to feel self-conscious about the metal arm, but you don’t mind anymore. People don’t stare as much, and when they do they want to thank you for your service, which makes you blush and Steve laugh. A little girl with a prosthetic leg once saw you in the streets on your way to the kosher store and came up to you, a smile on her face. She said you two were wins. You couldn’t agree more.