#★⠀⠀⟶⠀⠀the blood on my hands scares me to death⠀⠀/⠀⠀verse.

[jbbarnes]

@brooklynsoul : ❝ I know you’re nervous. And you have plenty of reason to be. But you’re lying. ❞

One foot in front of the other. Just focus on that. Nothing else. Not the sensation of every single eye following his every movement, not the hairs standing up on the back of neck as he wound down back alleys and side streets on his way home. It took a lot of concentration not to run, to keep his feet moving at a normal pace, hands in his pockets, eyes down.

Why the fuck did he decide leaving the backpack in the apartment was a good idea? There were so many places he could have stashed it. And yeah, maybe going back for it was a bad idea, but he just... he couldn't lose it all again. If they–if they found him, and they–He'd have his notebooks. They couldn't take them from him, because he had his notebooks. It was real. All of it was real. He had to have them.

Even before he reached the door, having climbed the stairs two or three at a time as soon as he was out of view, he'd known there was someone in there. The shift of the floorboards reached his sensitive ears and he'd frozen. The low murmur of voices had him silently climbing a few more flights, finally able to make out a voice he felt like he knew better than his own.

Steve.

His stomach lurched and his heart twisted as his brain suddenly supplied a tidal wave of memories of Steve's voice coming from behind a closed door. Greetings and complaining and observations. He had to stop, lean against the wall for a moment as it passed, and it was only the sound of approaching sirens that had him moving again.

The door was well oiled, completely silent as he pushed it open. A figment of his memory overlapped with the man stopped in his kitchen for a second, a smaller frame with floppy blond hair he was constantly pushing out of the way. But this wasn't just Steve – he had the shield at his side, but the uniform was the one he had seen on the news, not the one he'd sho–shot–

A shake of his head.

He stood in the middle of the small space, unable to bring himself to say anything. This wasn't what he had wanted. He wanted... he wanted to be Bucky again. Able to smile and offer up what he remembered freely, not just glimpses into the past and screams and blood. He wanted to feel like a person again, not something masquerading as one. Broken parts tied together with gossamer string. But when had the universe ever considered what he wanted?

"Do you know me?"

Golden hair in sunlight, graphite covered fingers, bruised knuckles, a bump on his nose from one too many run ins with a fist, sky blue eyes. Thin shoulders tucked under his arm, tugged tight against his side. Knees knocking against each other under a table. Sleepovers and days at the beach. Curled up next to each other in the depths of winter, that one draft refusing to be patched. Being pulled off a table, holding a shield, blasted out of the side of a train.

A hand reaching for his.

A rough swallow. "You're Steve. I read about you in a museum."

A blatant lie. He'd noticed the notebook Steve held in his hands. The one he'd have propped open as he chewed on one of the caramel bars he liked, jotting down whatever random memory of the pair of them came into his head. Some of it in a near illegible scrawl, but more and more these days in a neat cursive that felt familiar, felt right. The leaflet the only picture he'd allowed himself to have after that fateful visit to the Smithsonian, swiped on his way out. He didn't need anything else messing up the validity of his memories.

The response made his knees want to buckle, too weak to hold him up. Steve's voice was so gentle, like he was an animal about to spook. Of course he was fucking lying, if they were coming for him, they'd come for Steve, he couldn't implicate him in this. Steve shouldn't even be here, stood in his tiny kitchen, small and broken but his. He was meant to protect Steve, he'd promised... he'd promised... He knew he had.

"I wasn't in Vienna," he blurted, needing Steve to know the truth, even after the lie had slipped from his lips. "I don't do that any more."

Footsteps on the roof, men gathered outside the door. More on the balconies. He'd already set up the place for each scenario, but not all at once. Still, he could handle it. There was just the spanner of Steve in the works, and his mind ran through his plans, adding it another thing to keep safe as they continued to speak. He didn't even really hear his own replies. The inevitability of it weighed heavy in his bones. Of course they'd come for him. Whether that was his handlers or someone else, he'd known it would come to this.

"You pulled me from the river. Why?"

It took all his control not to snap his head to look at that imploring face. Because if he did, Bucky knew he was done for. When he did, clenching his jaw, he wished he could tell the truth.

Because you're Steve. Because you're my person even when I don't know who or what I am. Because you broke through the thing HYDRA made me to finally reach the person trapped underneath. Because you believed in me when no one else would.

Because I love you.

"I don't know."

[jbbarnes]

@peacereflected : who's gonna know you, if not me? ( from steve )

Hands were already twisted in his hair, and those words only had his grasp tightening. He wondered, briefly, mind far away, if the force he was grinding his teeth together would break one of them. He had no memory of if he'd ever done it before — but that didn't mean much, did it? A hollow bark of laughter left him, and he shoved the notebook he'd been writing in away, unwilling to face his odd handwriting. A mixture of childish blocks and neat cursive, as if the new and old parts of himself were doing battle.

"You knew him," he growled. "Not me."

Some days it was hard not to think of himself as anything other than the Soldier, walking around in the corpse of Bucky Barnes. That they had burned out every bit of the man, and he was what they had shoved in the empty space. But then his writing would change mid-word, and a memory would come back, and he knew that he was an amalgamation. Neither wholly one or the other, some monstrous combination, a Frankenstein's monster of a man. Dead and dying and beyond.

He curled up tighter on himself, wishing the bed he was sitting on could swallow him whole.