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'It's not so bad,' Bucky thinks, 'it's not so—’
That is when the pain really starts. He wouldn't have expected bones turning to metal to feel like this, like burning from within.
“Yes,” He says, and it must be in Bucky's head, because he doesn't think he can hear anything but the pain. “Tell me how it feels. Don't you dare lie.”
Bucky doesn't think he can speak, doesn't think his mouth will form words, doesn't want it to, but the sounds come out anyway, through gritted teeth, “Hurts. Hurtssobad. Nothing, nothing's ever hurt like this before.”
His eyes burn in Bucky's mind, the way his bones are burning. “Good.”
–
“The rules are these,” He says. “You are to obey.”
Bucky can only nod; he does not know where his voice has gone.
“You are to obey,” He says, “and this lasts forever.”
Bucky nods again.
His face is shadows, and his eyes are burned out coal. It is impossible to look at him; he can only be seen out of the corner of the eye. Bucky does not know what he has sold himself to.
“You break the rules; I change him back.”
It was worth it.
–
“There,” He says. A red star sears itself into the flesh-turned-metal of Bucky's left arm. “Now you're ready to serve me.”
He kisses Bucky's forehead, and everything goes black. Like paper, curling at the edges as it burns. It isn't peaceful blankness.
–
“He's going to last three more winters,” the man says. He speaks with an accent that denotes worlds and wealth beyond Brooklyn, and he stands in the shadows. Bucky cannot see his face.
“I don't know what you're talking about, pal.”
“It's going to be tuberculosis. Same as his mother,” the man says. “It's been waiting in his lungs.”
“I don't know who you mean,” Bucky lies. He can feel the color draining from his cheeks.
“You're going to watch him die,” the man says.
Bucky white-knuckles the vapor rub, but does not say a word.
“At the end, he won't know who you are,” the man says. “The fever will burn out his mind before it kills him.”
Bucky makes a choked sound.
“I can save him,” the man says. “In exchange for—”
“Yes,” Bucky tells him.
The man laughs. “You don't know my terms.”
Bucky says, “I don't care.”
The man steps forward.
He's not a man at all.
–
“Bucky's not the kind of name that strikes fear into anyone's heart,” He says, charred smirk smoking in Bucky's mind. “And I know names.”
Bucky's heard His name. The shadowed, boiling hiss of it snaked into his ear drums in a twisting plume, and rattled in his skull for hours.
Bucky's eyes water, and the smell of scorching sulfur pours itself into his lungs as He tilts Bucky's head back to examine his face with the burning smog he calls eyes.
“I found you in the winter, soldier. It will only be fitting.”
–
“I will give you six months,” the man-who-is-not-a-man says. “You will never see the body you sold yourself for.”
Bucky stares at the abyss of him. Looking feels like frost crackling in his bones, so cold it could cauterize. He's prepared to nod his acquiescence, but there must be something in his eyes.
“Or,” He says, “I can give you a year.”
Bucky draws a breath that feels like coming up for one last gulp of oxygen while drowning.
“I can give you a year,” He says, “but you will suffer.”
Bucky lets the hope of air go.
“You will suffer, but you will see him thrive.”
Bucky doesn't have to say yes, not out loud. The deal strikes through his viscera and veins like lightning.
“You see? I'm a reasonable man.”
–
“You will return to me with their blood on your hands, Winter Soldier,” He says, the cloven smoke of his hand tangled in overgrown hair, the pulling-pain of it sharp at the edge of Bucky's consciousness.
Bucky would obey even if he had a choice.
He thinks only of Steve, who is alive, and strong. The memory of him is warm light. He will do more good than Bucky can do evil.
“Yes,” He says. He tugs harder, and it should rip the hair from Bucky's scalp, but it just hones the point of the pain. “I suppose he will.”
–
The tin of the vapor rub is dented in the shape of Bucky's fingers. He takes it home, and sits by Steve's side on the bed, listening to the tinny rattle of his breathing as he sleeps.
He does not think the damned should touch the living, but Bucky massages the pungent salve into the translucent skin-stretched-over-bones of Steve's chest anyway.
Bucky has always been selfish. In this, too.
The war hits home in the morning.
–
Bucky gasps out a ragged sob. He is down on his knees.
“I'm not in violation of our agreement, Winter Soldier,” He says. “Your prince isn't dead, merely sleeping. Underneath the ice, until someone disturbs his rest.”
Bucky feels like he's choking on ashes.
He strokes the side of Bucky's face in a mockery of comfort. “He won't die. I've made sure of it.”
It burns, but Bucky does not notice, not really; Bucky is somewhere under the ice.
“He could have probably saved himself, if he'd really tried,” He says. “You've seen him in action. I just don't think his heart was in it, not since...” He chuckles to himself, and makes an airy gesture in Bucky's direction with one hand.
(They are not hands. They are the shadows that lurk at the edges of nightmares).
He makes an airy gesture in Bucky's direction, and he is falling. The ice water is back in his lungs. He is suffocating.
“In case you'd forgotten—what happened, what you traded. Who you belong to.”
Bucky's vision darkens to a tight, painful tunnel. He is not passing out, though he should be long unconscious.
“A deal is a deal.”
–
Who—or what—ever He is, He does not lie.
Bucky suffers.
Bucky suffers, though his definition of the word changes daily.
He thinks he knows suffering in bootcamp.
He thinks he knows suffering when he goes to war.
He thinks he knows suffering in HYDRA's prison.
And then Bucky finds himself on Zola's table, and learns that he did not know anything about suffering, anything about suffering at all.
–
“You are not loyal to me, little soldier,” He says. “Not truly. But I know how to change that.”
“No,” Bucky tries to say, but the words stick in the hollow of his throat, and his jaw grinds shut with the crushing pressure of being touched by the void.
Bucky has not felt the claws, but he has seen them, the twisting talons that can rend souls and shear the flesh off of bones and scrape minds from skulls like the they're dried drippings on a pan.
They hurt more, even, than he thought they would.
It's like swallowing a live wire, like his brain cooking in its own juices. Like the core of him being ripped out through five puncture wounds in his skull. Steve, Bucky can't let Him take Steve. He clings with everything. He needs Steve's name, Steve's face, Steve's anything.
He's still hanging on to the memory of Steve when his own name is gone.
–
He kept up his end of the bargain, that's for sure.
The Steve that comes to peel what's left of Bucky off that table is tall and broad and leaps through fire like it's nothing, just because Bucky said that he wouldn't go on alone.
He is loved the world over, this Steve—people finally see him like they ought, the way Bucky always has. And Bucky still gets to cherish the knowledge that this is just the body that should have always housed Steve's fierce heart. Something of Steve still gets to be his secret.
'It's nice,' Bucky thinks, 'to remember what you sold your soul for.'
It's nicer, still, the way Steve pulls Bucky close the long nights when he cannot sleep (or stop shaking).
–
“You will return to me with their blood on your hands,” He says.
The Winter Soldier has a rifle and a name.
He has one thought, 'Obey.'
–
He comes on a cold, miserable day of recon, when Bucky is alone and mired in mud to the ankle.
“I trust that I don't need to tell you,” He says, the menacing curl of smoke in his voice, “that if you breathe a word of our deal to him, he dies.”
He is making Bucky stare, because looking at Him hurts. Looking at him hurts like eardrums bursting from a high-pitched sound; it hurts like madness screaming in his skull.
Bucky nods. He would never have told Steve about this, anyway. Some burdens are not for sharing.
–
“It's never as fun when they're already broken,” He says, watching the blood from the Winter Soldier's chest drip down in perfect, red rivulets. “You used to be so much more interesting.”
The Winter Soldier does not speak; he saves his voice for screaming.
–
It's a cold day, and Bucky looks for him. Except look isn’t the right word, it implies too much of something like hoping to find. He is not something Bucky could ever look for. Him, Bucky dreads.
“You're always so worried,” Steve says.
He's coming any day now.
“We don't exactly have secrets,” Steve says. “You should tell me. It will help.”
Bucky waits until Steve leaves, the frustration that he's trying to shove down evident to Bucky's trained eyes, and then he laughs—but laugh isn't the right word. There's no right word for something so bitter.
–
“You bore me now,” He says. There is a dusk-sharp claw loped in the Winter Soldier's viscera. “You used to cry, and beg.” He removes the claw from the Soldier's insides; the would closes up, and He plunges the claw in again.
The Winter Soldier lets out a sharp cry.
“Once, I pulled out all of your nails, and you spent the whole time sobbing out his name, pleading for him to save you. Now that was entertainment.”
The Winter Soldier does not wonder; he just breathes, raw and ragged.
“Do you remember what you did the last time I pulled out your nails?” He gives a sudden tug to something vital. The Soldier makes no sound. “Of course you don't. You don't remember anything. You blinked.”
He plunges the entirety of the thing he calls a hand into the Soldier's belly; flesh and organs rend with a wet, grotesque sound. The Winter Soldier just gasps.
“I should just leave you here ripped open,” He hisses. His rage is a boiling thing. “You wouldn't even beg for your life.”
A claw sinks through the Winter Soldier’s diaphragm and up—into a lung, if the Soldier had to guess by the way it fractures his breathing. This is, perhaps, the end.
“Too bad you're useful.”
The claws are removed, but the wounds remain. “You can stay like this a while. Don't worry,” He says, with a laugh like iron scraping against concrete, “you'll live.”
The Winter Soldier keeps breathing, wet and wrong and far too quick. The sound of it troubles him more than the pain. He's heard breathing like that before, and not just from his own victims.
“I could leave you here for days,” He says, “and you still wouldn't provide me with a moment of proper amusement.”
He kicks out in frustration, and the Soldier feels a bone crackle and break under the pressure of cloven ice—the femur, judging by the position of the pain. It takes 160 pounds per square inch to break that bone—that isn't knowledge for which the Soldier has to struggle.
There is a sharp, metallic taste in the Winter Soldier's mouth. Something about the feeling of blood in his mouth make him want to smile, so he bares bloody teeth.
“I think you'll sleep between missions now.”
The wound knits shut, and the Soldier is shoved under—or perhaps the other way around.
It is not peaceful blankness. He drowns beneath dark waters.
–
He comes to Bucky on a day that is too bright to be so cold, when Bucky's whole being is set through a scope, trained on Steve's protection.
“You're ready now,” He says. His voice is hissing in Bucky's ears, like lingering nightmares. “You have no idea how useful your wartime skills are going to make you for me.”
Bucky takes a deep, shuddering breath. It might be his last.
“Don't worry,” He says, looking out, towards Steve – and that hurts Bucky far, far more than having that vicious gaze directed at himself ever could. “I'm going to let you die protecting him.”
He presses a hand-that-isn't-a-hand against the back of Bucky's neck, and it is fire and ice and the feeling of bones and spirit both melting.
“Let no one say that I am not a reasonable man.”
–
The Winter Soldier is awakened. The target is killed. He is sent back to the suffocating calm of his inky black sea.
–
The Winter Soldier is awakened. The target is killed.
–
The Winter Soldier does not sleep, when he is pulled from his waters, so when she comes to his chambers, he may as well be waiting. She crawls into his bed without the pretense of seduction. “I'm not sentimental about it,” she says. “I'd just rather it be you than someone else.”
Her hair is red and bright around a beautiful face – and it's been years since the Winter Soldier perceived beauty. When she kisses him, he thinks it should burn. But for the first time in decades, he feels, not vicious heat, or blistering cold, but warmth.
–
Steve kisses him, searching and searing, and Bucky thinks that if he has to burn for something, he wants to burn for this. Steve's hands slide down his back and pause on the small of his back. “Is this okay?” he asks, voice just a whisper, mouth hot against Bucky's ear.
And Bucky has no words for the want of it, so he just hauls Steve close and kisses him harder.
“I didn't want to push,” Steve says, breaking away. “Not after—”
“Let's not talk about that now,” Bucky says, and then he's kissing Steve, and kissing him, because there are no words for the way the sunlight he missed strapped to that table comes back to him in the warmth of Steve's skin. Steve's kindness comes through in every kiss; and if Bucky's heart was crushed between sharp talons the moment he first found himself forced to look into burning sulfur eyes, Steve reconstructs it now. His hands—large, warm hands—find their way down to Bucky's ass, somehow still polite.
Bucky may be doomed, and he may be damned, and he was almost certainly made for suffering, but when he comes with Steve mouthing “I love you” against the skin of his neck, it feels something like salvation.
–
They stand among the bloody ruins of men. He has taught her to kill, and she has learned well. “So you remember nothing of your past?” she asks.
“Not even my former name,” he tells her.
She looks at him. Natalia never looks shaken by anything, but there is something troubled in her eyes.
“There was somebody with blue eyes, once,” he says.
She seems content.
–
Bucky has told himself, over and over, that it's not something good boys do. The nuns always called him wicked, and they would know best—but Steve—Steve makes Bucky want to rush to the confessional with every smile. Steve's eyes are blue and they are always kind, even when they're lit up with the fierceness of his latest cause—be it two small boys and a half-drowned kitten, or a group of big men that won't listen when a dame tells them to leave her alone.
The nuns called him wicked; and if he still has wrong thoughts like this after years and years by Steve's side, then wicked he must be. Doing something about those thoughts, those feelings, might be too big a gamble for some—Steve's all Bucky's got—but Steve's all the good that Bucky ever gets, too. And Bucky—well, ever since he first learned how to play poker from an older boy in the orphanage, he's been a gambling man.
It's not what good boys do; but Bucky's not a good boy, so when Steve comes home, Bucky closes the space between them with a kiss.
Steve lets out this little breath (Bucky is not breathing), and then he kisses back. He steps back, and his eyes are kind and they are blue and they are all lit up, and Bucky is the one who put that light there.
Bucky's never felt like a better person in his life.
–
“And how,” He growls, the earth rumbling with the violent lows of it, “did you worthless creatures possibly think you could hide such a thing from me? You are specimens pinned between my slides and stuck under my glass. I see your every inconsequential squirm, and no pathetic little shielding spell will ever change that.”
It burns even to turn downcast eyes in his direction.
“You dare defile my virgin sacrifice? The two of you, who are nothing more than the dogs who drag me fresh meat?”
The Winter Soldier is familiar with the painful pitch of his anger, piercing his ear drums, and creeping, sticky, viscous, and boiling, over his skin. Natasha is less learned in such things, but she holds her composure with grace.
She holds her composure with grace even when the shifting, burning void of that face is inches from hers, and He hisses, “You thought some piddling charm the village witch taught you in her time of guilt would go unnoticed...by me.”
He storms away from her, and somewhere glass is breaking. “This base idiocy is unworthy of servitude to me.”
They will be wrenched to pieces for this, the two of them. Wrenched to pieces and put back together again, over and over, until He tires of the blood on his suit. It will have been worth it, to have for a moment felt warm.
“Such stupidity can hardly be punished,” He says, the rows and rows of teeth glittering in a putrid smile. “But I will certainly have to try.”
–
“You're hurting,” Steve pulls him aside to say.
Yes, Zola certainly had a way with that little tray of tools. The injections Bucky still feels in his bones.
“Can I help?” Steve asks, one hand—careful, unsure, and still-shockingly large—resting on Bucky's shoulder.
He and Steve would bandage each other's knuckles after fights. Bucky would see to all Steve's scrapes and bruises—that damned skin of his, delicate and translucent and so easy to break.
Things were simpler in back alleys.
Bucky is torn between wanting Steve's careful, careful hands all over his body, treating every wound and every bruise, and the look of dawning horror that will spread over Steve's face when he sees the full extent of what Zola did. So it's never a decision at all.
He presses himself against Steve's side and drapes Steve's arm around himself. “There. You're helping.”
Steve chuckles, tugs him closer, and then proceeds to rub the painful tension out of Bucky's shoulders. Steve always does more. Steve will never do the least he can.
–
The Winter Soldier is pulled from the cold darkness in which he floats. He awakens bleeding—a most unusual happening. He recalls the torture, but not the crime; it must have been a great transgression, indeed.
“Tell me what you remember of her,” He demands, rage reduced to a simmer, but ready—at any moment—to rise.
The Winter Soldier shakes his head. “Nothing. You made sure of it.” He throws back his head and laughs, the sound of it hollow even to his own ears. “But whoever she is, she escaped, didn't she?”
His fury burns cold. “Guards,” He says, voice a glancing hiss, “I'm bored of torturing him. Do it for me.”
And then the dogs of hell are upon him. If he experiences any relief at the change, it fades quickly—what they lack in skill, they make up for in enthusiasm.
–
She's barely more than a girl, when He brings her—a sacrifice. One pure soul to buy bread and health for a village trampled by starvation and disease.
“You will help me train her,” He says.
The Winter Soldier gives a terse nod. He does not speak.
–
“Make no mistake of it, this is a mission meant to prove that you still have any value left,” He says, brimstone in the hollow, shrieking darkness he calls eyes.
The Winter Soldier nods his acquiescence. All weapons eventually lose their meaning.
Cities blended into a list of nameless places and faceless targets long ago, but even the concrete is alive beneath his fingers here.
Something in him surges, and the Soldier drifts in search of a thing he cannot name. There is something warm and golden here, of this he is certain.
The Soldier is lost in a peaceful undertow when He finds him.
“Useless,” He says, dragging the Winter Soldier back, his voice a low, painful buzz. The smell of him is an acrid burn. The punishment will be awful.
The Soldier thinks about the city, pulse thundering at his touch, promising him something golden.
–
“Come out with me!” he says, tugging on Steve's wrist. New York is spread out before them, a glittering promise, and Bucky would paint the town—with Steve by his side (always with Steve by his side).
Steve lets out a weary, put-upon sigh, but his eyes betray affection.
Bucky can work with affection. Because there's a world out there, new-penny bright with possibilities, and if the two of them don't grab on with both hands, someone else will. “We don't even have to take girls,” Bucky says.
Steve budges, like always, lets Bucky pull him from their bed and from his sketchbook, and out into the world. He will tell Bucky, later, sitting on a rooftop, drunk on cheap whiskey, “I do it for the lights in your eyes.”
Bucky laughs, joyous among the lights of Brooklyn, head thrown back with delight, though he cannot say why.
–
The Winter Soldier awakens to a shark-toothed smile. The air fills his lungs. There is nothing crushing his chest, and the absence is striking.
He has been drowning for a long, long time.
“I have use for you again,” He says, as soon as the Winter Soldier opens his eyes to take in the cavernous, smoldering ruin of His face. He sounds happy, and this must have been the joy that watched Rome burn, and Pompeii consumed by ash. Men have spilled each other's blood for centuries to the tune of that pointed grin.
“There's a hero in New York. I've let him live too long,” He says. “and you have failed me too many times.”
Whether this is his final chance or his last hail mary, the Winter Soldier does not know. He does his job—he follows the target.
The Winter Soldier has never witnessed such overpowering goodness. It emanates from him like warmth and light. The people around him shift and surge into something better than themselves.
(The Winter Soldier imagines who he could have been by this man's side, and the bitter laugh almost betrays his position).
–
“You're all I've got, you know,” Steve says, bruised fists on a brisk day, the slight, rattling cough he keeps failing to disguise promising yet another illness. “I don't know if I've ever thanked you for that.”
All the sickness rarely makes him maudlin. Most days he suffers with perfect grace. But when it does—when it does.
“I wonder, sometimes, If I'da stuck it out this far without you.”
“Yeah, well, I doubt my life woulda meant much to anyone if it weren't for you, either,” Bucky says, instead of screaming. “And don't lie. You're too stubborn to die, with or without me.”
–
The Winter Soldier takes the shot. The Winter Soldier always takes the shot.
–
“Maybe,” Steve says, something like a smile curling along his lips—too stubborn die, and too stubborn to admit that Bucky’s right.
–
The Winter Soldier misses, and that is something new.
–
Bucky first meets Steve on a grey day, but he remembers it as brighter—the blue of Steve's fierce eyes transposed onto the sky. The look on Steve's face, his small fists clenched against impossible odds, etches itself into Bucky's young mind, but committing it to memory proves unnecessary, because Steve wears it every day of his life. And for a long, long time, Bucky sees it just as often.
When Bucky looks back on his life—when he can—standing up for Steve that time, every time, is the most important thing he's ever done.
When he watches Steve sleep—bony chest rising, and falling, rising, and falling—and if Bucky tears his eyes from the slight motion, what if it stops? (Bucky has to keep watching, so that it won't stop, keeps watching every night, until his eyes betray him— flutter shut and stay that way ‘til morning). And who could have ever foretold this that day, when one small boy's brave eyes spurred another boy to action. Who could have guessed the vast significance of that meeting?
When he watches Steve sleep—that body of impossible, muscled planes, breaths so even and deep, wrapped up in arms strong enough to save him (not that anything will save Bucky next time, not from—).
Bucky cannot sleep most nights now, but it's all worthwhile, with Steve by his side.
–
Bucky awakens to smell of Brooklyn after the rain, car exhaust and wet cement in equal measure. It's all wrong, and he knows this before he knows the concrete underneath his fingers or the bricks behind his back. He's in a Brooklyn alley, fallen to his hands and knees, and it's wrong.
He knows the quiet in his head before he knows the concerned shape by his side, blue suit and blue eyes, cowl pulled away, the strangest and the most familiar sight. “Bucky, you're safe,” Steve says, voice soft and low like he's soothing a scared, wild thing—but warm with love and hesitant joy, too, and fierce, protective—in three words, a world of undisguised emotions.
Steve covers Bucky's hand with one of his own, like he's sheltering it. Steve's hand is large and gloved and warm—alive and unfrozen—and when Bucky screams his voice is a raw, torn thing, like he's been screaming for decades. If the tangle of memories in his mind is to be believed, he might well have been.
“No, Buck, you're safe,” Steve says. The mollifying lull of his voice and the thicket of dark things Bucky can't keep out of his own head almost make him forget, but Steve's eyes are blue and bright, warmer than sunlight. They keep Bucky's priorities straight.
“Undo it,” Bucky says. “Put me back the way I was.”
The memories grow clearer by the moment, and Bucky increases the urgency of his entreaty. Steve—he lived it all for Steve, and would—will—go through it all again, and more, to keep Steve safe. The faster Bucky returns under His clawed dominion, the less risk to Steve. The punishment for having broken free will certainly be a grave one—Bucky can already hear the sizzle of his flesh, burning over and over while demonic laughter crackles in his skull.
“He'll kill you. You'll die if I'm free,” Bucky says, scrambling on hands and knees to tug at one of the straps on Steve's uniform. “Just let him have me, please.” 'I'm not worth it,' is what he really wants to say, but Bucky knows exactly the way that Steve's bright eyes will cloud at the words, and he needs this, needs Steve's sure gaze to warm his bones. This moment—if he just gets to keep this memory, of Steve safe and loving him—this will carry him for a hundred years.
Steve takes Bucky's hand between both his own, tender like he's touching something precious, like he isn't sullying himself with decades of carnage, and that feeling alone will be enough to sustain him through whatever punishment this brings. “You don't get it, Buck. We've got Doctor Strange—he's the Sorcerer Supreme. He took care of it. You're free and it's not going to hurt me. We're safe—both of us.”
Bucky shakes, then, like he will never stop. This is a trick—this could only be a trick. Bucky only ever gets things so that He can take them away again. Bucky shuts his eyes against the light and Steve's dazzling face and all of the things that he must only be dreaming.
“Bucky!” Steve's voice is calling. “Bucky!” over and over again.
But this is deceit and Bucky will bear it as best as he can, so he shuts his eyes against the light, and against the anguished voice crying out his name. He shuts himself away from the gentle arms that gather him up against a broad, strong chest that feels exactly how he remembers—no memory is safe from His clutches.
Bucky shuts himself away and waits for the feeling of blistering breath against his skin.