#absolution fic

He nodded. “There were a handful of them that came and went… She was there already when I woke up.” Bucky swallowed the lump in his throat, remembering all the whispered moments they’d shared. He remembered the desperation they’d each laid bare, unable to hold on any longer, only for the other to breathe hope through a rusting pipe. A voice through a hole in the wall had saved him. “That one’s my first memory of her.”

July 23

I slept through the night but I dreamed of waking up. There are a few hazy memories between the fall and when I first heard her, but they’re cloudy and they don’t fit together right.

She said I might never remember them, that I’d been in and out of medical because of the prosthetic. She didn’t know much but she said she’d heard them talk about how well the material was taking, or rather wasn’t taking and then I’d come and go for weeks at a time until they stabilized everything.

I’d woken in a panic, the memories felt like a muddy dream and there was a machine where my arm should be. She’d called to me through the pipe.

“Hey, shh! Hey, you’re okay!”

I sure as shit wasn’t. I clawed at the sheets and stumbled out of the bed, a sharp burning pain radiated through my shoulder and down my entire spine when I tried to push myself up with the metal arm. I was a soldier, and trained on how to handle captivity, but this… this was more than anyone had ever trained me to handle.

I think I nearly died of a heart attack right there when cold slender fingers reached out over mine. “Shh! Shh, just breathe,” that soothing murmur insisted. “If they hear you they’ll come sedate you again, they want you to heal.”

Finally, she pulled her small bony hand back away through the drain pipe. “There you go,” she encouraged as I dragged myself to sit up, finally settling my breathing into a normal pattern. She offered her name and asked mine. Nervous and taking in my surroundings in a soldier’s survival mode, I rattled off my service number.

“Okay, you’re a soldier,” she seemed a little worried. For some reason I didn’t want her to worry. “What’s your name, though?”

“J-James,” I finally breathed. “James Barnes.”

“That’s good.”

Was it? Why was that good?

“Hang on to that,” she urged, a serious firmness in her tone. “They’re going to try to take it from you, but remember who you are.”

“H-how do you know that?” I asked shakily, sweat forming over my skin from the pain of the gruesome seam where my skin met the shining metal prosthetic. “Who are you?”

She told me how HYDRA took soldiers and civilians alike, how they’d overtaken her small village and kept those who were fit for their work with Zola. The rest were executed immediately, the lucky ones, she called them.

“I’ve been here long enough now to see soldiers like you turn to monsters, and to see the ill cured only to try on a new disease or weapon until they’re dead.” Her voice wasn’t cold and removed when she talked about these things. She hadn’t adopted the self-protective dissociation I expected, she was devastated and so, so alone. “It’s easy to forget who you are. To start to think you’re just a piece of lab equipment or a gun. As soon as you do, you’re dead or you’re theirs.”

July 27

Sam has food poisoning I’m not surprised; he’ll eat any damn thing he sees. Just the smell from his room is horrifying. Before I can pass his door I see her. I see her. She’s leaning against the wall beside his door, holding her stomach as if her entire body would come apart if she let go. I know she’s not real. I know it’s a guilty projection from my trauma-ridden mind. But god I just want to help her. I can never help her. It’s enough to kick my memories into overdrive and it’s not just a picture in my head, I can smell it and see it and practically feel it.

I never saw her like that, hunched over and sick, I never saw it. But I remember it.

She moaned softly when they dropped her body onto the bed in her cell. I could hear the springs whine under the rough treatment. They didn’t say a word as they left. They never did, not to her. There was a loud clang as her door crashed closed.

“You okay?” I asked her as softly as I could through the pipe. It was best to be gentle when she’d just returned. It was hard to know what horrors she’d seen and sometimes even the sound of my voice startled her.

A stifled sob was my only reply before the bed creaked again. I heard her heaving and felt my own stomach flip. I hated them. I hate them. All I wanted was to comfort her, to stroke her back gently and whisper that she’d be okay. I couldn’t do either of those things. Neither of us would ever be okay.

I have no idea how many nights were spent that way, listening to each other suffer and trying to find any comfort. I won’t call it hope, because after a while there just wasn’t any to be found.

When she was sick from the testing I’d tell her about Brooklyn, and Coney Island, I told her how I wanted to take her dancing and about my favorite dance halls. I told her about my sister and laughed about what the hell kind of job I would get with a damn metal arm.

When I came back shattered and lost, not quite myself, echoes of words I didn’t understand lingering at the edges of my memory, she’d talk to me. She’d tell me about her village and what it was like to be from a place where everyone knew each other. I could hear the smile in her voice and wondered how she managed to smile in a place like that, after everything. I think she only did it for me. Or maybe I just want to think that. I loved her, I think.

“I can see you really care for her,” Bucky’s therapist told him, looking up from the pages in his hands.

Bucky nodded, pushing his hands into his hair anxiously. “I don’t even know how much time we had together, really. I don’t remember all of it. I hate that they took that from me, too.”

“It doesn’t have to be about the time, James.” He had that gentle urging voice on again. “We can form extraordinary bonds under extraordinary circumstances. Even if it was only a short time or--”

“It was years,” Bucky interrupted, “I know that. When I… When she died I had already been there long enough for the trigger words to work.”

“I’m sorry, James. It must have been difficult to lose her.”

“You haven’t even read it yet,” Bucky eyed him, slightly apprehensive.

“I can see how much you cared for her, regardless of what’s on this paper,” he lifted the pages like they were nothing, like they didn’t contain his patient’s worst memories. “Her loss is still painful for you.”

“I can’t get her out of my head.” Bucky chewed on his lip, staring at his hands in his lap, silent for a long moment. He could feel the doctor’s eyes on him, patient and understanding. He drew in a deep, shuddering breath, “I loved her. I loved her and I killed her.”

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“Alright,” he answered in a smooth tone, betraying none of the disappointment Bucky knew he must feel. “You know we don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”

More time. More silence.

“Okay, let’s try something else. How have you been sleeping lately? Are you still having the dreams?”

Bucky was quiet again for a moment and shook his head. “Not the same dreams, no.” His eyes lifted up to his therapist briefly before flickering over to the young woman, hovering just behind him. He knew she wasn’t real, just… some hallucination, some grotesque manifestation of his trauma come to taunt him. A guilty memory come back to life. It was she who filled his dreams now instead of rusting iron restraints and frosted glass cages. He remembered the guilt of how he cared for her and what he did to her instead of the terror of the shifting black plates and piercing electric currents. Every second was about her now, awake or asleep.

He’d been silent too long again. The therapist looked at him, waiting, but not expectant any longer. They both knew this session wasn’t going anywhere.

“Alright James, that’s our time for today.” Bucky only nodded his reply, shifting to leave, yet another session where he’d held back, pushed the truth away, hid the things he needed to say. “We’ve done a lot of great work together, and I think there’s more we could do but I think you’ve been holding back the last several weeks. So this week, I’d like for you to think about your goals for our time here, and when you’re back we can look at how to get there. Sound good?”

Bucky nodded and avoided rolling his eyes. He didn’t blame the guy. It wasn’t his fault. Bucky  knew you got out what you gave in to this sort of thing, and in the not so distant past he’d gotten a lot. He’d talked about his memories of Steve and growing up, the night terrors he still had about being reconditioned, the abuse. It was all starting to help.

The dreams had diminished but now they only gave way to something worse… He now remembered the things he’d done, and he wasn’t entirely sure he deserved absolution. He wasn’t quite ready to let someone help him move past them.

As he paced quickly out of the office, she followed too. “You should tell him.” How was it possible that her voice was as clear in his head as it had been some 60 odd years ago. It was agony.

“Tell a Mandated Reporter that the assassin living in the middle of New York City, who was barely pardoned less than a year ago is also hallucinating? Seems like I should not tell him.”

“And talking to yourself,” she smirked. Or… the image of her in his mind smirked as he straddled his motorcycle.

“Part and parcel,” he argued.

“He’ll understand,” she soothed. Why was she trying to help him get rid of her? “It’s what he’s paid to do.”

“No, it’s what he’s court ordered to do.”

“Hallucinations of the deceased are a fairly common bereavement experience,” she rattled off. Or did it mean he was thinking it to himself? It was all so confusing and anything where she was concerned made him too nauseous to think clearly. “Complex grief. I think after 70 years of loss and abuse at the caliber you’ve experienced it’s hardly a shocking symptom.”

With a sigh Bucky slipped the helmet over his head, shutting out his new old friend. “Doesn’t mean it’ll end well.”

Steve stood beside him with a comforting hand on his shoulder, gripping tighter than he needed to. Bucky’s arms were extended in front of him, his stance sure and strong, the firearm unwavering as he held the barrel flush against her skin. It was her again. It was always her lately. For weeks. She stared at him unblinking, no expression at all as the cold steel pressed against her forehead.

“What you did all those years…” Steve began. She slowly lifted her hands to circle the barrel, holding it in place, still staring at him, relentlessly. There was no other way for this to end. “It wasn’t you.”

Bucky could feel the tears on his cheeks, wet, and burning hot. He was shaking, trying to catch his breath. He needed to be quick or he’d devolve into sobs and he’d never get off a clean shot. She shouldn’t suffer.

There was a rumbling bang and everything went dark. With eyes tightly closed he embraced the dark for a moment longer; she wasn’t in the dark, only in dreams like this one. And sometimes in his imagination if he was too distracted. He tried to steady his breathing by placing a hand on his chest and focusing on the rise and fall, trying to count it out. There was moisture on his cheeks. Tears. That part of the dream, at least, had been real.

Another bang had him jolting out of bed faster than he could think, all instinct and fear, fresh out of a dream like this. He’d slipped out of his room, keeping flush to the wall and taking long silent strides towards the noise with his thick serrated knife in hand. He wasn’t permitted firearms yet. It was a good thing, he thought.

As he eased into the common area, he saw that the lights were on, which instantly eased his alerted instincts. Someone breaking into the Avengers Tower in the middle of the night would certainly cut the power. Light was a sign of safety.

The muffled curse from behind the counter gave him enough grasp on reality to lower the knife and step into the light.

“Oh Jesus!” Tony hissed, nearly dropping the pan for the 3rd time. “Barnes! You scared the shit out of me.”

Bucky didn’t answer, and Tony took in his appearance: pajamas, but a long thick knife in hand, red-rimmed eyes. It was the tired look he found in them that let him turn his back, moving to the stove and trusting his instincts.

“I was gonna make an omelet but uh…” he glanced at Bucky over his shoulder as Bucky eased onto a stool setting the knife on the island and pushing it a few feet away. “Split a frittata?”

Again, no answer, but they’d run into each other often enough on sleepless nights for him to know that unless Bucky skulked back to his room, he’d take whatever you put in front of him. Neither of them were exactly hungry, but Tony needed something to do with his hands, something to keep him occupied, and Bucky needed people. Someone to just let him be close without asking too many questions.

He usually wound up with Tony or Natasha on nights like this. At first it had been Steve, and Steve still worried to no end, but that was exactly the problem. For as long as Bucky’d known Steve he’s always had a Mr. Fix-It attitude about everything; he had no clue how to just be there. He’d go to Steve if he felt like he was really in trouble, if things were shifting or he might be a danger. Otherwise he preferred the quiet understanding of common experience with Tony and Nat. It didn’t need to be said, they could feel it, read it on each other as if it were their own bodies tensed and reacting to invisible ghosts.

Tony chattered on quietly, tossing veggies in with the eggs. Bucky didn’t mind the talking, it suited them both. Eventually, Tony cut to the chase. “Haven’t heard you much at night, still having nightmares, though?”

Bucky nodded. They were definitely nightmares, even if they didn’t leave him screaming in fear and remembered agony. “Different lately,” was all he managed to say, her memory still so fresh he could taste the gunpowder on his tongue, feel it stinging his nose when he breathed in.

“Your doc think you just gotta work through ‘em?” Tony probed, sliding the messy little frittata onto plates. “Or is he giving you something to help you sleep?”

Bucky gnawed on his lip and spun his fork in his fingers, hesitant and unsure how to answer.

“Oh, c’mon, you’ve gotta tell him.”

“It’s just, this time…” Bucky swallowed some egg. “This time it’s me. I remember… Am I supposed to just let this guy document every horrible thing they made me do?”

“If it helps,” Tony gave a slight nod, stuffing his a large piece of egg in his mouth. “Have you tried writing it down?” Bucky shook his head. There were things he wrote down, notebooks he kept carefully guarded, slowly filling with memories he wanted to keep. This was not one of them. “Try it. Write down what you remember or what you dreamed and then just give it to your guy. Easier than saying it sometimes.”

Again Bucky had very little to say, the weight of his memories still heavy on his mind. The image of her followed him like an eclipse, blocking out the light of a future free of all this. He offered only a nod as he slid off the stool and rinsed both their plates.

“Okay!” Tony clapped his hands together, “We’ve talked, and now let’s forget. Mario Kart?”

Bucky chuckled softly, drying his hands while leaning on the counter. Forgetting sounded divine. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

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