To spy my shadow in the sun;

[grimvisaged]

Rogers is not as good at this game as Romanoff. He is a man who lives the whole of his life in the open and has little knowledge of shadows, little use for subterfuge. Sometimes, his attention will find the right spot a moment too late. More often, Rogers doesn't know to look at all.

This should not be admirable, yet it is.

Nearly three weeks he's been trailing Rogers, quietly watching him, trying to find the footing he so thoroughly lost in Washington. He's less secure than he wants to be, the very sight of the man a perpetual punch to the gut, but curiosity eats at him, fed by an emotion beneath that he can't give a name to.

(lovelovelovelove)

In the long, late afternoon shadows of the gardens, he waits. Watches the figure jog through stands of trees, hurdling effortlessly over bushes, a distant smear of white on green growing rapidly closer. Predictable. Easily avoided.

This isn't how he intended this to go. He hadn't intended anything at all. Yet his right hand pulls the hood down from the stringy mess of his hair, and he takes one deliberate step from behind the pale and spindly trunk of a birch. Not line of sight, just on the periphery.

It'll be enough.

He doesn't realize he's holding his breath.

Comments

[captain_rogers]

Where the guilt that weighed across his shoulders, feeling as if it would bow and then break them if he breathed too sharply while staring at his old friend, hiked higher for his feeling hurt at Bucky’s answer, Steve could not deny the fact that he felt as if he had been kicked squarely in the gut. Hope punctured by the other man’s words deflated him, but as he continued watching the man he had once known so well screw his face up in deliberation, he knew he could not leave it at that.

“I have to call you something,” he told him, voice strengthening with the determination to see his friend returned to at least the knowledge of himself and all they had experienced together. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not giving up.”

I’m with you ‘til the end of the line. The words hang between them, unspoken then but anything but unfelt.

[grimvisaged]

"I said don't worry about it," he says, and his voice betrays him despite his intent to be firm: There's no menace in him, here, only confusion and the inescapable fact that he will never measure up to the ghost of his last lifetime. His fingers twitch against his thighs from wanting to lay hands on Rogers, although he couldn't say whether it was out of a deep-seated affection or simply a need to shake him until some comprehension rattles into his stubborn brain.

"I don't care what you call me, as long as it isn't that," he adds, more softly, an intentional echo of Rogers' own words. "I'm only here for information," he says, knowing he's fooling no one, not even himself.

[captain_rogers]

Despite his earlier resolution to move slowly, to allow Bucky to set the pace of things as much as possible, Steve could not help but be then beginning to get frustrated at the other man’s inability to give him even a name to call him by. There in the muddle of the confusion splashed across his friend’s face, the familiar long-gone notes of his friend’s voice pitched with less certainty than Steve could ever remember hearing, the familiar threads of the man he had lost so long ago were too enticing to allow him to give up. Not on the situation, and never on Bucky. Standing so far apart as they were then felt as if it only widened the gulf between them, those familiar small touches and comforts of a hand on the other’s shoulder, the familiar sling of Bucky’s arm around his neck or his own useless swatting at the other man as much a part of who they had been as any insult they had tossed between themselves.

“You’ve been following me for weeks, only for information?” he repeated, his disbelief clear, though he threw open his arms and lifted his chin. “Okay, then. Ask me anything.”

[grimvisaged]

The sheer scope of the offer is overwhelming, and he visibly falters beneath the sudden deluge of choice. Ask Rogers anything? Where would a person even begin, when anything is literally the sum total of what they don't know? For a handful of seconds it's all simply too much, and he fights first against the impulse to lash out, and then to flee.

"I've been following you because you're the only person still alive who knew—" His voice abruptly halts, teeth grinding hard against the name to keep it passing his lips. Even now, he isn't certain why it's so difficult to verbally acknowledge the person he used to be, but the reaction is instinctive and visceral—His body won't allow him to say the name.

"You're the only person with any real answers," he says when his throat finally relents, his lips pursing in frustration. He still doesn't know what to ask, and he hates that, hates the vulnerability innate to each time he so much as looks at Rogers. He swallows it down, his gaze darting briefly aside, shaken.

"I don't know what to ask," he quietly admits, brow knitting.

[captain_rogers]

Had it been anyone else in the world, Steve was almost certain he could have made something better of the situation than be left standing there caught between all he wanted and all he could not have, the knowledge of what divided them serving only to make him more frustrated where he attempted to keep a clear head. But when it came to Bucky…there had never been a chance of being objective where Bucky was concerned.

The fact that the man who had been made into the Winter Soldier had come out of the shadows to speak to him, that he had come to meet him face to face to speak to him was a great leap forward from the nothingness he had been told time and time again that the two of them were fated toward. He wanted to celebrate that fact even as he understood it was just the first small step in what would have to be a long, arduous process. Everything he had read in that damned file, seen in Bucky’s eyes on that street, that helicarrier, told him he could expect no less.

The patience he was supposed to have felt frayed and hard to grasp then, though he struggled to keep a hold of himself in an attempt to give Bucky time to say what he needs to say. The fear that grips him whenever his thoughts stray to a scenario of pushing too hard when it wasn’t all laid on the line in fire and blood and being left alone again seemed to be then all that helped him keep his cool.

“I know,” he said finally, one side of his mouth curling up in an old habit as he looked at the man who had been his friend with soft eyes. Letting the moment pass, he then asked “What if I told you how we met?" And, as much as it hurt, "Or how we lost you?"

[grimvisaged]

"No," he says, quick and with a fierce shake of his head that speaks to the instinct fueling his response. Those things he already knows about, in the safe and academic way that research could provide. He doesn't want to stand here and watch Steve Rogers recount his loss, he isn't certain he could bear it.

"Just…" He trails off, his face going pinched. Part of him is desperate to know who James Buchanan Barnes was when the cameras weren't rolling, would give anything to understand even an inkling of the bond he shared with Rogers, or how he could always seem to be so easy with people, so happy.

If he's ever been happy, he doesn't remember it.

Another part of him sharply balks at this, however, elbowing out his tender curiosity with fear. Maybe it's what they put in his brain, or maybe it's just natural self-preservation, but one thing he knows for sure is that finding out all of the ways he's unlike Barnes will hurt.

"Austria," he finally settles on, lifting his chin, confident now that he's chosen something sufficiently neutral. "You rescued him. What did they do to him there?"

[captain_rogers]

The difficulty he had had some nights during the war, in moments decades after in hearing the grand tales of what history had recorded of them and knowing the records were shined and cleansed of the worst of what had happened, of dividing his sense of right from what had had to be done was nothing compared to the impossibility of staying distant and rational in the face of anything to do with Bucky. Had he any weak spot, it was that man. Had he anyone in the world who had made him stronger, it had been him.

He struggled with it then, staring at the man who had been carved out of his old friend and holding himself still despite all that screamed for him to go nearer. As much as he wanted to tell him then everything, to try to cauterize his own agony over the situation in gripping his friend's shoulders and attempting to bring him back that way, Steve knew enough to know he could not be so selfish.

His jaw tightens at the question, but he nodded stiffly all the same. "At the time I only knew Zola had been taking soldiers away from the rest of everyone they had captured. That those who were dragged off did not return." More than seventy years later and the fear that had shot through him at being told Bucky was one of that number had not faded in the least from memory. No more than the remembered determination to find his friend, to destroy the base and all the horrors it made. Old memories had been flushed out by the detailed notes in the Winter Soldier file, suspicions made gruesome and as vivid as if he had seen it done before his own eyes in reading of the trials Zola had put Bucky and the others through. Of how the others had died.

"Zola was trying to recreate the Serum and used soldiers as lab rats. You were the only one to survive."

[grimvisaged]

He wants to snap again that he isn't Barnes, wants to tell Rogers to stop using you when he should mean he, but for all that he was made as a weapon, he can see when a fight will be fruitless. It bothers him beyond accounting, how dogged Rogers is about this even now.

In every word, every movement, those blue eyes see only Bucky Barnes.

"I didn't pull you from the Potomac because of him," he says now instead, veering the conversation right back in the direction he'd so adamantly diverted it from with his bullshit posturing about Austria. He isn't sharp or threatening now, but he means it deeply and his eyes are intense when they suddenly lock on Rogers. "That was me, not him. I made that choice."

He doesn't know why it matters now, only that it's everything. He hadn't understood that before.

[captain_rogers]

Steve gets the impression of a stray animal, looking at the man who was once and forever his friend. Though it’s better than the images before of a wild animal backed into a corner, of a man who had been hollowed out and filled with lead and purpose, of fear and of hate in familiar eyes framed in back, it’s one he cannot deny all the same. He doesn’t need to ask to know he’s fumbling every inch of them. He’s reminded too much of the animals they had seen in the war, ribs protruding from their thin sides, eyes too bright and wary even as they approached and retreated repeatedly from any attempt to help them, even so much as sharing shreds of their rations.

His world had been too emptied of Bucky to be able to hide the edge of desperation that brittled his voice, his body steeled in place in fighting the urge to reach out and be able to curl his fingers at Bucky’s shoulders once more.

The man who was at once Bucky and not Bucky spoke and Steve had to work not to flinch. Not for the defiant sharpness of his eyes or the pronouncement that he had made the first choice he had been capable of perhaps since the moment Steve had lost him in Switzerland. For the second time in his life he had fallen, untethered that second time from a ship or a reason to be lost. For the second time he had tasted defeat and accepted in the last moments before consciousness had slipped away, long before he hit the water, the certainty of his own death.

He had not expected to wake a second time.

The memory bled sluggishly from him, a wound still scabbing over, and he was left looking ahead at the man who had dragged him out of the river. “I understand,” he said, instead of all that roiled within him. “I-” he broke off before starting again, "I'm glad."

[grimvisaged]

Four words. That's apparently all it takes, and some hastily-buried part of him ignites with relief and what he thinks must be happiness. Without even realizing it, he'd been harboring a childlike desperation for this man's approval, and those four words, even grudgingly-given, grip him so suddenly that his hands shake where they're clamped at his sides.

What assaults him then are more impressions than actual memories: Blurred snapshots of straw-colored hair; of pale, earnest eyes; of stick-skinny limbs dangling off of fire escapes. Beneath it all there is an emotion so immovable, so undeniable, that the shock of finding it within himself makes him falter backward half a step with a visible wince.

(NO, NOT WITHOUT YOU!)

It's entirely too much.

Stunned, he looks to Rogers again, only to find that it hurts in a way he is completely unequipped to quantify. He will never be that man again, and all at once, it feels as if it's killing him.

Knowing no other way to respond, he does the only thing he can: He turns, wordless, and walks away.