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Sometimes Bucky thought that the boys had made it their sole mission never to let the corners of his mouth drop out of a smile while they had his full attention all to themselves. He hadn’t remembered how your face started to hurt once you’ve laughed for minutes at a time, how the entire body ached for oxygen because your diaphragm was too busy being amused to remember to draw in air. He hadn’t remembered how suddenly the world seemed a little lighter, a little brighter, a little more hopeful just because your brain was hopped up on the good kind of neurotransmitters, not the bad. He hadn’t remembered how it could make you forget all the things that weighed you down on a daily basis, even just for a second, a minute, a moment of joyful peace he hadn’t believed he’d ever find again. He had not remembered any of this until Cass and AJ reminded him.
He didn’t know what it was about those two that made it seem like seeing them happy was the most important thing in the world, didn’t know if that was just kids in general or these two kids in particular—he found he didn’t really care. There was a quiet, bashful pride that spread in his chest whenever Cass called him ‘Uncle Bucky’. A fluttering relief whenever AJ clung to his vibranium arm.
The first time he came to Delacroix all he’d wanted to do was drop off a favor for Sam and then somehow he’d gotten stuck here, roped into helping, into letting people allow him into their community without questions, without doubts, without fear. Just with the simple knowledge that Sam had invited him, and if Sam said he was okay, apparently that was enough anyone needed to be convinced of the very same.
The second time he visited, Sam had coaxed him for weeks, singing praises of the place and the people sky-high as if Bucky wasn’t aware of all that. Sometimes he didn’t even know why he refused. He didn’t know if the excuses he made towards Sam and towards himself were rooted in truth or if he was really just being a coward and hiding away from the world, because sometimes that was just easier to do. So much was new to him, although it shouldn’t be, although it had been firmly lodged in his personality way back before he learned to mistrust the idle company of people.
He knew he’d done these things before, remembered the conversations he’d let, the way he’d unabashedly charmed his way through half of Brooklyn, the easy way in which he had joked and touched and told stories without questioning if it was too much, too little, too real, or too contrived. But he’d found that hardly any of his memories from Before involved actual feelings. They probably had, at some point, but even so, he couldn’t recall them now. Didn’t know how he’d actually felt in those moments. All he had was conjecture and a lingering sense of watching on as another person lived his life for him.
But it got easier. With every time Sam sneakily managed to drag him down to the Bayou it seemed like the Louisiana sun melted down more and more of the parts of him that were still frozen in ice, still sleeping somewhere forgotten in his brain, and every time he was more disappointed to have to leave than the last. He came for Sam, of course, for the easy way Sam seemed to be able to read him without making him uncomfortable, the reassuring knowledge that he was here of his own Free Will—and for Sarah’s incredible cooking, which reminded him all too much of home cooked meals set in front of him by another Sarah, in another century.
Mostly, though, he was here for the boys. It took a while for Bucky to realize it, but while Sam made him feel at ease and Sarah made him feel welcome, AJ and Cass made him happy . It felt almost like a violation to claim that word, and to claim it from people who owed him nothing. He had no inherent right to AJ and Cass’s company, he was not family, nor did he feel like he could call himself their friend. They were kids. They knew nothing of his past, besides that he’d been friends with Steve—though he was sure they’d figure it out soon enough, a moment he was dreading with his entire being.
He had no clue if it was the Wilson genes, or Sarah’s impeccable skills as a mother, or the fact that they’d been through far more hardship than any child their age should know, but the boys had a way about them that made everyone in their vicinity unable to resist the pull of their very own, very joyful gravity. He was not exempt from that, even though he had tried very hard to resist. Attachments were never a good thing. Attachments to kids were even worse.
He’d been pathetically unsuccessful though, because AJ wasn’t afraid of him although he was usually so skittish, and Cass listened raptly to his stories although he struggled hard to make them kid-friendly and he was sure that it had to have an impact on the quality of his storytelling. Because both of them had a weird sixth sense of when to be gentle with him, when not to climb all over him, when to listen to their mother if she told them that enough was enough. Because they invited him to conspire against Sam (innocently, of course), because they asked silly questions and laughed if he gave overly-sincere answers, because they didn’t look at him and see a wreck or a threat, which was mostly what he saw in people’s eyes when they recognized him nowadays.
It was like losing part of him all over again, then, when that fragile, hard won space he had carved out for himself in the Wilson household over many a visit, when that comfortable nook right at Cass and AJ’s side finally shattered—as all things did that he touched a little too long, that he held on to a little too tight.
It started with a children’s game.
Sam had been held up in DC for a day longer than planned and Sarah was supposed to go out for drinks with old friends from high school. Bucky had offered again and again to look after the boys. He knew their routines well enough, knew that AJ couldn’t sleep unless the light in the hallway stayed on a little longer, knew that Cass would say ‘good night’ and snuggle into his pillows only to dig out a flashlight and start reading under the covers the second whoever tucked him into bed reached the bottom of the stairs.
Sarah still insisted on finding someone else to watch the boys, to come over for the night. She barely ever let Bucky do any of the housework either, and while he appreciated the sentiment he had not quite found the right words yet to tell her he needed to be busy without sounding like an ingrate. It didn’t matter, in the end, because all of Sarah’s contacts fell through and she sat him down at the kitchen table three hours before she had to leave.
“Looks like I’ll take you up on that offer after all” she sighed, casting him an apologetic look.
“Sarah, it’s fine. I would’ve done it anyways, you really didn’t need to go asking the entire town—”
“I just don’t want to put these things on you, you’re a guest—”
“I don’t want to just be a guest, I want to help out.”
“The boys can be a lot all on your own, especially if you’re not used to it—”
“It’s not my first time looking after children, Sarah, I wasn’t fucking born yesterday” Bucky bit out, his tone a lot harsher than intended.
Sarah raised her eyebrows at him in that signature Wilson way somewhere between annoyance and surprise. “You care to explain that one, Barnes?” she said coolly.
Bucky took a deep breath and clenched his teeth, eyes fixed on the one cracked tile on the kitchen floor. He knew Sam had talked to Sarah about some of his past. He had no idea how much. Loads of it floated around on the internet, no matter how hard Shuri and Natasha had tried to quell that source of information over the years. He didn’t think Sarah would have gone looking for it, but she watched the news. And she wasn’t stupid.
“I’m sorry” he said contritely, hands clasped in his lap. “It’s just…this, all of this.” He waved vaguely around the room with his vibranium hand, still not looking up. “I wanna be able to give back. I need to give back. You won’t ever let me help with anything. And I get that you’re worried about the boys, but I would never hurt them—”
“Bucky, I’m not worried about the boys,” Sarah said gently. “I mean, I am, I’m their mother, I will always worry. But I don’t worry about leaving you with them . I worry about leaving them with you . They’re good kids, but they’re still kids. Even I need a break every now and then. And I know it’s not always…” She didn’t finish her sentence and Bucky didn’t need her to. She’d witnessed often enough how he hid himself in the bathroom for half an hour during a cookout, or how Sam inconspicuously navigated people away from him after a particularly bad night.
“I wouldn’t have offered if I didn’t feel up to it” he said bitterly, finally meeting her eyes. “And like I said, it’s not my first time.”
“No?” Sarah asked, surprised.
“No. I thought…Sam didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“I had sisters. Three of them, all younger than me.”
Sarah’s expression crumpled from curiosity into something akin to compassion. God damn the Wilsons and their big hearts. Somehow the fact that they sympathized so much made it all the harder to be honest sometimes.
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “Explains a lot though.”
“Really? Like what?” he narrowed her eyes at her.
“Nothing” she said with a grin, getting to her feet and putting her braids up in a bun. “Just a lot,” she shrugged, making to leave.
“Sarah, what does it explain?” Bucky called after her. “Sarah!”
She just cackled happily and vanished into her bedroom. Three hours later she said goodbye to the boys and waved at Bucky before heading out the door. They watched from the porch as she started the car and rolled out of the driveway. Bucky could hear the engine purring long after she turned the corner.
“So” he said eventually, turning around to AJ and Cass who grinned up at him expectantly. “What do you wanna do?”
They started the evening off with the usual suspects for entertainment: Mario Kart (which Bucky was atrocious at because vibranium fingers were very slippery), Minecraft (which Bucky simply didn’t understand), and something called League of Legends (which Bucky didn’t even try to understand). Cass, as usual, also tried to convince Bucky to buy them something titled “Call of Duty” which Bucky knew Sarah didn’t want them to play and which he would have outright rejected anyway the second he read the text in the description box.
“We’ve had more than enough screen time for today” he finally said, rubbing his eyes. “Isn’t there something you guys do for fun that doesn’t involve computers at all?”
“We have board games” AJ shrugged, throwing a look at his brother. “We…don’t usually play them anymore though.”
“Oh” Bucky said, the tone of AJ’s voice alone compelling him to sit up straight and regard the kids with a worried look. “Why’s that?”
The boys exchanged another fleeting glance and AJ developed a sudden interest in the intricate patterns of the carpet that covered the floorboards beneath their feet.
“Our Dad used to play with me and Mom,” Cass said quietly. There was a depth to his eyes that Bucky thought was utterly misplaced in a child’s face. “It was just sort of his thing. Feels wrong to do it without him, if that makes sense” Cass muttered.
“Yeah, buddy. That makes a lot of sense” Bucky nodded, reaching out a hesitant, human hand for Cass’s shoulder. When the boy didn’t flinch he squeezed lightly, hoping he could provide some sort of comfort.
“You know, my Dad died, too, when I was a kid” he suddenly blurted out. It was stupid, and selfish, and it probably didn’t help the boys one bit. But sometimes things just jumped up on him and he couldn’t keep them in.
“He get blown up, too?” Cass said and Bucky flinched at the crassness of his words. He’d known Sarah’s husband was military, but hearing his cause of death stated so bluntly by his eldest son was still a bit of a shock.
“Cass!” AJ whimpered, worrying his lower lip. “Mommy hates when you say that!”
“Why?” Cass said, his voice too hard for a thirteen year old. “It’s the truth. He came home to meet you and then he went back and got himself blown up.”
“Hey, kiddo” Bucky said, tilting Cass head up by the chin. “I get that you’re angry with him for leaving. But you gotta remember that he didn’t choose to die, okay? He wanted to make the world a safer place for you guys.”
“Why are you saying it’s okay to be angry with him?” AJ now jumped in, brows furrowed in frustration. “He loved us. Mommy always says he loved us very much.”
Fuck, Bucky was so utterly out of his depth here. Most of the time he was still trying to figure out his own feelings. He was in no position to be handing out advice on how to grow up dealing with the death of your father.
“Were you angry, too?” Cass suddenly asked, hardness replaced by curiosity.
“Hm?”
“When your Dad died, were you angry with him?”
Well, shit, there was one huge rabbit hole that demanded to be dodged. What the hell was he supposed to say? Should he lie? Tell the truth? Try to somehow evade the fact altogether that he didn’t remember shit about how he’d felt after his father died?
“Sometimes” he said, clearing his throat, “sometimes people leave us too soon. And yeah, it’s…I think it’s normal to be a little angry. I know I am.”
Cass stared at him wide-eyed, his thumbs absently rolling around the joystick on his controller.
“I don’t wanna talk about this anymore” AJ whispered, tears pooling in his tiny, brown eyes.
“That’s okay” Bucky nodded and swallowed thankfully. “We still got about an hour before you guys need to go to bed. What do you wanna do? I’ll even play another video game if need be” he offered with a slight grin.
Cass looked at his younger brother and something shifted in him. He put the controller down and threw an arm around AJ’s shoulders, pulling him close. “There’s always Operation,” he said thoughtfully.
“I’m sorry, what?”
AJ laughed, a little wet and a little hitched from unshed tears, but happy nonetheless. “It’s a game,” he explained. “The only one we ever play. Uncle Sam hates it because he never wins.”
Bucky laughed and there it was again, that little shift in atmosphere, that little light in the room that seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere at once. The dark spiral that had threatened to pull him under mere moments ago was all but forgotten.
“Sounds like an excellent choice to me” he grinned, getting to his feet. “How does it go?”
His exalted mood didn’t last long when Cass pulled the game from a cupboard in the living room, and it only dwindled further as the boys explained to him the rules. It was so goddamn stupid to freak out over a children’s game, but something about the concept just didn’t sit right with him. The fake patient. The fake organs. The tiny little electrical buzz when the tweezers touched the rim. The first time he heard it his entire body froze. That noise never ever boded well. In the past. That was all in the past. This was a children’s game. The buzz was harmless. The organs were made from plastic. It was a game . And he’d promised to play, so he would play. This was about banning any residual morose thoughts from Cass and AJ’s heads before they went to bed. This was, very decidedly, not about him.
He accepted the tweezers from AJ with the metal hand. He was fairly certain his right one was shaking and he didn’t want the boys to see. That turned out to be a mistake, because as soon as he brushed against the metal edges that contained the funny bone, his spine exploded into tingles. It was nothing, really. It was a tiny, tiny current. Voltage in the single-digits, probably. It didn’t hurt, not even close.
“Ich möchte eine exponentielle Steigerung. Testen Sie die Grenzen aus, die Grenzen des Möglichen!”
He pressed his eyes shut in an effort to keep at least the images at bay.
“Looks like I’m going for the heart next” Cass said, plucking the tweezers from Bucky’s fingers and setting to work. He was precise, well practiced in his delicate movements as he groped around the plastic chest cavity.
The room has long since grown blurry, the voices bleed together, he feels cold, too cold, although there is something warm moving inside his stomach, shoving and pulling and rearranging. He tries to ascertain the state of his surroundings but the senses are dulled, sluggish as he blinks against the bright white light.
“I think he’s waking up.”
“Should I put him back under?”
“No, leave it for a while. Let’s see what he does.”
“—cky? It’s your turn.” AJ held the tweezers out to him once more.
This couldn’t be happening. Not here, not now. Not without anyone present to put him down if necessary. Not with the boys having no clue what was going on, how to act so they wouldn’t get hurt by accident. Mechanically, he took the the tweezers—with his right hand this time—trying desperately to control the tremor and the voices and the fucking feeling of his organs being moved around. He stared hard at the plump little man on the plastic board in front of him. What was he doing here? It smelled like rubbing alcohol and electricity and freshly burned flesh—
“Are you okay?” someone said. It was a little voice, small and unsure and perhaps a little scared. Had they started recruiting children now? It wouldn’t be the first time—
“Uncle Bucky? Your hand is shaking. Are you getting sick?”
He looked up at another voice, stronger, a little scratchy, jumping between low and high. It connected to a face, a small, dark face with concerned eyes and a worried frown and he wasn’t far enough gone not to think that he had never seen a Black face before down in the bunkers, down in the labs. Hadn’t seen one in person, in fact, since—since—had he ever? Surely. Surely he had. He couldn’t remember.
“Cass, what’s going on?” there was the first voice again, so familiar, so unfamiliar, so wobbly.
Cass. Cass. He knew that name, he knew it. He looked down at the table, the…game, they were playing a game. He looked back up at Cass, the boy, the older boy. And the other, the younger, who blinked at him while chewing on his lower lip.
“Пульс остается ровным. Дыхание слегка учащено. Никаких изменений в работе организма.”
They are wrong and he wants to tell them, wants to scream at them that there is an effect, that the world is burning all around him, but he doesn’t have the words, doesn’t have a voice. He knows nothing but to lie still, to not speak, to comply or else the fire will only burn through more of him than it has already.
He staggered to his feet, the tweezers dropping from his hand with a low thud as they hit the carpet. Carpet? There should be no carpet. There should be no light, no warmth, no small children staring at him, frightened, near tears. Or were they part of the mission? Part of the test. He remembered no instructions, no orders, no mission objective. Unless he was told, he would not touch them.
There was something he’d wanted to do, a reason why he’d stood up, why he’d started halfway into the hallway, paused in the door, halted by the creaking of wood under his feet. It was all so wrong. He looked back at Cass and AJ—the boys. The boys, he remembered the boys, at Sarah’s house, alone. He just about managed to string a sentence together before stumbling into the bathroom.
“Be right back” he muttered, not even sure if it was English words that tumbled out of his mouth.
He knelt and waited on the tiles until they came to retrieve him. His eyes stared blankly at the pristine white. It was so clean, too clean, no blood or dirt or dried urine coloring the ceramic. The room smelled like Sarah’s laundry detergent. Sarah’s bathroom. In Sarah’s house. With Sarah’s kids. He stumbled back to his feet, making sure the door was properly locked.
They only locked him in when he had done something bad. Only ever turned the key when he had disobeyed. He couldn’t remember this particular transgression, but the cell was locked and the air was cold and they would soon come to deliver their punishment. A tiled room for punishment usually meant a lot of clean-up after. There were already voices outside the door, muffled and hushed. He could have listened in, but it was better not to hear. He only hoped that this time he would be spared the rats.
“Uncle Bucky?” one of the voices rose to a wavering call, spoke a name that resonated somewhere in the depths of his mind. There was something he should do. Something he needed to remember but he couldn’t quite catch the thought and hold on to it long enough to examine.
“Are you okay?”
It was children speaking. They only brought children before him occasionally, to test his loyalty, to make him prove his obedience. Usually, the children didn’t speak. They often cried or screamed, but they rarely ever spoke. Perhaps this was a different test. If so, he was unsure how to proceed. He had received no instructions for this scenario and any missteps would have consequences.
“I’ve tried calling Mom, but she won’t pick up” the little boy spoke again. He was the older of the two, he thought. How did he know there were two? He’d only heard one speaking.
The tiles were hard under his knees and the balls of his feet. He wasn’t wearing boots. He wasn’t barefoot, either. He couldn’t recall them ever leaving him wearing socks.
“Uncle Bucky?” This was the younger one, his voice trembling. “Maybe we should go upstairs,” he said, more quietly. “Like Mom said to do when he isn’t feeling well.”
“Don’t be stupid” replied the other voice. “What if he’s really sick?”
There was a rift in the world then, a disjointed image of the room around him, half bathed in bright light, half covered in dim shadows. Half the downstairs toilet at Sarah’s place, half the Wet Room in Siberia.
“Cass” he said, and the word sounded wrong somehow, forced and choked, as if dragged from his throat against its will. “Call…call Sam” he said. He didn’t know what happened next because the room shifted again and suddenly there was the all too familiar smell of electrified metal, the tang of old leather, the stench of burned flesh.
“They tested him extensively in the past, Sir, this is hardly necessary.”
“I want regular examinations of the Asset’s function, Samuels. We can’t afford to send him out into the field based on Soviet mission reports. Either he meets our standards or he will be made to meet them.”
Cold crept into his body, stiffening the already tense joints, and it smelled like roses and summer and the remnants of Sam’s overwhelmingly strong body spray. The Doctor’s breath suffused the air with the scent of mint and rotting teeth as he spoke his instructions, callous and indifferent. The clinicality was key for his experiments, it was science after all. He often spoke of just how important his work was for mankind.
“Wir leisten alle unseren Beitrag, Sergeant Barnes, jeder auf seine Art, nicht wahr?”
Pudgy hands reached for a shoulder hot with infection, chubby thumbs digging into the skin and underlying muscle, a scalpel cutting away at the ever-growing gangrene. There was the sound of a drill and the bone-rattling vibrations echoing through his entire body.
He is not alone this time, there is a man on the table to his right, a woman to his left. They are sleeping peacefully, they are not awake, not forced to watch. Were he less used to seeing corpses he would believe they were dead. He should wake them, tell them to run. He should stop thinking such things. They are not allowed. They are rotten fruit, dangling in front of him, knowing he will reach out and swallow only to die a slow and painful death before they bring him back to life.
The next voice he heard was impossibly soft and out of place. A woman’s. Her words touched his ears through a muffled haze, settling idly in his brain. It felt like minutes before they unfolded their wings and presented their essence to him, as the syllables slowly trickled down his neurons and turned back into fully formed words that carried meaning.
“Bucky, I’ve called Sam. He’s on the phone with me right now, but he can’t be down here ‘till tomorrow morning. The boys are in their rooms. Can you tell me what’s happening?”
His knees were seriously starting to burn now from the prolonged contact with the unyielding tiles. White, pristine bathroom tiles like at the house in Delacroix. The house that belonged to Sarah. Her voice was soft and fraught with worry.
“I’m…I’m not sure” he said, hoping his voice carried, hoping the words were English, hoping Sarah would know what to do with that.
“Okay” Sarah said shakily, followed by hushed words that Bucky couldn’t catch. “Can you tell me where you are?” she asked eventually.
“Not…I don’t know. I knew, just a second ago.”
“That’s fine.” There were more whispered words, the soft crackling of a bad phone connection, the shuffling of heels on floorboards. “Do you know who I am?”
“Sarah” he said, then, his pulse picking up, “the boys, where are the boys?”
“They’re safe, Bucky. Can you look around the room for me, tell me what you see?”
Bucky blinked, for a moment unsure if his eyes were opened or closed. Everything looked much the same either way. White tiles. Glaring lights. Glinting metal. Pale, scarred skin. He turned his head, raked his eyes across the floor, the walls, even the ceiling.
“There’s no blood” he said, because it was the first thing that garnered his attention.
“Good. That’s good” Sarah said, although she didn’t sound very sure. “What else? How about something that is there?”
His gaze drifted around the room once more and caught on something yellow between all the whites and blues. A small rubber duck that sat perched in one corner of the shower, wearing a pirate hat and an eyepatch. AJ had won it as a prize at the summer fair of his school.
“AJ’s duck” he said, fixating on the thing as if it were a lifeline.
“Great” Sarah breathed. “Focus on that while you answer my other questions. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Bucky nodded slowly. “I think I can do that.”
“Right. Shit, hold on” another bout of hushed words and forcibly steadied breathing. “Okay. What can you smell?”
Bucky’s nostrils flared almost on their own as she said the words. “Laundry detergent, the one with the roses. Body spray. Mouthwash. Alcohol. Electricity. Metal. Gun oil. Blood.”
“Alright, no smells. Forget the smells, describe the duck to me. In as much detail as you can.”
He stared at the tiny thing, took in every dent in the rubber, every minor production mistake, every change in texture and color. “It’s yellow,” he said after a few moments. “The beak is orange, like the sunset over the docks. It has a hat, a black one with a blue band. A black eyepatch. The other eye is blue. They forgot to print a pupil. It looks a bit spooky.”
“Okay, that’s good. You’re doing really well.” Again, she paused to speak silently into her phone. “Look around the room again” she said eventually. “Can you tell me where you are?”
He let his eyes drift. There was the toilet seat with the atrocious depictions of sea life on its lid. The sink which he’d fixed last summer because the water wouldn’t properly drain. The rug Cass had picked out because he liked the way the long tussles tickled his bare feet. The large assortment of hair products that Sarah swore by.
“Downstairs bathroom” he said. “Your house. Delacroix, Louisiana. USA.”
Sarah breathed. “That’s right.”
Bucky nodded to himself and reached for the rubber duck, squeezing it between human fingers. There was a soft hiss as the air was pressed out of place and a pathetic wheeze as it streamed back in when he loosened his grip. He listened to the sound, closing his fist over and over again. The air still smelled like blood and electrified metal.
“Do you think you could unlock the door, Bucky?” Sarah asked warily. “Let me in?”
Bucky breathed deeply, squeezed the duck, listened to its wheeze. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Okay. Then talk to me. About anything at all.”
His fingers opened and closed around the yellow rubber almost of their own accord by now, creating a steady rhythm of hisses and wheezes that suffused the small room. After a while, mostly subconsciously, he matched his breathing to the sound until he and the duck drew in and released air in unison.
“Did the boys call you?” he asked after a while.
“I missed it, called Cass back about ten minutes later.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Maybe forty minutes?”
Bucky didn’t know exactly where Sarah had been, but she’d had a thirty minute drive to get there.
“Fuck. Sarah, I’m sorry. This hasn’t happened in ages. I thought I was fine, I swear.”
“It’s okay. No one got hurt.” Her words were meant to be reassuring, but her voice sounded drained, apprehensive, and perhaps the tiniest bit angry.
“Is Sam still on the phone?” he asked, the rubber duck hissing sadly.
“Yeah. He says he’s not hanging up until I’ve laid eyes on you and confirmed you're okay.”
Bucky breathed deeply, in sync with the wheezing of the rubber duck. He could smell laundry detergent, body spray, and mouthwash. The last remnants of iron in the air were gone. He squeezed the duck once more, waited until it was fully reinflated, then set it carefully on the edge of the sink and turned the lock. When he opened the door, Sarah sat leaned against the doorframe with her legs drawn up, the phone balancing on her knees. She looked up at him in surprise, scrambling to get to her feet.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi. Sorry. I’m fine now. I’m okay.”
“He ain’t bleeding anywhere, is he?” sounded Sam’s faint voice over the phone. “He always hides that shit.”
“I’m not bleeding, Sam. I’m fine.”
It took a few more reassurances, but eventually Sam reluctantly hung up the phone and Bucky was left with Sarah and the concerned frown on her face as she eyed him warily.
“Tea?” she asked.
“Sure” Bucky shrugged. It didn’t escape him that she kept a deliberate amount of distance between them. Both Sarah and Sam were usually very physical people. They hugged and touched freely, with everyone they knew. That included essentially the entire town. He had noticed it often that they were different, with him. Sam’s claps on the back were rare, Sarah’s hugs short and light. He didn’t know whether to appreciate their change in behavior or to find it slightly hurtful.
He followed Sarah into the kitchen and sank onto one of the chairs, dragging a hand over his face. He hadn’t been tired before. Now, he felt as though he’d been awake for four days straight and yet he still had no urge to sleep. The nights were always awful after something like this. They waited in silence for the water to boil and the tea to steep. After a few minutes, Sarah carefully placed a mug in front of him and then slid onto the bench opposite his chair. She regarded him out of watchful eyes, her face slightly obscured by the steam rising from the hot liquid.
“I know I shouldn’t be asking you what caused it” she began after a moment, cradling her mug in both hands. “But I have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“I know,” Bucky said, staring at the table. “It won’t. I won’t…It was the game.”
“What game?” she frowned.
“The one in the living room” he said, doubting anyone had taken the time to put it away. He was afraid that if he talked about it more the memories would just slam right back into him.
Sarah raised a brow before depositing her tea on the kitchen counter and hurrying off to the neighboring room. It was several minutes before she came back, her face pale and tense, her rigid posture speaking of a body carefully controlled and deliberately moved so as to not give away too much distress. He knew that posture very well.
“I put it away” she said, absently reaching for her tea and leaning back against the counter, arms crossed. “No one is going to be playing that again while you’re here.”
He nodded, tracing a metal finger around the rim of his mug. The sound it created was equally soothing and grating on the nerves.
“You’re not gonna ask?” Bucky said, looking up at Sarah without moving his head.
“I don’t think I want to know” Sarah replied quietly and Bucky focused back on his swirling tea.
They let silence fill the room until they both looked up as two sets of tiny feet traipsed down the stairs and paused in front of the bathroom before continuing on. AJ and Cass peered into the kitchen, both clinging to the stuffed animals that resided proudly at the head of their beds; AJ’s bright green dinosaur and Cass’ tattered giraffe that he swore he never used anymore.
“Mom?” AJ asked, his voice small and unsure. “Is Uncle Bucky alright?”
The kids blinked at their mother, casting only fretful glances in Bucky’s direction. Sarah was the authority here, she was expected to know all the answers, expected to keep them safe. Sarah waved her two boys towards her and they came without hesitation, letting her close both arms around them and hold them tight. She met Bucky’s eyes, considering him for long seconds before she finally nodded slightly.
“He’ll be fine” she said, kneeling down so she was at eye level with her kids. AJ and Cass turned around to Bucky, eyes wide, stuffed animals clung tightly against their chests.
“Hey kids” he said, his voice wavering. He didn’t know what he would do if the boys were forever scared of him now.
AJ looked tiny and uncertain next to his older brother, shuffling his feet and only meeting Bucky’s gaze for the briefest, fleeting moments before directing his eyes firmly back onto the floorboards. Cass was braver, or perhaps he only put on a brave face, but he took a step forward, disregarding his giraffe and considering Bucky for a moment.
“Do you need a hug?” he asked, pushing his glasses up his nose. Oh, how Sarah had managed to raise these kids so well Bucky would never know. He marvelled at it on the regular, and today was no different.
“Yeah, buddy” he smiled weakly in relief. “Yeah, I could use a hug.”
It didn’t need more than that for Cass to close his spindly arms around him and for AJ to follow suit, climbing onto Bucky’s lap and falling against his chest. They didn’t ask any questions, they never pried. He was sure they would riddle Sarah later, but they always spared him their curiosity when it really counted. It wouldn’t be long now, before Cass was old enough to put two and two together, before he would learn about who Bucky was. But for the moment he could still relish in the knowledge that these two liked him simply for who they knew him to be, despite all his faults. For the moment, they were just kids and he was just Bucky Barnes.