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The Winter Soldier had no self.

He was the sharpest eye and the heaviest gun in the body that was his country. He was her quickest bullet and her fiercest heart. His love for her eclipsed all else, until he felt nothing but the clean burn of loyalty unquestioned.

It was a simple existence. If the Winter Soldier were capable of contentment, that is how he would describe his state of being. But no one ever asked him. No one ever had to ask him.

And if he dreamt of betraying the state, during his long sleeps when Mother Russia was not in need of his closed fist and gnashing teeth, he would not open his mouth to reveal it.

What were dreams, after all? Gossamer and fog. Half-formed untruths and crumbling towers of lies. The only things he could call his own.

—

There is a past that does not exist, and in it, the Winter Soldier is young, Russia is merely a word, and there is extra money in his pocket that he intends to spend on his boy.

“Aw, Buck, we can’t,” the boy says. His voice is deep like a man’s, but he is slight, and the sight of his eyelashes sweeping downwards as he looks at his feet and fidgets makes the soldier want to gather him up tight against his body, bury his face in that fine, fair hair.

“Sure we can, you lug,” the soldier says. “I got a bonus for working those extra shifts last month, remember? And this is what I wanna do.”

“You should spend it on stuff you need.”

“Stevie, there ain’t nothing I need more than a little bit of fun with my best pal.”

The soldier knows something this boy made of light does not: he has already put away enough for this month’s food, rent, and emergency fund, and he has been waiting for months to take the boy out, waiting for the weather and his good health to slot into alignment. He flicks one of the boy’s ears before wrangling him into a headlock. The boy’s arms come up around the soldier’s waist and squeeze him tight, tighter than it appears he’s capable of, but the boy is wiry and strong, and in his pants the soldier’s penis gives a hopeful twitch.

But the sun is up and it is shining, and the low throb of desire the boy inspires is reserved for moonlight hours and closed doors. Touch more heated than a friendly tussle is not something they can afford, even with all the extra shifts and kindly bosses. The soldier can see the slick parting of his boy’s full pink mouth, and before his body can betray him further, he pushes him away.

“Come on, lunkhead,” he says. “Think you can handle the Cyclone?”

—

Listen to me, are you listening?

Comrade—

Natalia, I cannot betray my country, do you understand?

Of course. I would never believe otherwise. You are an inspiration to us all.

So when I tell you the things I am about to tell you, you must realize that you dreamed them, yes?

…Yes. I dream often, and vividly.

Good. Very good.

I feel I must be sleeping even now.

Natalia, The Soviet Union is collapsing. Sooner, perhaps, than even I can calculate.

I — I know. I had not wished to believe it.

None of us did. But this war — I have seen it only through the crosshairs, a patchwork history. Nevertheless, I know its rhythms better than any other man living. I see this crumbling foundation for what it is, even if our comrades cannot. We are done for.

What will we do?

We will do nothing. I will serve the state, as I long to do. As I was born to do. You — you will disappear.

What is this?

The key to a deposit box in Vienna. You know the one — you visited it in another dream.

I was a gymnast, and you were my coach.

You will swallow it. Or — insert it. You will keep it safe. And when I sleep again, it will be the last time, and you will go and you will follow the instructions I’ve left in the box. I have crafted an identity for you, bank accounts, legal documents—

Comrade. Come with me.

I am a relic with no place in a world without the Soviet Union. And Natalia, I love my country.

We can find a way.

Are you asleep?

…I am.

Good. Good. I must go now, and I will not see you again.

Comrade—

Natalia. Remember: blind faith is no faith at all.

—

“Absolutely not,” the boy says when the Steeplechase Mountain Ride looms before them. He is still pale and clammy from losing his funnel cake and candy apple lunch over the Cyclone. “No more rides.”

“Not even the ferris wheel?”

“Nope.”

“Carousel.”

“Bucky.”

“All right, all right.” The soldier, who is younger than he ever remembers being, who smiles with an ease he cannot grasp at now, raises his two flesh and blood hands in surrender. He does not know what surrender feels like, but he imagines it like this: a sly gift, a capitulation with the promise of a greater reward later than winning would offer now. Surrender is not in his nature, and yet here he is, palms up and open for this boy with the full pink mouth, the big earnest eyes the color of Lake Lagoda in the summertime.

The soldier can be someone else in a dream, can be someone who laughs and loves and hides under humid bedsheets slick with his own leavings. Can be someone who holds his hands up and puts his fate in the hands of a phantom boy who makes his pulse misbehave.

“Let’s go down the midway then,” the soldier says, slinging an arm around the boy’s narrow shoulders.

“No games, Buck. They’re all scams and we might as well throw our money away.”

“Come on, those air rifle games? I’ll win you a bear bigger’n you are.”

The boy pokes the soldier in the side, right where a finger dragging against his ribs will elicit an undignified giggle, and the soldier squirms away.

“No fair,” he says.

“Maybe I’ll win you one, ever think of that?”

“Don’t be sore,” the soldier says, and he wants to reach out to wipe the stubborn scowl off of the boy’s mouth, wants to lean down and lick it away, but instead he shoves his hands in his pockets and looks away. “I just wanna be nice to you.”

“You are,” the boy says, low enough that no one else in the crush of the crowd can hear. “Just — not like that, all right? And they really are scams. You’ve already spent enough today, and all I’ve done is waste it like a baby.”

“Aren’t you having fun?”

“Aw, hell, Buck,” the boy says. They’re walking past all the games, all the shouting carnies, all the newspaper-stuffed animals in lurid colors. “It’s not that. It’s that I can’t go on rides when you want to, and I waste the food you buy me, and I just feel bad, all right? And I’d be — you know.” He shrugs, and he is pointedly not looking in the soldier’s direction. “I’d be having fun no matter what we were doing, because I always have fun with you.”

“There’s other stuff to do here,” the soldier says. “We’ll do whatever you want.”

“It’s real nice of you to take me here, Buck, it really is. Sorry I’m —”

The Winter Soldier has this dream often. It seems he has a finite number of dreams, and his mind must cycle through them over and over. In some of the dreams, the boy is no longer slight. The boy dwarfs him, but his eyes are the same, and his mouth, and the sweet clutch of his ass around the soldier’s tongue, his fingers, his cock. He dreams, too, of falling, falling falling falling without an end, terror gripping his lungs and clawing his stomach until he is in a new old dream, and the boy is there, hair flopping over his eyes, smiling, hand reaching out and drawing the soldier’s head down for a kiss. When the boy walks in his dreams, the soldier feels an abiding absolution.

The Winter Solider has this dream often, and he always longs for the boy’s words not to dry up. He wants to know what the boy could possibly have to apologize for.

“Oh no,” the boy always says instead. When the soldier looks up, he finds they have wandered into the dusty portion of the midway housing the freak show. World’s Fattest Lady, signs proclaim. World’s Smallest Grown Up. Touch the Siamese Twins. Meet the Pinheads. See the Savages from Darkest Africa.

“Let’s just keep on walking,” the soldier says. The day he’s been planning for months has turned melancholy, and soon it’ll be all he can do to keep the boy from storming the entire midway to liberate the denizens of the freak show. “I heard there’s a tiger taming show at three.”

“People don’t deserve to be gawked at for how they were born,” the boy says. At his sides, his fists clench and unclench convulsively.

The soldier has a more liberal attitude about the freak show. The way he sees it, people who couldn’t otherwise make a living are able to put food on the table because of all this gawking. He knows about doing anything it takes. He knows about taking good care.

“So, the jerks who pay a whole nickel to see them deserve to be swindled,” the soldier says. “Meanwhile, the freaks can afford to keep a roof over their own heads.” He extends an arm and the boy grudgingly slides into place under it. The soldier hooks an elbow around the boy’s delicate neck, and the boy smiles a tremulous smile, and they make their way to the tiger show.

—

You serve your country well. She is proud of you.

I seek only to eradicate her enemies and glorify her name.

Nevertheless, you have her thanks. You will be rewarded with another assignment, when the time comes.

Thank you, sir.

Your chamber is ready.

Thank you, sir. Only…

Do your duty and get in the chamber, comrade.

I merely wish—

Wishes are a luxury reserved for citizens, not tools of the state.

Of course. My apologies.

Come now. You know the procedure. Get in, and before you can blink, you will be awake and in your country’s service again.

Forgive me, but I know Comrade Gorbachev is considering—

That is not your concern.

I could help—

You are a weapon, not a brain. Remember that.

Apologies.

Your chamber.

Yes, sir.

The union will always need you, comrade. Think of that and let it warm you, when this door closes.

Yes, sir.

You are a good boy. Close your eyes.

—

In the dream, the Winter Soldier leaves the boy alone for mere moments while he answers nature’s call, and when he returns, the boy is sitting on some steps with a bloody handkerchief pressed to his nose, a pretty girl fussing over him.

“What the hell happened, Steve?”

The boy grins, and the girl whirls around, brown eyes big and wet.

“Oh, it was the most gallant thing!” the girl says, hands animated. “My friends are off playing the coin toss, and this big ugly mook wouldn’t leave me alone, but Steve here took care of it! He’s a real gentleman.”

The girl can’t be more than seventeen, and she gazes at the boy as if she might swallow him whole, but the boy only looks up at the soldier with eyes half-lidded, a single eyebrow creeping upward. Desire grips the soldier by the base of the spine.

“It was better than the tiger tamer, I swear!” the girl says.

“How dirty did you fight, Steve-o?”

The boy’s eyes dart to the girl, who beams and covers her mouth with both hands. The soldier laughs and plucks the handkerchief from the boy’s fingers. The bleeding has stopped, but streaks of red are beginning to crust on his face. The soldier sets himself to wiping it away.

“Right in the nuts?” the soldier says, and the boy blushes a pretty red while the girl, behind him now, titters. He and the boy are close, closer than they should be, perhaps, but no one’s paying them any mind. He can feel the heat of the boy’s skin against his own. He can see every churning ocean color of the boy’s eyes. He watches as the tip of the boy’s tongue flickers briefly over the swell of his lush lower lip.

“Learned from the best,” the boy murmurs.

The dream dissolves, the girl and the carnival and the beach with it, and they are in their apartment again, clothes falling to the floor, skin sliding against skin. The Winter Soldier pushes three fingers into the boy’s mouth to muffle the sobbing as his tongue works its way into the boy’s ass. His thighs are trembling, clamped around the soldier’s ears, and the heels of his feet are pressed hard against the soldier’s back as he pushes into the contact. His hands tangle in the soldier’s hair, softly reverent even as he holds his head in place.

The Winter Soldier has spent his entire life wanting nothing but glory for Russia. He does not have opinions or desires. There is no room for them, because his fealty to his country is so vast. But in his dreams, he knows what want is. He wants to stay with this boy who looks at him with so much awe, whether he’s a slender filament or a behemoth carved from the finest marble, whether he is delicate as he quivers under the soldier’s hands or shining so brightly when he sees where a good application of justice is needed. The soldier wants to sink into the boy’s body and listen to him moan, wants to keep count of his heartbeat under his palm, wants to bite at the space between his shoulder blades that makes him arch and paint the bed with his semen. The soldier wants to rub that semen into his skin, wants to fill the boy up with his own, wants to be allowed to win him ugly bears at carnivals. The soldier wants to lock his arms around the boy and breathe him in so deeply they will be entangled always.

He knows, however, that the boy is not real. The Winter Soldier has imagined him to keep his mind occupied during the long empty years he spends in storage. He spun him from fantasy and desire. Quite literally dreamed him up. Who could ever be both slight and massive? Sickly and the paragon of health? A man who longed for fairness and went to war? The boy is a delusion, a specter, a mirage, and the soldier is locked away in a cryogenic chamber, where he will never feel anything but cold.

—

Here you are, Captain Rogers.

Please, ma’am, call me Steve. Or Steven? Is my full name. I mean. If you don’t like nicknames on Asgard. You seem to really like your titles here, ma’am. Queen. Mrs. Odinson. Oh God, someone please stop me.

He will wake soon, Steven. He can probably hear you, even now.

Is he…I mean, is he Bucky, or is he the assassin they made him?

I cannot be sure until he awakens. Do not fret — we have brought him from his stasis safely, and though he is unrestrained, the magics of the healing room will keep him from harming you should he not be the man you remember.

And you’ll help him? In that scenario?

Of course, Steven.

I can’t thank you enough. I don’t know how to repay you.

You owe me nothing, son of Midgard. You are a worthy warrior, and you fight at my son’s side. What more could I possibly ask?

You’re giving me back…everything. Everything. I am so, so grateful, ma’am. I don’t know what to say.

Sometimes, words are not necessary. Would you like to be alone with your shield-mate?

I — yes. No! No, sorry. Just — what if he wakes up?

Then I will return.

Oh. Okay. I, um. Thank you.

You need only press this, you see?

Yes, ma’am.

All right. What is it you say in your realm? Good luck?

Thanks, ma’am. I feel like I’m gonna need it.

—

Coming out of stasis always felt vaguely unpleasant, if the Winter Soldier were to have such opinions. The flesh under his skin always prickled, and his bones were slow to shake the cold. But now he was experiencing things foreign to him. Foreign, but somehow familiar, all the same. Warmth, and a pillow beneath his head. A voice, speaking not Russian but English. A big hand, cradling his metal one.

“…And I have some terrible news about the Dodgers, Buck, but Tony has this color television that gets almost anything you could possibly want, so even though they’re in California now, we can still catch every game…hey. Oh, hey. Bucky? Buck?”

The Winter Soldier opened his eyes, and when his vision cleared he saw a face hovering over him, eyes full of stars.

It was the boy, and he was made of light.

End