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It’s their third session before Dr. Raynor asks the question, in a way that Bucky knows was extremely calculated, folding her hands and looking up at him. Bucky meets her gaze. He knows what she’s going to ask before she says it.
“And how do you feel about Captain Rogers leaving you?”
Bucky is experienced in interrogation; HYDRA taught him well a very long time ago. It never really came in handy because he never got caught, but he retained the skills. He doesn’t let his expression change. He doesn’t let his heart rate lift. He keeps his tone even. He doesn’t give the intel.
“Fine.”
Annoyingly she snorts. “Bullshit. James, even you know that’s bullshit.”
“Wow,” he replies, looking out the window, trying not to react as she shakes her head and opens her notebook. The click of her pen is always particularly designed to get a reaction from him, and he sighs.
He remembers when Steve came to tell him about the plan. It was right before Stark’s funeral. They’d got ready together at Steve’s house, because Bucky had nowhere to live. Steve had come through and sat down next to him in his beautifully pressed suit, and from the look on his face, Bucky knew he hadn’t been about to tell him anything good.
“I have an opportunity,” Steve said, quietly, “but I’m not going to take it unless you tell me you’re okay with it.”
And so Bucky had listened as Steve explained. That he was tired of fighting. That was confusing; as if Bucky wasn’t? That he felt he had done what he could do and the world was a better place. That one, Bucky couldn’t relate to; he had inarguably left the world a worse place for his being a part of it. He had the chance to go back and live a different life, to be with Peggy, to be happy.
Bucky’s but what about me? died on his tongue, and came out as a silent nod.
“I don’t want to leave you, Buck,” Steve said, as if he had not spent the previous ten minutes outlining exactly how he wanted to leave him, “so this only happens if you say you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” Bucky said, robotically. He’d been taught enough times over the decades that if someone fed you a line like that you said it back to them, no questions asked. If you didn’t, that generally led to a fist across your face. You always ended up being made to parrot it eventually, so it was more efficient to give in the first time.
It had been the right response, because Steve had looked relieved, and gone on to talk about what he wanted to leave behind for Sam. Bucky had listened, and nodded where he was supposed to, and told Steve that he understood. That wasn’t true. He told him he agreed about Sam. That was.
“He wanted peace,” he tells Raynor, back in the present, still staring out her window. He can see trees out there, and he likes that, though it makes him miss Wakanda. “He didn’t want to keep fighting.”
“The one person who’s always been there for you and suddenly he isn’t.” She puts her pen down again, and out of the corner of his eye, Bucky can see her stare. He can pick up more than most in peripheral vision. “How does that make you feel?”
One thing that Bucky hates about therapy is that he finds it very difficult to resist a direct question, because his brain interprets it as an order. It’s why he always takes his time and thinks it over, staring into space and crafting a reply to give away the least amount of information. He can protect secrets, even his own. HYDRA was proud of him once. He turns to look back at Raynor before he replies, because eye contact implies sincerity. “I’m fine,” he repeats.
“You’re lying,” she retorts, tone absolutely flat.
“Are you like this with all your patients?”
“I am when they lie to me.”
Bucky scoffs, pushing his hands down against his knees. He thinks about the first time he hadn’t said no to Steve when he’d wanted to, after Austria, after they’d marched back to camp.
At the time, Bucky hadn’t appreciated that his life had changed irreversibly. He had adjusted to what Steve looked like sometime on that march, watching him, taking in the newfound confidence. Bucky had felt eerily like he’d been demoted as they had walked along, watching how Steve spoke to everyone.
Back at camp, Steve had gone off somewhere and Bucky was left by himself. It had occurred to him that Steve had never actually asked if he was okay. He wasn’t okay; he was far from it. He was in more pain than he’d ever felt in his life, he was sweating and cold at the same time, he could hear and see way too much, and he’d had a horrible feeling in his gut that HYDRA had done something irreversible to him there in that ward. (He’d been right, he realised much, much later.)
When he finally saw Steve later it was by coincidence; Bucky inexplicably wasn’t tired and had been trying to pace off his additional energy in spite of the pain in his limbs, and Steve was coming back from wherever he’d been planning the next move.
“I’m going home,” Bucky told him, mentally already back in New York City. How to tell Steve that he couldn’t keep fighting, not after that last battle, not after seeing people disintegrated in front of his eyes, not after the number of men he’d killed, and not after a week of being a science experiment for crazy Nazi scientists?
Steve had looked at him, wide eyed, and simply shook his head. “You can’t, Buck. I just got here.”
Somehow, Steve’s stubbornness seemed to be worse than it used to be, and Bucky had just stared at him at his flat dismissal.
Steve had taken that differently and given Bucky a smile, reaching out to grasp his left shoulder. “What would I do without you, pal? This is everything we wanted.”
At the time, Bucky had wanted to correct him that it was what Steve had wanted, not him: before being drafted, he remembered very clearly planning only to enlist if Steve somehow managed to trick someone into accepting him in the army and he would be needed to look after him. Other than that he had very much planned to stay at home in the life he liked just fine. Nothing he had experienced since shipping out had done anything to convince him that he’d been wrong in that view.
But he would never leave Steve, not if he needed him, and so he’d just nodded, annoyed and disappointed, giving him a weak smile.
In the present, Bucky offers Raynor that same smile. “I’m fine. I want Steve to be happy.”
“He abandoned you,” she retorts, and he nearly flinches. He can tell she clocks that reaction because she looks pleased with herself. He’s given something away and can feel his eyes widen, the automatic fear response at the back of his brain lighting up because that will be punished, later, on his knees with a stun baton pressed to his chest or temple or groin or—
No, that’s not him, that’s not what happens any more, he reminds himself. That was what happened to the Winter Soldier. There’s nobody to do that to him any more, because Bucky Barnes doesn’t have anyone who cares enough about him to administer punishment when he screws up.
“I’m old enough to look after myself,” Bucky tells her, intertwining his fingers in front of his body so he can clench a little too hard with his left hand and feel the bones in his right start to ache.
It isn’t entirely true; Bucky finds navigating the world alone extraordinarily difficult.
In Romania he had begun to be good at it it for one reason and one reason alone. The only decision making agency he had retained over seventy years was on the battlefield, so he convinced himself that each decision he made was life or death. Sometimes that required holding a handgun under his own chin as he decided what to cook for dinner, or forcing his body to go into flight or fight mode as he wandered the markets.
After Steve left, there were a lot of things that Bucky had had to navigate by himself. He’d had to find a place to live; he had gone three weeks without sleeping while he did so because it was so much more difficult than he’d expected. He had reminded himself it must have been harder for Steve when he’d come out of the ice; at least Bucky had the benefit of being aware of the passing of time. He’d never had to learn technology or new ways of speaking; HYDRA had taken care of that for him, he’d always just woken up with the information already in his brain. Bucky had felt maddeningly guilty about the idea that Steve had had to learn everything without him, and had told himself the Avengers had probably looked after him. They surely did that for Steve, who was a good person. They didn’t for Bucky, who was not.
After the first two sleepless weeks he had hacked into a database to try and find a phone number for Commander Rumlow, because Bucky thought there was a small chance he would help him out, and frankly, he was fairly short on people he thought might. Rumlow, it turned out, was dead. Bucky hadn’t been sure how he felt about that. Steve had been involved. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, either.
And then there had been the hearing, where Bucky had sat in a room and stared into space while people who didn’t understand anything about him had discussed how much of a danger he was. Ayo had testified about the removal of the trigger words, keeping her eyes on him as he’d stared out the window. She had sounded annoyed, insulted about being there, but she’d come. For him. It made him uncomfortable. He wasn’t worth it.
They had spoken about conditions of release, about mandatory therapy, as he counted twenty-seven different items in the room that he could use as a weapon if he needed to. They’d discussed whether you could be held responsible for crimes committed if someone else was controlling your mind as he stared silently at them while tracing a star on the table in front of him.
They’d told him he could have a support person there through the process, which was why there had been nobody in the room.
And then he was free, they had told him. Bucky was well versed in mimicking facial expressions, and he had imitated the wary smiles on their faces. It made people more comfortable if you mirrored them. It made them trust you. And so he was free. Free to work for the government when they needed him to. He’d nearly asked how that made his life any different to life with HYDRA, but then they’d talked to him about his liaison in the government and called her his handler and he’d felt so suddenly relieved he had wanted to cry.
“Tell me, James,” Raynor says, bringing him back to himself. She uses his first name constantly; refuses to call him Bucky. He watches her, very wary. “Do you think you have been more loyal to Captain Rogers than the other way around?”
Do you think you love him more than he loves you?
This time, he is careful to not flinch as he calculates his response, slow, playing out the scenarios and consequences in his mind. But it is a factual question, and those are easier to be honest to. He meets her gaze. “Yes.”
“Good,” she replies. The praise is simple for the gravity of what he has just admitted to. “That’s good, James. Now we can work through what that means, and how it makes you feel that he left you.”
“I don’t feel anything about him leaving me,” Bucky replies, and he is a terrible liar. It’s by deliberate design: HYDRA never wanted him to be able to lie to them, so he can evade a question or answer carefully, but he can’t lie well at all. Raynor fixes him with a look that says she knows that he’s lying, and he tries to glare back at her.
“Want to try that again?”
“No,” Bucky says, and this time his answer is perfectly truthful.
She sighs and picks her pen up again and he holds his hands up in surrender. “Okay, fine. I feel…” he pauses, for a long time, focusing on a spot in the corner of the ceiling. The plaster looks slightly thinner there, as if, if he needed to, he could escape through the roof. He glances at her. “Bad.”
“You feel bad. That’s all you’re going to give me?”
He scowls, but offers, after a moment, “… Sad?”
“You know, you can waste my time all you like,” she tells him, writing something in her book. “I get paid either way. But the entire point of what we are doing here is to help you work through some of what you’ve gone through. To help you. I’m not the enemy, James.”
“Then who is,” he answers before he can stop himself.
It is the wrong answer, unquestionably, and he realises that as Raynor stares at him. He tries offering her an insincere smile, but she ignores it, as she always does. “The enemy,” she says, after a moment, “if you must have one, is that dark place inside your head. The one we’re trying to help you stay out of. And I believe what Captain Rogers did to you puts you back there.”
“He didn’t do anything to me.”
That, too, is true.
When Bucky had seen him on that bench talking to Sam, he had hung back, his hands in his pockets, watching them. It was a strange feeling, to mourn someone he’d seen twenty seconds earlier and to know that for them, eighty years had passed.
When he had first appeared there, Bucky had hoped that something would change in his head. He and Steve hadn’t discussed it, what Steve would do about Bucky when he went back, and Bucky had hoped that it would be something: that maybe Steve would have found him, destroyed HYDRA in its relative infancy, and rescued Bucky. He didn’t know much about time travel but he had assumed he would just feel his memories change and a lifetime of difference would have settled over him.
But he watched Steve talk to Sam, and he knew: Steve hadn’t done anything. He had left Bucky where he was. He had gone to the life he deserved to have had all along, and had left Bucky to the life that was meant for him, too. Bucky had set his jaw, and tried to not cry, and the conversation between Sam and Steve had gone on for long enough that he had just turned to leave.
At least, he reasoned, Steve finally saw that he wasn’t worth saving.
He had had nowhere to go, but that had happened to him before too. Back when he’d left Steve waterlogged on the bank of a river and walked off to create a life for himself.
“If you never admit that what he did hurt you, then you’ll never heal,” Raynor tells him.
It isn’t true, because Bucky has healed from plenty of things without admitting that they hurt. The feedback loop is only important if something is wrong enough that it requires external intervention, and he has been taught to treat his own wounds and not waste resources.
In the back of his head he always counts the seconds down from their hour, and so one second before Raynor’s timer quietly goes off, he always gets up. She gives him a frustrated look when he does so, and says, “This isn’t the end of this subject, James. I want you to think about Captain Rogers before our next session, and come back more prepared to talk about him.”
“I talked,” Bucky says, because this is technically true. He can count fifty six words he said on the subject in this session alone; fifty seven if ‘wow’ counts. And he gives Dr. Raynor a smile, because she’s told him multiple times that his sarcasm isn’t constructive.
“Just think about it. Okay? That’s all I ask. Think about how you feel.”
It’s an order and it makes him feel uncomfortable. He nods, and turns to go, careful to use his right hand to open the door, because he is right handed, and it was the Winter Soldier who used his left for everything. Everything is such a fucking act these days that he’s exhausted.
As Bucky walks outside, he tries to comply. He remembers when he thought of Steve in Romania, and how he made him feel. He remembers the utter confusion in his head; the anger that this was a trick, this was HYDRA’s enemies trying to rip him from their grasp; the certainty that Steve was someone he knew; the unwillingness to accept it. He remembers needing him, needing that lifeline out of his mental hell, out of everything he had done as the Winter Soldier, crawling on his belly toward an identity he’d once been certain of.
He remembers Steve standing in his kitchen.
He remembers Steve taking him to Wakanda where things started to finally get better.
He remembers Steve being the only thing he knew with any kind of certainty. He remembers clinging to Steve saying his name that day in the street, the spark of a flame in the back of his head that he might be something more than what he was being told.
And he remembers that light going out as he watched Steve disappear on that platform. Steve had kept his eyes on him until the moment he disappeared. He didn’t see what he was looking for, because after long decades, Bucky may not lie well, but he can absolutely conceal what he feels.
This is an order he is not ready to comply with.
He can’t think about what he feels when it comes to the fact Steve left. Because if he thinks about it then he will lose him, what’s left of him, the Steve that’s still in his head.
And if he loses Steve then he loses that lifeline out of his hell.
And if Bucky loses that, he knows, he loses himself.
There are twenty-three variations of route he can take between the therapist’s house and his apartment: this is also something he knows. From where he stands right now, there are thirteen ways he could be open to attack, but he isn’t being followed. He checks his phone - his Wednesday phone, the one that Dr. Raynor and Sam have the number of - and decides to take the fifth route on the list.
It goes past the street where Steve used to live, after all, and Bucky is feeling nostalgic.