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He hated the way nothing made sense anymore. The way everything was so precariously balanced, like he was standing on a tightrope a hundred feet up, and the smallest mistake could send him tumbling to the ground.
Everything felt… fractured. There was the life he remembered – waking up, being given a mission. Track, analyze, neutralize the target. Report back to base. Obey the handlers. Sleep again.
But looking too closely at that life was like poking at an open wound, making it bleed, bringing the pain flaring back to life again.
There was the life before that, fleeting scraps of a past that felt like it belonged to someone else. Music and dancing meshed with bullets and battlegrounds, fragments of the voices of people that no longer existed. Like a dream that became less clear the longer he was awake.
And there was the life he had now, the one that was only just beginning, that didn’t yet feel like much of a life. He clung to that with all the strength he had, determined to find something to rebuild, some new foundation for the few clear memories he had.
“Buck?”
A voice startled him out of his thoughts and he looked up. There stood a man with sandy hair and a dark blue shirt, smiling gently at him, eyebrows raised slightly as if waiting for a response to a question.
Steve.
He blinked back at Steve, waiting for… something.
“You doing okay?” Steve asked.
That was a question. He should answer it.
“Um… what?” he said, the words feeling strange in his mouth. There was more he was supposed to say, but the thoughts moved sluggishly through his brain, and the words kept getting stuck somewhere.
Steve moved closer, slowly, a couple of steps at a time. “Okay if I sit with you?” he asked, pointing at the chair.
No, not the chair.
Couch.
Softer. No restraints.
He nodded mutely, and Steve moved forward. The couch cushions shifted as he sat down with a soft sigh.
“What’s up, Buck?” Steve asked.
There it was again. That word. Familiar, but strange in his head.
“Um… that’s… me…” he mumbled, hoping he was right. It felt strange to have a name again. Was that his name? Did it belong to him?
“That’s you, Bucky,” he heard Steve say quietly. “That’s you. James Buchanan Barnes.”
A hand wrapped around his shoulders and he flinched, old programming bubbling up through his thoughts, ready to disarm his attacker. He reached back with one arm, ready to pull forward and flip his opponent to the ground, but nothing happened. Like he was a ghost, incorporeal and ineffective, and he didn’t understand why until he looked down at his arm.
At the empty space where it should have been. Where the sleeve of his shirt flapped uselessly.
He inhaled sharply, mind and body reeling, reality crashing back into him.
The tears sprang unbidden to his eyes and he froze, willing them to go away. He didn’t understand.
There was no mission.
There was no war.
It was just him and Steve, and he didn’t know what to do. No procedures, no orders, no commands.
“What… what do I do?” he managed to whisper, the words shaking their way out of him on ragged breaths.
Steve’s grip around his shoulders got a little tighter, pulling him closer, and he leaned into it, body fitting into the space next to Steve. He tried to ignore the feeling of the empty space where his arm should have been, the sensation of whatever metal remained pressing into the muscles under his skin.
“Stay with me,” Steve murmured into his hair, pressing a kiss firmly to the top of his head. “I gotcha.”