Actions

Work Header

Rating:
Archive Warning:
Category:
Fandoms:
Relationships:
Characters:
Additional Tags:
Language:
English
Collections:
Marvel Trumps Hate 2019, Not Another Stucky Big Bang 2020, My precious loki
Stats:
Published:
2020-10-12
Completed:
2020-12-18
Words:
147,285
Chapters:
20/20
Comments:
895
Kudos:
816
Bookmarks:
291
Hits:
21,184

Space Oddity

Summary:

After the world ends, things happen to Bucky in this specific order: he helps defeat Thanos, he rejects Steve’s attempt to address Feelings, he watches Steve volunteer to put the Infinity Stones back in time, he waits for Steve to come back, he is sad when Steve does not come back, he realizes that everyone thinks Steve disappeared in 2012 (???), he gets taken to space by Carol Danvers (!!!), he meets up with a depressed literal alien Norse God, he and the depressed literal alien Norse God travel through space, he and the depressed literal alien Norse God hit a wormhole and fall into the--Multiverse.

What the fuck.

This is the story of how Bucky and Thor pick up the pieces of their lives, find their own worth, find their own person, and find their way out of a multiverse of 100 realities stitched together with 100 tropes. There’s love, there’s friendship, there’s an extreme amount of Tesseract fuckery, but most importantly there are sexy vampires. Bon Appetit.

Notes:

OH BOY. Thank you and welcome to my (excessive) (monstrous) (unwieldy) (inexplicable) contribution to the 2020 (Not) Another Stucky Big Bang! This approximately 145K ridiculous work of 700 tropes and 200 AUs was originally supposed to be 60K MAX, but one thing led to another and Thor and Bucky could not shut the fuck up and so here we are. With this thing.

Thank you IMMENSELY to my incredible and astounding artists nalonzooo and cyclamental, who cheerleaded me & created just stellar works of art for this dumb fic. I am so grateful that I was able to work with you guys for this Bang and so goddamn excited for everyone to see what you've done here!

This fic is also for aurilly, who so kindly bid on me for Marvel Trumps Hate last year and didn't give me a whole lot of guidelines other than "Bucky and Steve should have canon history" and "I want Bucky and Loki to have friends" and so that is what you will receive, with a BUNCH of other ridiculous stuff mixed in as well.

Testimonials for this fic include: a minimum of 7 people telling me they knew immediately which NASBB claim slide was mine, at least 10 people straight up laughing at me for my original estimated length, and steebadore, who has said this of this fic: "Have you ever wanted to read 7 full length stories inside one full length story? Have I got the fic for you!"

Thank you to all for reading and to all who comment. I see you and I appreciate you and probably Bucky Barnes does too! ♥

(See the end of the work for more notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1: Chapter One. [no oddity]

Chapter Text

*

[ earth. 2023.]

The end of the world doesn’t come the way he expects it to. Bucky has spent decades having his brain scrambled, diced, re-scrambled, and scraped back together with off-brand paste by an underground operation of Nazis and it’s still somehow beyond the boundaries of his imagination that the world could end with the snap of someone’s fingers.

But it does.

The world ends and Bucky spends five years as the memory of space dust and then, one day, the dust formerly known as Doctor Strange tells him and his other space dust compatriots that it’s time to resume their normal human form.

There’s a battle, that ugly purple motherfucker again, Stark snaps his fingers, Stark dies, and then there’s a funeral and a five year gap that half of the world remembers and the other half doesn’t. That, at least, is something that Bucky is used to.

The aftermath of the world ending is a lot more paperwork and insurance adjustment than Bucky would have expected, but the rebuilding process is so fraught and, furthermore, so tedious, that someone with high security clearance at the U.S. government just gives Bucky a tired once-over and hands him a piece of paper that says something to the effect of Congratulations Bucky Barnes, you’re a free man!

He spends half a day looking at that, as though a piece of government-issued paper could absolve him of decades of being the gun that HYDRA pointed and pulled the trigger on. He guesses legally it can, but it does nothing to resolve the knot of hard-earned and hard-worn guilt that gives him heartburn in the middle of the night, so his eyes bug out around the twentieth time he re-reads the paltry, one-page document and in a pique of confused anger, he tears it to pieces.

He immediately regrets this action and picks the pieces back up to try to tape back together.

“Buck?” Steve asks, uncertainly, from behind his shoulder.

Bucky could and likely should have picked a better place to process internal turmoil than the kitchen he shares with his former best friend of complicated origin and even more complicated whatever-comes-after-origin, but he hadn’t and now he has tape stuck to his fingers and in between his shifting arm plates and an expression on his face like someone stepped on his cat.

“I’m fine,” Bucky says.

“You have tape in your hair,” Steve says, cautiously.

Steve says most things to Bucky cautiously now and Bucky doesn’t know if it’s the one hundred year history or the amnesia or the fact that they had never discussed the time Bucky had shot Steve seven times in the stomach or the period where Bucky was cryogenically frozen or the five years of space dust separation, but every time Bucky hears the note of caution in Steve’s voice—as though he doesn’t know where they stand or what to do with Bucky—Bucky feels the distinct urge to scream.

“I meant to put it there,” Bucky says.

Steve opens his mouth to say something and just as quickly snaps it shut. He gives Bucky a cautious smile and moves around the kitchen island to fill a glass of water. Bucky scowls at Steve’s back and feeling wrong-footed, tries to peel as many pieces of tape off of him as possible in the time between the faucet turning on and Steve turning around, glass to mouth, to stare at Bucky with his too-large, too-blue eyes.

Bucky gets to most of the tape.

He stares down at his hastily pieced-together sheet of paper.

In the case of United States v. Barnes, the government has chosen to withdraw its criminal petition against the aforementioned. Be it noted that Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes is hereby free of all criminal charges. This case is ordered sealed by judicial order.

The words don’t have their intended effect. Bucky should feel relieved, grateful, even awed. Instead, he feels something short of hollow.

All of those people gone by his hands and he’s free to live a life he’s not sure he’s really earned. They don’t tell you that you can help save the world and still have to wrestle your past demons.

“What do you want for dinner?” Steve asks, quietly.

Bucky swallows, that horrible, empty knot clenched in his chest, anxiety simmering somewhere near his stomach.

He can’t look up at his best friend now—not knowing what Steve has lost; not knowing what Bucky has been given.

“I’m not hungry,” he says.

He doesn’t look up at Steve.

Instead, he takes his sheet of paper and his guilt and shuts himself in his room.

*

What makes it difficult to live with Steve isn’t the century of unresolved issues or the past decade of half-truths and brief intermission as intergalactic space molecules; it’s the way Steve looks at him. Bucky is used to dodging AK-47 shots to the head and knives aimed for his ribs, but there hasn’t been a lifetime yet that he’s been able to avoid the intensity of Steve’s scrutiny. He feels it boring into the back of his neck, sometimes when Steve isn’t even in the room, and it feels like a layer of spikes under his skin, or an allergic reaction that leaves it impossible to breathe.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Bucky mutters once and Steve blinks at him slowly, as though it’s never occurred to him that this is what he’s been doing.

“How do you want me to look at you, Buck?” Steve asks, in response.

“I don’t,” Bucky answers then, which is the truth and also a lie; sometimes, an answer can be both things.

It’s difficult to explain to Steve that it’s been five years going on one hundred and the world has ended and Bucky has been pardoned and what he finds himself with isn’t a blank slate or a fresh start, but an endless stretch of time filled with ghosts he can no longer ignore.

Bucky wakes up most nights, sweating and twisted in his sheets, his voice hoarse from yelling. Steve never comes in, even when he’s suffering the worst of these terrors, but Bucky stares wildly up at the ceiling, after it’s passed, his heart battering somewhere near his throat, his pulse in his ears, and still he hears Steve breathing outside of his door, one hand on the doorknob.

Bucky doesn’t know how to handle Steve’s caution and he knows how to handle Steve’s devotion even less. It’s like he fell off a train eighty-something years ago, and Steve’s never stopped trying to catch him.

Bucky wants to tell him to stop, wants to press a metal hand to Steve’s chest and shove him away, push him until he stumbles backwards, trips on his feet and looks up to see what Bucky sees in the mirror every day—not the Bucky that Steve had lost, but one Steve had never known. What forgiveness has he earned? What worship?

He doesn’t want Steve’s caution or his devotion. He wants Steve to understand that Bucky had sunk seven bullets into his stomach and jumping into the Potomac and dragging his near-lifeless body onto a riverbank didn’t change the seven times he pulled the trigger.

He’s a monster, he thinks. He wants Steve to treat him as such.


The problem with living with Steve is that Steve is a big man and hard to miss. He’s a stubborn asshole too and even harder to avoid. He has that look in his eyes every time Bucky stops in the same room as him, as though he’s going to say something he won’t be able to take back.

That makes Bucky’s breath come up short. He presses a hand to his chest to catch the pain. He doesn’t stay in rooms with Steve for very long. He doesn’t wait to hear an offer he won’t be able to accept.


It’s all irrelevant, in the end. Steve catches up to him, because they live in the same apartment, and Bucky has been avoiding him for a month, and because there isn’t a place on Earth Bucky can run to that Steve won’t find him. Stubborn fucking bastard.

One day, Steve presses his palm to Bucky’s cheek and tilts his face up to look at him, his fingers so firmly gripping Bucky’s jaw that he can’t look away, much less escape.

“Buck,” Steve says in a voice so soft that it causes Bucky’s adrenaline to spike, a panic caught sharp and hot at the base of his spine.

Bucky’s like a startled animal, caught while trying to run.

He doesn’t know how to do this; he doesn’t know how to be this. Steve looks at him as though waiting for an answer they both know Bucky has been trying to avoid. Bucky won’t be cornered. He grasps Steve’s forearm and tries to evade that too-bright blue gaze, as clear and hungry and interminably soft as it is.

There’s a half-crumpled, taped-together piece of paper with a half-assed government pardon shoved into the back of a drawer in his room, a bed with sheets twisted and torn from night terrors, and a backpack he keeps filled with the bare essentials—three protein bars, two unopened bottles of water, a map printed in 2004, and a battered red journal with select clippings and one person’s photograph inside—in case he needs to run. These are the things that make up the whole of Bucky Barnes now, which is to say nothing of the ghosts or the gaps in his fucking memory, so when Steve looks at him with those bright blue eyes and that familiar pink mouth, turned slightly down at the corners, and blond hair Bucky aches to run his fingers through—well, Bucky has to grit his teeth and swallow what he wants to say.

The truth is that it doesn’t matter how much Steve loves him or how many lifetimes Bucky would follow him into war; Steve is not a person that Bucky has earned. There aren’t enough governmental pardons in the world that could make him worthy of a man like Steve Rogers.

So Steve brushes his knuckles against Bucky’s jaw, and against his lips, and against the ridge of his nose, and Bucky swallows what feels like a mouthful of glass shards and shakes his head.

It’s an offer he can’t take.

“No, Steve,” he says, quietly.

Steve stops, knuckles pressed to that space just under Bucky’s mouth. He looks—stricken. He looks quietly, universally, devastated.

He hasn’t said anything overtly and now he won’t. Because Steve has never denied Bucky his choice. And because Bucky’s choice is to be a coward.

Steve lets Bucky go, his fingers leaving indentations in Bucky’s skin.

Bucky breaks his own heart, then, in the hopes that one day he won’t have to feel it anymore.

*


art: Steve caressing Bucky's face and Bucky looking at him sadly; art by: nalonzooo

*

By Bucky’s count, there are no less than four hundred and seventy two potential Avengers available to take the stupid fucking world-ending stones back to the times they belong, but of the four hundred and seventy two potential Avengers available, only one is stupid enough to offer.

“Let me go with you,” Bucky says, shaking with a kind of cold fury that sinks under his skin and stays there.

This is time traveling and world-ending magical stones that fuck up universes and turn people into space dust. Steve isn’t a god or a titan. He’s a motherfucking, stupid as fuck human with some science juice that makes him strong and keeps him from freezing to death in the middle of the Atlantic fucking Ocean.

They weren’t meant for missions like this.

Steve, in his stupid white Avengers time suit, shakes his head.

“I need to do this for me,” he says, with a sad smile.

It feels like a blade slipped in between his ribs, the point of the dagger pricking his side and then being unceremoniously shoved in.

Bucky stares at his hands blankly, curling and uncurling his fingers, teeth grit tight to bite down on a despair he can only remember feeling once before—the night before he had left for war, three lifetimes ago.

“Don’t be stupid,” he tries again. It doesn’t have to mean this, he wants to say. Just because I’m a coward doesn’t mean I want to let you go.

Instead he says, “I’ll always have your six.”

Maybe he can’t say that anymore. Maybe that’s what you give up when you break your best friend’s heart.

“It’ll be okay, Buck,” the stupid fucker says in his stupid, kind, sad fucking voice. Steve looks worn thin, a battle-born son having fought one war too many. His voice is sad, but so are his eyes, and the slopes of his shoulders, and the slightly crooked bridge of his nose, which Bucky doesn’t remember, but knows was broken twice and never fully healed.

Steve has had to live five years in a world he thinks he failed to save and once he had saved it, he had ended up losing everything else in its place. Bucky’s not the only one who can’t sleep at night. He’s stood outside of Steve’s door too, his flesh hand on the doorknob, forehead pressed to the wood, listening as Steve tries and fails to catch the Widow in his nightmares.

“I promise,” Steve says, a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, another hand clasped around a vibranium-enforced briefcase, “it’ll all be okay.”

After everything they’ve both been through, Bucky doesn’t think either of them can promise that with any kind of certainty.

Steve must sense this, because he squeezes Bucky’s shoulder—as though a moment’s reassurance can fix everything that’s broken between them, a lifetime’s worth of Steve reaching for Bucky and Bucky slipping through his grasp.

Maybe a different lifetime. Maybe another Bucky.

“Let me go with you,” Bucky says quietly. He’s not begging, but he comes close, his voice low with a note bordering on desperation. “We can do this together. Steve. Come on.”

Steve leans forward and Bucky’s breath catches in his throat. He closes his eyes. Steve presses a kiss to the crown of his hair and pulls back.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he says. “You’ll see.”

Bucky watches helplessly as Steve takes his stupid fucking briefcase to the middle of the stupid fucking time machine that stupid fucking Lang is operating.

“He’ll be back,” Wilson says at his elbow.

Steve gives Lang and Wilson a smile. Bucky avoids his eyes, as angry as he is, but that doesn’t mean Steve doesn’t find him anyway.

Bucky looks up in time to see Steve give him a sad half-smile.

It’s too late for regrets and what ifs by the time Lang pulls the lever and the contraption shoves Steve back through time, alone.

I should have said yes, Bucky thinks wildly. I should have kissed him goodbye.

It’s too little, too late.


They wait five seconds, then ten seconds, and Bucky feels each of them, like knives buried in his lungs. He watches the spot where Steve had disappeared, stares at it until there’s a Steve-shaped hole he’s burned into the blank air.

“Barnes,” Wilson calls to him from the side and Bucky wheels around frantically, his heart beating rapidly, his acute sense of fuckery—or what his therapist would call an unhealthy scale of paranoia—blaring in his scrambled egg brain.

Bucky takes a step toward Wilson, toward a bench in between trees by the water.

For a moment, his heart skips, thinking—hoping—he sees a Steve-shaped person sitting there. He’s alive, he thinks, with immense relief. He’s back.

The stupid motherfucker came back after all.

But then he actually sees Wilson’s expression. Wilson’s looking back at him, his face stricken too.

Oh.

Bucky sucks in a breath.

There’s nothing there after all.


They wait, and they wait.

Scott shuts off the time machine.

*

Steve doesn’t come back.

* * *

[ guardians ship. 2023. ]

He’s seen eternity spread out before him, made a home among the stars, more times than he could possibly count in his very long life. It looks different to him now and he wonders, sometimes, if this is how his father had felt. He has two eyes, kind of, where Odin only had one, but sometimes he thinks he sees things only half as well anyway.

He’s spent more of his life in space recently than he has since he lost Asgard and he still hopes, sometimes, that he can find some solace in stardust, an answer to a question he can’t verbalize. The stars hadn’t answered him back then, while on board the Statesman, in between the destruction of Hela and the cataclysm of Thanos, and they don’t answer him now, on a different ship, after all else is said and destroyed.

He asks, in his own way, but space is relentless and the stars speak a language even he can’t understand.

He spends a lot of sleepless nights like this, trying to understand, and, ultimately, failing.

*

The Guardians are more subdued than they were before, but there’s still music coming from Quill’s earbuds and Groot is still playing the same video game he left with five years ago. Thor doesn’t mind sharing this space, but the closeness between them scrapes at a hollow place inside him. The Guardians are a family, but they are not his own.

“Uh, should you maybe take it a little easier?” the racoon asks, eyeing Thor. It’s surprisingly kind, if a little fed up.

Thor shrugs.

“No,” he says and finishes his bottle.

He drinks, because drinking is easier than remembering.

*

One day, in the middle of the stars, Nebula fixes her unnerving, mechanical gaze on him.

“That won’t help you, you know,” she says.

Thor likes her, in a strange way. She, too, is a creature set loose in a story not of her own choosing. Nebula never seems as lonely as Thor feels, but perhaps she simply holds it closer to her chest than he does. He’s never been very good at locking everything away.

“It helps,” Thor insists, his hand around the cold neck of a bottle of beer. It’s no Asgardian quality, but it will do for what he needs.

“You think I haven’t seen my father destroy lives before?” Nebula asks him. She leans against a table in the middle of the dining area, peeling an orange. “It helps only until the last drop. And then you’re back to thinking about all of the things he took from you.”

Thor frowns at that, the cheap beer sliding across his tongue.

“And what would you have me do instead?” he asks.

Nebula snorts and continues peeling the orange. She does it with precision and Thor is momentarily distracted, watching her bright blue fingers against orange.

She finishes and swipes the peels off the table, into the trash.

“Anything else, your highness,” she says in her dry, gravelly voice. “Literally, do anything else.”

Thor frowns and finishes half his bottle in a single gulp. He gets up to his feet and sways. It takes more than a bottle of cheap Midgardian beer to go to Thor’s head. But then, when he looks down at the table, he sees not one empty bottle, but half a dozen of them easy. He hopes they won’t run out of stock.

He doesn’t remember finishing the rest and his head swims anyway. He sweeps all of them into the garbage and sways all the way to his bed.

He collapses onto it, staring at the ship’s ceiling above him.

He’s tired and adrift in a way he never expected to be. Once, he was an arrogant, shining, crowned prince. Then, he was a king. Now, he is nothing.

He falls asleep and has nightmares he won’t be able to shake in the morning.

*

“Another bad night?” Rocket asks when Thor blearily pries his eyes open.

Thor wants to say they are all bad nights, sweet rabbit, but he can’t even manage that.

He drinks beer for breakfast and feels the quiet, careful air around him. The Guardians, usually so blunt and full of humor, fall quiet around him these days.

Nebula gives him a discerning look and a single, raised metal eyebrow.

Thor sighs as the ship comes to life around him.

He truly needs to get a life.

*

“What is home, to you?” Thor asks Nebula one day.

They are sitting across from each other at a table, playing some Midgardian game with their fingers and a metal triangle. The game seems to please her and make her sad simultaneously. Thor can only half read her expression on any given day anyway. Mostly, she looks as though she wants to murder everyone on the ship. It’s an expression he’s familiar with, so it’s soothing in its own way.

“Home,” Nebula says, her voice like scraping gravel.

“Yes,” Thor says. He puts his two fingers together as she instructed and she concentrates with the metal disc.

“I’ve never cared for the concept,” Nebula says.

Thor watches her ready her fingers with a frown.

“Never?” he asks.

“Home is where Thanos was,” Nebula says. “Home is where he would torture me when I displeased him.”

“That’s...awful,” Thor says, feeling horrified.

Nebula shrugs then lines up her fingers.

Thor watches in silence as she flicks it and the metal triangle goes flying through the air, across his fingers.

“I win,” she says suddenly, straightening. “I win!”

“Yes,” Thor nods. “Yes, you won.”

Nebula looks extremely pleased with herself. She retrieves the triangle.

“Again,” she instructs.

Sometimes, she reminds Thor of—he stops before completing the thought. He swallows as he takes the triangle and sets up the game again.

They go through another round and this time Thor wins.

“Oh,” Nebula says, but she doesn’t look displeased.


She and Thor split a drink after and look out at the stars.

“This is home for me,” Nebula says quietly, into the dark. “I like it here.”

Thor nods, taking a mouthful. He leans back on his elbows.

“I like it here too,” Thor says. “But it’s not my place.”

“Why not?” Nebula demands.

Thor thinks about that. Eventually, with a mouth full of marbles, he verbalizes it.

“There’s something missing,” he says.

That makes Nebula laugh, for some reason. She shoves Thor’s shoulder.

“Then go find it,” she says, as though it’s as simple as that.

*

Maybe it is, Thor thinks.

Maybe what he’s looking for is out there; not in here.

*

“Where are you going?” Rocket asks.

The Guardians watch Thor as he tries to fit himself into the extra pod.

“To find something that is missing,” Thor says, a smile on his face.

“Well,” Rocket says and scratches his head. “What’s missing?”

“I do not know,” Thor says cheerfully. “But I hope to find it.”

“I am Groot,” the tree says, watching Thor.

“Yes,” Thor agrees. “You are.”

He says goodbye to his companions and launches the pod into deep space.

* * *

[ earth. 2024. ]

It’s shitty enough to realize that your best fucking friend in the entire fucking world chose to disappear into the deep recesses of the past without a fucking goodbye, just a cryptic it’ll all be okay, Buck, like that means anything at fucking all, but torture takes on a new meaning when you’re the only one left in the apartment that the two of you had shared, if briefly.

It’s not the empty bedroom or the way that his footsteps seem to echo in a space too large for him. It’s not even buying groceries for one when he’s used to two supersoldier appetites. In the end, it’s being mailed a letter for lease renewal and realizing that his name had been on the papers the entire time.

Dear Mr. Buchanan,

As your one year lease expires on the 30th of April, 2024, I have enclosed a contract for lease renewal, with the notice that rent will be increasing $200 to accommodate for rise in property taxes. Your rent has been paid in the full through—

Bucky shuffles past the letter to the papers underneath, containing a copy of the lease from the previous year and a clean lease for renewal.

Rental Lease Agreement

This lease (hereinafter referred to as The Lease) is made on this 1st day of May, 2023 (hereinafter referred to as The Effective Date) by and between Steven Grant Rogers, James Buchanan Barnes, and—

He stares at the names, nearly uncomprehendingly, that familiar name staring up at him, a name he’s seen so many times over the past year it’s become nearly foreign to him, like staring at the same word for so long that it loses all meaning. (Where is Captain America? in The New York Times and Captain America Stays in the Past by fucking Fox fucking News and Steve Rogers, 1918-2023 in the Washington Post, and Steve Rogers: Missing in BuzzFeed mysteries) The names are in a handwriting crystallized in the folds of his one hundred year old amnesiatic brain, Steve’s name written first and Bucky’s name second, their names written together, on this binding document, when Bucky had never known and never been told and the full lease had been paid through the end of the fucking year.

It’s the knowledge that Steve had wanted him to stay, that he had planned for a long-term something with the two of them and left anyway, left him stuck in this miserable time with half-memories and a life that follows in the shadows of Captain fucking America, as though he had chosen that for himself. If he had known he was going to be unceremoniously abandoned by his best fucking friend, he would have taken up something less torturous than agreeing to become the world’s least favorite add-on Avenger, but he had said yes in some misguided attempt to honor Steve—or at least impress him—and now he’s stuck shooting fucking sentient lizards in between their fucking eyes and trying to stop Wilson from getting himself killed instead of building lawn chairs or baking 14 layer cakes or whatever else a formerly brainwashed ex-assassing is suited for in retirement.

Bucky could technically leave their home at any time, as untied and unencumbered as he is, but he stays, because this was the last place he saw Steve and on nights when his terrors light a fire up and down his spine, he still thinks he can hear Steve breathing outside of his door.

It’s stupid sentiment that binds him in place, a sense of deep, unshakeable loyalty that keeps him from moving on, when Steve had looked him in the eyes, lied, and left anyway.

Bucky stares at the lease and at the lease renewal and he’s halfway to setting it on fire in his kitchen sink when he stops and looks again.

Dear Mr. Buchanan, the lease renewal letter says, although the old lease has both of their names on it.

Dear Mr. Buchanan, only, as though the landlord knows the truth of it all—about the empty room in Bucky’s apartment, and the extra bowl in the kitchen cabinet, and the missing pair of shoes by the door.

It’s probably an oversight, Bucky thinks, even though he’s never met the man or spoken to a single member of the condominium board.

Bucky holds the paper and stares at his name—solitary, alone, a sentence started and a sentence ended, which is how he came into this century and will, ultimately, leave it.

He shakes his head bitterly and swallows.

He crumples the documents and throws them into the trash can.

*

Things only get stranger from there.

The first time someone calls him Captain America, he thinks it’s some kind of stupid prank. He rolls his eyes at the kid, gives him a shit-eating grin, and finishes buying his three bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, gallon of milk, and discount pack of passion fruit-flavored LaCroix from the bodega down the street.


The second time someone calls him Captain America, he figures people are really being stupid, racist pieces of shit. This time he’s less nice about it, glaring at the Brooklyn millennial drinking iced coffee out of a mason jar and her very white boyfriend with the flowers braided into his stupid, ginger beard.

“Hey, shithead,” he says to the guy. “There’s one Captain America and it sure ain’t the white guy with the metal arm and the history of political assassinations.”

He slings an arm around Sam’s shoulder to emphasize his point, his glare intensifying, and the couple look both confused and horrified to be called out on their racism. The year is 20-fucking-24, where it’s worse to be called a racist than it is to actually be a racist piece of shit.

They leave without saying another word and Bucky and Sam continue their brunch date. Bucky sticks an entire poached egg in his mouth and this time, Sam gives him a weird look.

“What?” Bucky says, chewing barely, and swallowing.

“That was a little harsh,” Sam says, raising an eyebrow. He picks up his iced coffee, incidentally also served in a mason jar.

“Pieces of shit,” Bucky growls. “They don’t like a Black Captain America, so they’re just going to make the first white guy they see their hero instead? Hard fucking pass.”

Sam’s confused expression deepens.

“You’re not...black, Barnes,” he says.

Now it’s Bucky’s turn to stare at Sam as though he’s grown a second head.

“Yeah, no shit,” he says. “You are.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Sam replies. However, he says it uncertainly, as though he doesn’t know why he’s saying it at all.

Bucky shrugs and skewers a piece of lox and sticks it in his mouth.

“So why’d you yell at them?” Sam asks, eyebrows knit together.

Bucky finishes his lox and washes it down by straight up draining his mimosa.

“Because they deserved it,” he says and gets up to use the bathroom.


The third time someone calls him Captain America, it’s, well, Sam.

“Cap!” Sam screams, in the middle of shooting the underbelly of a toxic fucking alien motherfucking flying slug.

Bucky doesn’t have time to be weirded out while he’s trying not to get doused in radioactive sludge, but he does roll out from behind a tree and shoot the motherfucker straight between the eyes with some enhanced gun that Hill had given him during their last check-in.

It’s after the fucker is dead and the team is catching their breaths, guzzling entire bottles of Gatorade, that Bucky turns to him.

“Wilson,” he says. “What gives?”

Sam, who’s nursing a burn on his forearm, gives him a questioning look.

“Say what?”

“Cap,” Bucky says. “Are you having an identity crisis?”

“Are you?” Sam asks.

Bucky has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. He crumples his empty plastic bottle and throws it in the trash. Then he says to Sam, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“You take a knock to your head?” Sam says and he sounds genuinely concerned.

“Did you?” Bucky asks. He runs a hand through his sweat-matted, grimy hair. “We had a whole fucking conversation about this, Wilson. I don’t want the shield. It’s yours.”

“What?”

Now Bucky’s starting to get concerned.

“We talked about this,” he says again, staring at Sam. “Steve would have wanted you to have it. Just because he fucked off to who-the-hell-knows-when doesn’t change that.”

Sam looks at Bucky uncomprehendingly.

“Steve...Rogers?” Sam asks.

Now it’s Bucky’s turn to look uncomprehending.

“Why are you saying his name like you’ve never met him?” he asks.

Sam considers Bucky for a moment, like he’s studying him to make sure all of his marbles are still there. That’s fair enough, Bucky supposes, but not when he’s the one making sense and Sam’s the one trying to give him a fucking heart attack.

Sam shakes his head.

“Because...I haven’t,” he says, slowly. He tilts his head and Bucky’s eyes bug out. “Steve Rogers disappeared in 2012, Barnes. Long before I came on board.”

Bucky’s thoughts scramble inside his brain, one colliding into another, a racket so loud and a confusion so deep that it nearly disorients him.

“What?” he says.

“Steve Rogers,” Sam says, shaking his head again. “I never met the guy.”

*

Sam isn’t the only one who claims that Steve never made it past 2012. He asks Barton and Maximoff and Hill and Fury and they all say the same thing: “Barnes, did you get zapped in the face by an alien or magic-wielding sorcerer recently?” followed by “Steve Rogers disappeared in 2012, you’ve been Captain America ever since.”

Nevermind that the timeline of events makes no fucking sense, since in 2012, Bucky still had his brain radio-fried by HYDRA and was killing political targets for a good time, but the most fucked up thing about whatever grand, cosmic joke he’s currently in the middle of is that these people keep looking at him—looking Bucky Barnes straight in the center of his dead, blue-grey eyes—and indicating that someone, at some point, had decided he was capable of—to say nothing of being worthy of—being a golden American hero and icon.

It’s not a particularly funny joke, as far as grand, cosmic jokes go. Bucky has no fucking desire to pick up the mantle of Captain America for a multitude of reasons that not even his SHIELD-assigned therapist will ever come close to hearing, but chief among them is that every time he so much as looks at the shield, he’s reminded of blond hair and blue eyes and a now-forgotten promise that everything would be okay.

It sucks.

Bucky’s heartbroken and lonely and he misses his best friend in the entire fucking world and now he can’t even get drunk on 190 proof whiskey and complain to Wilson about how he misses his best friend in the entire fucking world, because no one can remember him.

It’s as though Steve had gone into the ice, reappeared for a year, and then disappeared from the collective memory. Everyone remembers him as he was in their history textbooks, or in the SHIELD files that Romanoff dumped onto the Internet, or, briefly, for the one year he had been woken from the middle of a fucking iceberg, given an apartment and a suit, and just told to become a superhero, nevermind that he had seventy fucking years of the world to catch up on and no one to do it with.

The more Bucky asks, the less the people around him remember.

First, Steve’s a close memory, then he’s a distant one, and then he grows further still, until Steve Rogers is just stats on the back of a superhero baseball card and when Bucky searches on Wikipedia for Captain America, what he gets is a long entry on how he, Bucky Barnes, Captain America, along with Iron Man and Thor, had helped kill Thanos, and saved the world.

Talk about fucked up.

*

It pisses him off, is the thing.

Steve Rogers didn’t fucking shove himself into a radioactive microwave, throw himself into a world fucking war, crash a plane full of nuclear bombs into the middle of the fucking Atlantic fucking Ocean, wake up in the 21st Century, don a superhero suit, fight with a group of reckless, borderline suicidal superheros, save the world from aliens, Tony Stark’s microwave oven alter ego, more aliens, and an ugly, genocidal purple motherfucker—all while suffering from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder from, you know, missing seventy fucking years of the world—to be erased from the public memory.

It’s not right and, furthermore, it’s stupid that Bucky is the only one who has to remember these things. It’s not enough that he has to live with the ghost of Steve in their two bedroom apartment, or the memories of the two of them—growing up, before the war, during the war, after the fucking war, something something a highway knife fight and seven bullets to Steve’s stomach and falling from the sky and into the Potomac and dragging a near lifeless body onto the bank of a river and disappearing for three years, only to be found in a small apartment in Bucharest, his brain a confused, recovering haze and Steve with his suit on, staring at Bucky and begging him to say that he had nothing to do with a terrorist attack on the United fucking Nations—with no one to corroborate them or even share them with. Now he has to carry the other memories too, and adopt a legacy that he never fucking asked for.

This is why Bucky drinks.

“There has to be a better way to deal with this,” Carol Danvers tells him, the next time she’s on the planet.

It’s the middle of June and Bucky is in a tank top with arms that are cut so low that anyone sparing him half a glance can see the scars raised on his sides. Once, he had been shy about this—about his metal arm, about his scars, about his toughened, battered, battle-worn body—but now he’s so tired about everything else that he doesn’t have the energy to also care about how scary he must look.

A very long time ago, this would have horrified him, but that was three Buckys and four lifetimes ago; now it just plays into his advantage. People see how grizzled and hardened he is and look away.

Or, well, they did before everyone started misremembering him as America’s favorite star spangled superhero.

“There isn’t,” Bucky grunts at her.

He has few friends in the post-Thanos world, but he likes Captain Marvel because she’s quiet when he needs her to be and she’s kind of a mouthy little shit and also, she’s almost an alien. Bucky enjoys all of these things about her—especially the alien bit—so when she’s on planet and she rings him up, he doesn’t send her straight to voicemail.

“What is it with superhuman men and drinking away their feelings?” Carol mutters. She, for her part, is wearing a t-shirt and jeans, a brown leather jacket tied about her waist, as though it isn’t 95 fucking degrees outside, with a humidity index of 83%.

“We have feelings,” Bucky says. “So we drink. Do you want something?”

“Just a beer,” Carol replies and Bucky flags down the bartender to refill his own glass and bring Carol whatever’s on tap. “So...how are you?”

“Don’t do that,” Bucky says.

Carol raises an eyebrow, drumming her fingers on the wooden counter.

“Do what?”

“Ask me that question,” Bucky says. “While looking at me like that.”

“Like what?” Carol asks, too innocently, and Bucky glares at her.

“Like that,” he growls. “Who did you talk to?”

Carol makes a noncommittal sound and Bucky drains half of his beer.

“That’s not safe,” Carol says.

“I’m a knock off supersoldier,” Bucky says. “I’ll live. Who did you talk to?”

Carol sighs. She picks a peanut from the bowl of nuts that Bucky ordered and chews on it thoughtfully.

“Sam,” she says.

“Wilson,” Bucky glowers.

“He’s worried about you,” Carol says.

“He doesn’t believe me,” Bucky says. “He thinks I’m losing my mind. What’s left of my mind.”

“Are you?” Carol asks.

Bucky’s interrupted from answering by the bartender, who nods at Carol and slides over her glass of beer.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Maybe,” Bucky says, with a shrug. Then, with an actual frown, “Actually, no.”

Carol hums and takes a mouthful of beer.

“I’m not crazy, Danvers,” he says. “I know...what I know. I remember what I remember.”

“You were brainwashed, weren’t you?” Carol asks. “HYDRA and all.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, his eyebrows knitting together.

“Could it be something from there?” she asks. “Something they put in, extra. Maybe it got triggered by one of the aliens you guys are always fighting. Or PTSD. Have you tried hypnosis?”

“I’m not going to hypnotize myself into forgetting my best friend,” Bucky mutters. He takes a mouthful of his drink too. “Nothing makes sense. The things...everyone remembers. This timeline. I was the Winter fucking Soldier. There was that whole airport fight with the Avengers and Siberia…Zemo, does no one remember that asshole?”

“All of those things happened,” Carol agrees.

“How could I have been Captain America and had that fight in the parking lot. And then the whole—Wakanda thing. Shuri and deprogramming me. How could I have been Captain America and the Winter Soldier and done all of those things?” he demands.

Carol puts her glass down and turns on her stool. Bucky doesn’t like that.

When she looks at him, her expression is partially thoughtful and partially careful, the way people are when they think they’re dealing with a crazy person. People are well-meaning assholes and Bucky’s haunches are already raised.

“You were the Winter Soldier,” Carol says. “From what I understand, you were turned from HYDRA during that whole incident with Romanoff and the files and the Triskellion. You became Captain America, but you still had those trigger words. So you handed yourself over to Wakanda after the incident in Siberia and King T’Challa’s sister did science on you. Now you’re here, Captain America, good as new. Except everything you’ve told me over the last fifteen minutes. That’s concerning.”

Bucky glares at his glass and rubs his palm against his forehead.

“It’s not true,” he says. “The things you said—your version of events. It’s wrong, Danvers. I don’t know why it’s wrong or how it got so wrong, but it’s fucking wrong.”

Carol says nothing to that, so Bucky drains the rest of his beer and slams the glass down on the counter.

She sighs.

“Okay,” she says.

That makes Bucky pause.

“Okay, what?”

“Okay,” she repeats herself, nodding. “I believe you.”

Bucky frowns, feeling unsteady, because it couldn’t possibly be this easy—not after how weird everything’s gotten.

“You do?”

“I believe that you think something’s wrong,” she says.

Bucky scowls at that. He’s about to snap back at her, when she raises both of her hands.

“But, you’re not the only one.”

He doesn’t know what to make of that.

“What?” he says. “Who else?”

Carol shakes her head and then—although she had just scolded Bucky about this—she drains her entire glass of beer too.

“I know someone else who’s remembering things no one else is,” she says. “He’s taking this about as well as you are.

“Who, Danvers?” Bucky asks. He curls his metal fingers into the edge of the bar and accidentally crushes it into wooden splinters. “Where?”

Carol gives Bucky a wry, half-smile and stands.

“How do you feel about going to space?” she asks.

*



art:
Carol Danvers and Bucky Barnes, at a bar, talking; art by: cyclamental


* * *