Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;

[grimvisaged]

The hotel, he finds, is home to an inordinate number of mirrors. This was not something he had taken particular note of before unless it helped in surveillance, but now they seem inescapable, tacked upon every wall and rising up to assault him around every corner. He has changed, and now he cannot get away from himself.

It is not Barnes nor the Winter Soldier who stares back at him now, but a grim and sleek hybrid, the place where light and dark meet. He has no opinion on his newly-clipped hair, apart from acknowledging that the style is sufficiently enough removed from both of the people he used to be. Falling in a dark sheet to skim his freshly-shaved cheeks, it would make him look like a wayward college student were it not for the hard line of his mouth which serves as accompaniment.

There's an odd sort of freedom which comes with looking different, however—A feeling of having firmly planted his flag in a place of his own choosing, of asserting that he need not be one or the other. This third option is a buoy, a brace, and it pulls him away from his reflection to find Rogers again.

He's stopped looking for Barnes, but he cannot stay away from the man who was his best friend. The thread which connects them is an invisible but unrelenting tug at his heart.

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[captain_rogers]

Not every hour was spent at the task. Not every idle moment was turned to the shape and weight of a pencil in his hand and the familiar press of a notebook’s binding against the side of his knee as he bent forward, or spread out before him on a table as his eyes focused only on the minute details he drew into the images that filled his memories. His dreams.

Still, the pages of the sketchbook were full to bursting. Had been made so by the months made reacquainted with the Nexus as he waited and watched, distracted and burned himself away in allowing an old friend to choose to come back to him. In whatever form or by whatever name he decided.

There were figures long lost, places long burned or remade into things so far unlike themselves he hardly recognized them in the present. The graceful lines of a bomber’s wings as it soared overhead, painted with the last hope of a pilot with a paintbrush and a desire to remember the girl he’d left back home. The hard angles of a group of men in their laughter as they raised a glass. A stage. A woman, beautiful in images both in the fire of youth and the faded, lined last days of her life.

The past was not unaccompanied on the pages, the vibrant present sidling up alongside old memories and making it all look easier than it ever could have been. The weight of a strange hammer bent one page, a woman shaped in agony and brutality even as her lips quirked and she flew on another. An airbase. A ship. A cafe in the middle of Brooklyn. Another woman dancing across the edges and into the center of more than a few pages, a sword in one hand, her hair a dark stream around her.

One man was missing from their midst. A notable absence only to one who knew the whole of his mind and could understand how and why he was unable to capture the one friend who had meant more than any other. It was the same, as Steve looked up from the fine details he drew of a bow and the smirk behind it, the same man who looked back at him then.

“I like the new look,” he said after a moment, finding no other words that would fit.

[grimvisaged]

He cannot say what exactly it is that this tableau does to him, only knows that he somehow feels abruptly comforted and unmoored all at once. When it comes to Rogers, this is a confusing mixture of emotion that he is no closer to understanding, but is at least getting used to. For someone so large, Rogers' fingers are surprisingly elegant, deft, and the lay of the pencil between them is familiar enough to be alarming.

(the slant of warm afternoon sun spilling over smudged pages, the bleat of car horns in the distance)

He's seen this many, many times before.

(Steve's face, dirty and beatific, bent over a notebook in the cold, failing twilight)

Throat dry, he swallows, and does not reply to Rogers' comment. Only belatedly does he recognize it as kindness, and then only because he feels with an immovable, deep-seated conviction that this man is incapable of subterfuge.

Rogers is the best person that Barnes knew, and he is terrifying.

"Do you have any of him?" he asks him with a glance to the sketchbook.

[captain_rogers]

The shift of his hands down from where he had paused, pencil hovering over paper, to curl around the boundaries of those life-filled, graphite-stricken pages, was an action kept careful under the guidance of a knowledge drawn deep enough into him to have become an unconscious instinct. There was ever a measure to his strength, a care he had learned to infuse every touch, every grip, every action with. Too often in those early days had he raced too hard and tripped over himself on newly long, muscled legs. Too many times had he made the mistake of gripping too hard or forgetting himself long enough to shatter a glass, break the hinges of a door.

He had been made clumsy in his inexperience and careful in the years of refining every pull of muscle and sinew.

All of which might have been strange to think about in the face of a man who had once known him as the sickly creature he had been, the world shifted so entirely around the two of them to make them outwardly nothing of what they had been before. It was not in clinging to those faded memories of what they had been that Steve had resolved to do, for all that it ached to let go of the idea that the two of them would never as they had once been, but in the hope that perhaps there could be something new brokered between the two men they had been forged into being.

His gaze dropped down to the sketchbook in his hands and he paused, just a moment, before shaking his head and tilting his head back again to look at the other man. "Not here, but-" his mind flew back to the books that must have salvaged by Howard or Peggy, he had never been told which, and had been delivered back to him with the few remaining possessions he had of his old life. The memory of how he had clung to them in those early weeks brought as much guilt as it did an echo of that hollowed feeling in his stomach, as if he had been momentarily gutted again. He took a breath and elaborated, "I have more in my room. I can show you, if you want?"

[grimvisaged]

"Yes," he says, the word out of him before he has time to consider its implications, perhaps for the best. He finds that he means it completely, an unexpected clamor having sprung up behind his breastbone like a second heartbeat.

It isn't Barnes he wants so badly to see, it's Barnes by Rogers' hand.

Some part of him is aware that the potency of something like that may be too much too soon, but there is little more easing into this that either of them can effectively do at this point. All they've done is ease into it, dancing around each other like nervous animals, each debating the relative merits of bolting or allowing themselves to be devoured by the past. He's tired of running, and can only allow Rogers to carry the burden alone for so long.

[captain_rogers]

Zola had spoken of his life in terms of equations, sums and algorithims, as if the world could be so determined down to the smallest detail, a single life within it. Where he had been wrong, the Smithsonian had been too, in believing that there was a world in which James Buchanan Barnes, in whatever form he could get him, was not as much a part of himself as the color of his hair, or the beat of his own heart. The man who stood before him then had been taken and changed by the years, by all the monstrosities that had been done to him when the two of them had not stood side to side, or back to back, but that much of that equation had not changed.

Even where it is almost a struggle to look at him in knowing how he had failed his oldest friend, it was a greater struggle to keep himself from rushing or overwhelming the other man with his own emotions. He could not be selfish in that, no matter how he was tempted, and kept a careful measure to his words, no matter how honest they were.

For all that, he smiled still when this new Barnes agreed, and while the gesture was kept small, it was wholly meant as he carefully got to his feet and gathered up his few things. "I can go get them now, or-" he hesitated, uncertain whether the other man would be likely to panic or back away if he felt cornered in a small space (as if his room could be termed that, when he'd been given as much space as the whole troupe of girls back in his war bonds days) but equally uncertain whether the man might still be there if he left him waiting to retrieve the books alone. In the end he decided to leave the decision up to Barnes. "Or would you can come with me?"

[grimvisaged]

Even as adrift as he has been these last months in the mire of his own emotions, he can recognize this moment, this question, for what it is. Should he decline, he doesn't doubt that Rogers will blithely soldier on and will lay the choice at his feet again some other day. It isn't a gauntlet but a turning point, and whether he will eventually assent is no longer in question; it's simply a matter of when.

He nods, the burn of curiosity getting the better of him. Being cornered physically is no concern, but he is dimly aware that alone in such a small space, the emotions which echo between them may corner him in less tangible ways.

[captain_rogers]

For a heartbeat, he stood waiting and wished there was some manual at hand in how to handle the situation. To handle him. But even what might otherwise have been a throwaway thought was one chased immediately by guilt with the understanding that people had been 'handling' Bucky for far too long. What mattered then was not how easy it was for Steve himself, he knew, but that he allow the man who had been all he had had in the world to have the freedom to make decisions for himself. He could not, would not do the man the disservice of doing anything less.

It was quite literally the least and most difficult thing he could do.

Where relief crashes like a wave through him at Barnes' nod, it loosed something of the tightness in his chest to see it. He nodded in reply, and where he could not entirely keep from a brief smile, held his things easy in one hand as he set himself in the direction of his room and trusted that Barnes would keep step.

They had moved like that long ago. That synchronicity of movement that belonged nowhere but to two souls who knew each other so well. It had been unweighted by better than 70 years apart then and untold (cyrillic-scripted) horrors, and while it remained just out of reach then, it felt as if a missing limb had been reattached to have the man again so near.

He did not speak until he stood before his door and reached into his pocket for the card key to let himself in, holding the door open in a thoughtless gesture to allow Barnes to follow. "This'll just take me a minute to grab."

[grimvisaged]

There's only the slightest tick of hesitation before he slips silently forward into the room, accepting the gesture and formally accepting Rogers, for whatever that's worth. The door is heavy and clicks closed after them, the sound soft but final.

In an instant he has assessed the whole of the room for tactical advantages, a habit impossible to break even under circumstances as strange as this, but it's the second pass of his gaze that proves more important, lingering on details that fill in the spaces in his memory about who Steve Rogers really is. There is no more intimate or personal space as a bedroom, even one in a hotel.

He feels awkward standing there just inside the door, the sensation intensely foreign, as if his body isn't his own when he's around this man.

[captain_rogers]

The room he had left behind him once before, that day two years ago he had left the Nexus by mistake and found himself dumped back into the strange modern world he had left behind, was not the same he had walked into upon his return. He had expected that it would be, of course, but as ever expectation had been unsteady in the face of reality (however it might be described when set within a world with doors that led to other dimensions of life and of thought, where not even his identity was certain on the other side of a doorway).

It was at once both like and unlike the apartment he had made for himself and abandoned (after a string of gunfire and a man dying across his boots and in his hands, the fact remained, although he left it unspoken). His bed was still tucked tight enough to be able to bounce a quarter off its sheets, his clothes and shoes carefully put away (his uniform at the back of the closet but still well within easy reach - his stash of files hidden in a space beneath the floorboards just beneath his bed). But the proof of who he was was scattered in pieces throughout the wide open room, the curtains thrown back from the wide window to allow sunlight to stream in.

His shield leant against the wall just behind the door. His jacket left thrown across the back of a chair at the desk with its neat stack of notebooks and few loose sheets of sketches left scattered in exact contradiction to the care taken in aligning the covers of the notebooks and the set of pastels in their case in right angles to the edges of the desk.

It was with care that he did not look back at Barnes standing in his room, half-certain the other man might spook if he moved too fast or paid too much attention to him when he should be retrieving the memories he'd offered to share, captured in paper and cheap pencil. He moved toward the desk, but bent to pull open one of the drawers to pull out a small stack of battered notebooks (cheaper and far more worn than the few on top of the desk). He sorted through them for a second as he straightened before he turned back, holding one out to the man who had been the lynchpin of his whole world for so much of his life. "Here," he offered, lips kicking up into a hint of an encouraging expression.

[grimvisaged]

This is what he'd been so desperate to see, and yet in that critical, wavering moment there is undeniable terror, too, as he reaches mechanically for the proffered notebook and forces himself to open the cover with surprising gentleness. The fear he has carried for some time now, although only recently did he begin to understand what it was. He's not unaware of the irony that he had for so long been regarded as a ghost, when now he is afraid of perpetually falling short of one.

The sketches inside begin innocuously enough, although the affection for the subject matter is obvious even to someone like himself. Cityscapes and the people within them, in lines at once confident and delicate. It doesn't take long to get to Barnes, however, the likeness so obvious that, rendered with those loving lines, it makes his head spin.

Abruptly, he wants to apologize, despite logically knowing that the loss of Rogers' best friend wasn't by his own design.

"You drew him a lot," he quietly says instead, not sure how to articulate how all of this makes him feel.

[captain_rogers]

In those early days out of the ice, where the world had been made of razor-edges and every breath, every action had felt as if it had left him bleeding, he had not understood enough of the mythos that had been left behind him to be grateful his sketchbooks had been saved. He had clung to them even as he had refused to turn the pages that held so much of his memory, the thought of finding the faces of those he had lost in the shape of his own hand in graphite or pen had left him too nauseous to have been able to do more than hoard them among his things.

Only in seeing the exhibit at the Smithsonian had he truly appreciated what had been done in keeping them out of the public's hands. There was agony enough in seeing the display of uniforms of the Howling Commandos. In seeing the image of himself before the procedure, gaunt and deathly, beside one taken when he had stood taller, broader. Watching a movie of Peggy's voice and Peggy's face as she described him to strangers but held so much of what they had been (or nearly been) in her eyes and out of her words had broken his heart enough. He could not have stood the invasion of his privacy it would have been to see his private sketches laid out for the world to see right along with his medical file and service record.

It is not nothing to offer the notebook out to Barnes.

It is everything.

As much of a struggle as it was to do so, Steve held himself silent and allowed the other man to look through the pages without interference or opinion. He kept his expression not blank, but without judgement, ever hesitant to push too hard and risk Barnes fleeing from him again. "I'd known him since we were just kids," he said, trying to find the words to convey something of the life they had lived without weighing it down with all the emotion and the memory those who had taken Bucky from him had tried to erase. "He didn't make the best model," the joke was a light one, but one that felt important somehow. "Never could hold still long enough. Refused to let me make him 'too serious.'"

[grimvisaged]

The few exchanges he's had with Rogers have all been surreal, but this may be the most dreamlike of all, the two of them discussing Barnes as a third party while the images being described look exactly like the man holding the sketchbook, apart from the smile. There is a gulf of distance in that easy curve of lips.

Rogers' assertion he can easily believe; Barnes was always smiling. He himself,

(arm slung across skinny shoulders, head thrown back, laughing at the blue blue sky above sharp-edged buildings)

he cannot remember ever having smiled.

Gently, he flips another page. Barnes could never hold still, and yet Rogers sketched more of him than anything else.

Sometimes, he feels Barnes' legacy so acutely he thinks he could actually be physically bowed by it, as if it were a tangible weight upon his otherwise strong shoulders. There are things which he remembers and things which he knows, and he will never be able to live up to that legacy, not for as long as he lives. When he realized that he wanted to, it surprised him a little.

Closing the book, he carefully passes it back with a nod.

[captain_rogers]

Steve remembered the scribbles of stick figures throughout Bucky's notebooks while they had still been studying in art school together, of his insistence that they were high art all without losing the grin on his face or the air of suggestion that had colored his scribbles each time they had gotten a seat in classes sketching or painting from live models. Just as he remembered the other man's insistence that no, Steve Rogers was going to be the best thing since Picasso and anyone who didn't see that was blind. Or how he'd tell girls exactly that in what little Steve had overheard of his buddy's habit of talking him up to girls who hadn't given him a second look once they'd been presented with him live and in the flesh.

It was hard not to remember how easy it had always been between them, even when they'd been quarreling over one thing or another (usually over how Steve himself threw himself into the fray before thinking). Not when he stood facing a man who was equal parts his best friend and someone else entirely. Not when he could remember so well who it had been who had insisted on scrounging him up soup from somewhere on those long, bitter winters when Steve had doubted in some moments that he'd make it through.

Bucky had never given up on him, and he would not, could not give up on Barnes.

He wanted to ask what the other man thought when he was handed back the notebook, but felt frozen, half-buckled under the weight of wanting to keep from pushing too hard and scaring the man off. As he wanted to apologize for what he was sure was his part in what had happened to his brother in all but blood, but bit his tongue hard to keep the words at bay.

Instead he chose a line of conversation one more neutral, "Hey, you wouldn't happen to be hungry, would you? Because I could use a bite."

[grimvisaged]

It's a normal sort of suggestion; this he understands. Natasha suggests the same to him as well, some innate human pull toward the common ritual of sustenance when commonalities are so difficult to find. What Rogers is after is clear enough in the hopeful sheen of his eyes: More time, always more time, and some small thing to share, to build upon.

When he eats, it is cursory and alone. It isn't that he doesn't understand the enjoyment of food, but that he's never had the room for it before now. The cafe or bar, he can at least assent, are less volatile spaces than the close walls of Rogers' room.

And he supposes that perhaps he wants a little more time, too.

"Sure," he replies, more gruffly than he intends, perpetually unsteadied around this man.