AN: Hello friends! I know I really should be updating Buxom Wenches but I recently finished writing a fantasy story for my masters thesis and now I accidentally got on a big Stucky kick. I'm also now on ao3 as CaptainHoney and will be posting updated versions of some old fics over there.

Content warning for this story: some graphic depictions of medical-ish procedures and mentions of death and violence.

longing

When Bucky sleeps, his dreams are concerned with the sensation of falling. He wakes soaked in sweat, metal fingers wrapped around his throat. He stares out the window for a while, looking for some sign of comfort, but the gibbous moon is too reminiscent of light flashing on Zola's spectacles and he cannot bear to be beneath it. He retreats, hiding in the corner of the apartment he's squatting in.

Bucky seeks an activity to distract his mind. He draws with sticks of charcoal in a cheap sketchbook. His first attempts are rough and angry but as the dream disappears his lines smooth out.

A good memory: the fourth of July, Steve's birthday, pennies pinched to buy him a box of pastels and a sheaf of good paper. Bright sketches of the fireworks. Red and yellow smudges on Steve's fingers, wiped over Bucky's cheeks and lips when he leans in too close.

Bucky's drawings are crude and ugly, but it helps, like he's extracting the blackness from his thoughts and transferring them to the page. He wonders how long it will take for him to be good enough to show the pictures to other people and have them understand, to say 'this is what they did to me' without opening his mouth.

rusted

He visits his own grave, angel-topped and ostentatious. With no body to tie his marker to a single location there are three, but he shuns the military cemeteries in favour of Evergreen. He'd found the site through the public records on a morbid whim, with a note about the headstone being paid for by Howard Stark. A memory comes to him like an itch behind his eye, of a dark road and a gleaming car. He lies down on the grave, pressing his face into the soil and closing his eyes. The ground is soft from rain and he feels like if he just lies there then he could sink through the ground and fill the empty space that is waiting for him. He wakes up two hours later to a policeman's torch. He's up and running long before they have a hope of catching him.

seventeen

He had always felt the two of them were diametrically opposed, like light and shadow. Even as kids, before they did what they did, Bucky had known that Steve was probably the most good person he would ever meet. So he tried to be Steve's shadow, tailing him around Brooklyn like a schmuck. He'd been forced to step in to save Steve from getting killed half a hundred times and he had destroyed a lot of handsome faces in the process, but the kid never stopped. When he got sent to the front Bucky was more worried about Steve getting killed without him there for protection than he was about getting killed himself.

Then they did what they did, peeling them open and turning them inside out. For Steve it was like that light that Bucky saw in him, that golden heat in his soul, had been put on the outside and now everyone could see how he shone. For Bucky, on the other hand, they stitched him back up again and hid it all. He might have looked the same, a few cuts and bruises, but inside it was like that darkness in him was collapsing in upon itself, becoming bigger and deeper and sucking him in.

daybreak

His face is on a postage stamp.

His eye still catch on every piece of Captain America memorabilia he passes and there it is, sitting in a dusty album in the window of a collector's shop (a stray thought: how much would the embarrassingly large collection of comics and flyers he had kept in his army pack be worth now?). The stamp is part of a special commemorative Howling Commandos set from the fiftieth anniversary of their formation (1993: he doesn't think the Winter Soldier got a lot done in that year, but the timeline is foggy). At the size of a thumbprint Bucky's picture is small enough that he can't see the death and desperation in his eyes. The clouds and the sun change position and then Bucky can see them well enough in his own reflection. Light glances of the picture of Captain America and Bucky has to shield his eyes from the glare.

furnace

Bucky is having a good day. He eats fruit on a bench overlooking the river, elbows on his knees. There's a paper bag containing fresh bread and a wedge of cheese on the bench beside him, and several slim paperbacks tucked in various pockets. He manages an easy exchange of smiles with several people and flirts with the person who sells him coffee. His mind is quieter than it's been since Washington. Bucky feels relaxed; he could live here, he thinks, selling papers and shopping at the market and taking long walks along the banks of the Dâmbovița. The good days string together into a soothing lullaby. For once the things he remembers are better than the things he forgets. Then everything goes to shit.

nine

They still seem so different in such familiar ways. Steve is so pure it makes Bucky's teeth hurt, and he's a ball of darkness and anger with two fists attached. Other voices reverberate around his head, ghosts shouting orders or screaming for mercy and he wants to rip them out by the roots. Steve places limits upon Bucky's violence and he must learn how to see the good in that. He has been relearning how to be himself, and now he must relearn how to be the version of himself that Steve always saw. It is difficult to unlearn ruthlessness, but Bucky is becoming real again, untangling himself from the myth of violence built in and around him.

A memory: taking some girls and a sketchbook-toting Steve to see Pinocchio. Nightmarish sequences that don't sit well in his head. A reverberating line: 'he's my conscience. He tells me what's right and wrong.'

Bucky tries so hard to be what Steve needs but he's drowning in the belly of the whale.

benign

He wakes up from a nightmare and shuffles to the elevator. It's 3:30am and Avengers Tower is silent as the grave. He enters the lab, finds what he needs in the dark, then positions himself: stool, lamp, mirror. The nightmare pulses through his brain and burns in his sockets as he takes the scalpel to the seam between metal and flesh. The scar tissue is full of unexpected knots; the cut is not clean. His angle is awkward and the tools are not ideal but he is able to separate skin from muscle and examine the filaments underneath. He has a screen with a three-dimensional diagram of a shoulder projected in from of him, but flesh and image do not appear the same. His body is messy, full of bolts and wires. The nightmare scuds across his vision. His trapezius muscles are spliced with cable. His scapula has been removed and replaced with a shield, striped red white and blue.

A bad memory: he still had half an arm when they found him. They cut it away piece by piece. He doesn't know what they did with the pieces.

Another memory: sometimes they explained what they were doing as they were doing it. The filaments run to his brain.

He jams his finger into the wound he has made and starts pulling at them, feeling the tug from his fingertips to his spinal cord. He blacks out, and it's nice not to dream.

He wakes up to shouting and the pounding of feet. Steve is clutching his face with desperate fingers and yelling his name. He's covered in blood and Bucky snaps to attention.

'Are you ok?' he asks.

'Am I-' Steve moves backwards like he's been electrocuted. He rubs his hand across his mouth, smearing more blood everywhere, and stands in the corner. He's not looking at Bucky, refuses to meet his eyes. Why won't he look at me?

Bucky looks around, sees the blood everywhere, sees Tony staring at his back like there's roaches pouring out of it, sees a doctor holding handfuls of bloody towel and others running around the periphery, barking at each other.

'Steve, what did I do?' he asks, voice shaking. 'Did I hurt someone?'

Steve lets out a strangled noise and Bucky realises it's a sob. He tries to reach out, but his arm doesn't seem to be working and it's making Steve look worse. He's suddenly, terribly afraid.

'What did I do?'

homecoming

New York is like a patched coat, new layer upon new layer until it's almost impossible to tell what the city had once looked like. The skyline rises and falls with each of the century's disasters and the city keeps striving forward. Bucky tries to rattle out some memories from his old neighbourhood but the warehouses have become condos and the alleys where he'd helped Steve gather up broken chips of tooth after fights are full of whiskey bars and boutique bakeries. The two of them had watched the Empire State Building shooting upwards, the tallest structure in the world, and now it's a tourist trap.

Worst offence of all is when Bucky finds a plaque outside a block of flats declaring them to be the childhood home of Captain America. The real childhood home of Captain America is now an office block two streets over. Bucky breaks into the apartment with the gilded shield above the door and drinks a cup of takeaway coffee at the kitchen table. Almost every object in the place could have bought everything the young Steve Rogers owned twice over at least. A newspaper clipping of the day they hung the plaque sits in a timber frame of top of the refrigerator. He smashes the glass and tears out the clipping, tucking it into his pocket. He leaves the coffee cup lying in the shards.

one

He tries to go through memories an emotion at a time, but that proves... difficult. He accidentally attracts attention by sitting alone on a fire escape while cackling at several decades' worth of jokes at once. These are the most mundane memories he has from after they did what they did; sitting in a vehicle en route to an assignment while his handlers cracked jokes and told stories. Then he remembers the time he had been out of cryo too long and was getting twitchy and someone had made a joke at his expense. They had elbowed him in the ribs and he had broken theirs. With that comes a rush of memories of violence, the sound of bones snapping in the air all around him like cicadas. He drops to the ground from four stories up and takes off running. Memory of boot heel on head is overtaken by boot heel on pavement and he finds a new memory: Bucky Barnes with Steve Rogers slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, running from a fight. Steve hadn't talked to him for three days after that one. He laughs again, and then he's the running, laughing madman and for once it feels good to be alive.

Freight car

Steve doesn't treat him like a fragile, broken thing, the way Bucky feared he would. He still embraces him as fully as he ever did, though now he's strong enough for it to almost hurt. This makes Bucky laugh; the laughter is free from memories of pain. He finds that a lot of Steve-memories are good. Maybe not good in the way he would have wanted things back then, but good in that they don't feel like wounds.

Steve's body still seems to remember itself as smaller than his. When Bucky reaches out for him in the night, Steve's arms wrap around his waist and his head presses against Bucky's chest, where it used to sit. He remembers lying in bed together when Steve was sick, trying to keep him warm. For a few moments Bucky enjoys the familiar feeling but now he wants to be held, needs to be held, and he jostles Steve awake as he untangles and shoves himself further downward. Steve grumbles the nonsense of one half-asleep as Bucky manoeuvres himself into his arms, pressing his forehead into his chest like he's trying to break through.

'Buck, ow', Steve mumbles, but he wraps one arm around Bucky's shoulders and another around his waist. Bucky bunches handfuls Steve's shirt in his fists and cries himself to sleep.