Work Text:
The fire crackles through the clearing. Orange light dances through the air and across the trees, across the faces around the flames.
Bucky, Ayo, Steve.
The latter shouldn’t be here, really, Bucky thinks, but he’s always been so damn stubborn. He insisted on being here for this, even though Bucky doesn’t know it’ll go well. He fears it won’t. Good things don’t happen for him.
Bucky’s sure that he’ll hear the words, and lose himself, just as he has dozens of times before. He’ll try to hold on, but he’ll slip, until his Self will be a quiet echo in the back of his brain, with absolutely no control over his actions. The Soldier will come over him first slowly, then all at once, like a wave coming up on a beach and curling, curling, falling, until it crashes. It will wash out all that he believes, all that he is. Bucky will watch as his body does whatever it is the Soldier wants it to.
And he’ll hurt Ayo, and some other Wakandans on the way. He’ll hurt himself, jump and punch with no regard for how it makes his knees buckle and his hand bleed.
Worst of all, he’ll hurt Steve. Again.
So, yeah, Bucky didn’t want him here. He didn’t want him to witness that terrifying transformation, and then end up back on the ground with a shattered cheekbone. Bucky hates to see Steve hurt, it always makes his chest ache and his vision blur, but it’s so much worse when he’s the one doing it.
Steve is strength and light and bigger than life itself. He’s everything. Bucky can’t remember not revolving around him, ever. He’s a livewire, and Bucky loves him. Hurting him is his worst fate.
“You ready?” Ayo asks.
Bucky looks up at her, at her calm and imposing power. She seems to think that this will work, that she can trust him.
She shouldn’t.
And yet, he nods. Because he’ll never be ready, but he might as well rip off the bandaid now.
He looks up at Steve beside him, who’s already looking back with his pretty blue eyes and that damn beard he’s been growing in. Bucky wants to tell him to leave, and he wants to pull him close and never let go.
He swallows, and with a look, bids him to step away, behind Ayo.
Steve knows Bucky doesn't trust himself. He gives another warm glance, and squeezes his good shoulder. He smiles, just a little.
“ ‘Til the end of the line,” he promises.
Bucky doesn’t tell him that Steve has had every right to cut that line, and that tonight might give him another reason.
“ ‘Til the end of the line.”
Steve gives his arm one last squeeze, and then steps away.
The flickers of the flames dance over his sweater-clad back as he steps beside Ayo, and steels his shoulders. He swallows.
A bird calls in the distance, and then Ayo begins to speak. Her Russian isn’t perfect, but it’s good, and Bucky feels the hair on his arms stand up.
“Longing”
The desire for freedom when he was trapped in those dark rooms, those cold caskets for weeks and months on end. The fire in his gut when Steve smiled over at him with that all-consuming grin, and the way Bucky’s heart clenched when he realized he couldn’t reach over like he wanted to.
Now, he longs, wishes for all his heart for this not to work. He longs to stay himself
“Rusted”
The squeaky door of the cell he was first kept in, shiny and then bespeckled with auburn. The way his memories from Before are still tainted, lagging, like there’s rust in the cogs of his brain that recall Becca’s snorting laugh and Steve’s crooked spine.
“Furnace”
The smell of incinerated bodies at the camps they would find. Using all the coal they had left to keep Steve warm in December. The whistling sounds it would make when there was barely any left, when he was curled around Steve at 2am.
Bucky thinks he hears screams, tortured cries of blood and death. He knows it was him that triggered them. He knows that he is the Soldier, and that the Soldier is him.
“Daybreak”
The sun rising over Brooklyn, painting window-pane stripes on Steve’s sleep-mussed hair. The orders for the Soldat to draw back, to wait again tomorrow night.
Daybreak means being seen. Daybreak is dangerous.
“Seventeen”
How many months it took Hydra to perfect the first arm. How many years it took Bucky to know that he would never love anyone else.
Images flash in his mind, off all the times that the words worked, when the blood on his hands wasn’t quite his, but stained him all the same
“Benign”
What Bucky tried to be, and what the Soldier never was.
Bucky closes his eyes, feels them well-up with tears. He thinks he feels the Wave, but he can’t be sure. This is worse than all the times Hydra did it, somehow, because he can’t decide if he’s going to become him or not. He wishes with all his might to be gentle, kind, benign.
“Nine”
How many months Bucky spent in that first cell. How many years he lived before he met Steve.
Is that the Soldier? He thinks, as the shouts in his head crescendo. His mind is screaming, and his eyes are wet. He’s shaking, he realizes. Is this it?
“Homecoming”
The Triskelion, the helicarrier. Blue, blue eyes, and the sun he revolves around. All Hydra never was. Home. Steve.
His mind quiets, for just a beat. Another tear falls.
“One”
His chance at redemption, the number of tries he’s willing to give himself. The number of people he’d kill for without second thought, the ones he’d die for. The number of people he’s ever loved right.
The screams crescendo again, and Bucky shakes
“ Freight car”
Snow. Shouting. A hand reaching out for him.
Falling.
Hydra. The Soldier. Blood.
A culmination of Bucky flashes before his eyes, and the screams of his victims follow his mothers laugh, and are then replaced by the sweep of Steve’s eyelashes. ‘Ready to comply’ he hears his voice echo, but he’s not.
It’s just in his head.
For a long moment Bucky thinks that he’s imagining it, that he’s actually dreaming up the control over his own body. But he’s not. His thumb wiggles and his eyes squeeze shut, and the warmth of the fire on his cheeks is all his.
He’s Bucky.
Tears streaming down his face, he looks up at Ayo, at Steve , and manages what he hopes is a smile. He heaves.
Ayo looks at him with a steady stare, interlaced with a pride, a joy, that Bucky doesn't quite let himself believe. Steve is crying. His eyes glow in the fire, and he’s smiling it Bucky with a brightness that rivals the fucking sun.
Before Bucky can even blink, Steve is on him. Around him.
Bucky sobs as Steve’s big arms wrap around him with a ferocity that Bucky doesn’t think he would survive if he wasn’t pumped full of chemicals. With his one arm, he tries his best to hug back, to return all the love he feels Steve push into his skin.
“You’re free,” Steve tells him. His words fall into his skin, into the spot where his neck meets his shoulder. They sink into Bucky, through his veins and his torso, and settle behind his sternum.
Steve laughs through his tears and holds on a bit tighter, and the words in his sternum light up.
Because they’re true. He’s free.
He’s a fucked up mess of a person, with nightmares and flashbacks and a scrambled mess of a past, but he’s free. The words don’t work on him anymore.
He’s not Hydra’s asset. He’s just Bucky.
He cries, and Steve cries, and they crouch in an awkward embrace for longer than they probably should.
Bucky is Bucky. And he revolves around Steve, that stubborn bastard who would rather get hurt than abandon him for even a moment. The fire crackles around them, and as the sparks dance into the sky, they rejoice in the rightness of it all.