Eyes of Fire | Bucky Barnes

54

The house was smaller now.

It was the strangest thing. Bucky couldn't get to the tea kettle in the morning without squeezing past Uxolo with his hand pressed to the small of her back. The kitchen was so tiny now that when she cooked, he had to stand behind her, his arms around her waist and his chin on her shoulder. The couch had shrunk, too; they couldn't watch TV together without being pressed up close, and he couldn't drift off to sleep without her hands in his hair and his lips on her forehead.

He didn't mind, of course. The closer she was, the more she kissed him, and holy hell, she was relentless. Bucky was getting a little better about it; the kisses didn't shock him anymore, didn't surprise him, but they sure as hell sent him into overdrive each and every time. Quick pecks and languid, lazy makeouts alike left him with a racing heart, struggling to catch his breath, yearning for more.

He'd started doing this thing, now that such a vital part of his identity was with her at all times, where he'd give a gentle tug on the chain holding his dog tags, pulling her in to him. Sometimes it was for a kiss, sometimes it was just to get her undivided attention, but either way he'd grown insatiable at the sight.

He hadn't told Shuri, or anyone who truly knew him, about the change in their relationship.  He didn't want anyone else's opinion, didn't want to be talked out of it, didn't want anyone telling him it was a bad idea. Maybe they'd tell him that everything he was afraid of was valid— that it was dangerous, reckless for him to be with someone who had been hired to... help him (ignorant of the fact that Uxolo had stopped accepting pay for her work with him not even a month into their adventures together). That it might not be real, might not be true, might be a trick.

But Bucky didn't care. He had her by his side, and that was all that mattered.

And as much as he would've liked that to mean that he was miraculously better —able to survive without the extreme panic, never ending nightmares, and loneliness that came with being... him — Uxolo constantly reminded him that it was not the case. She was happy to help in that way as much as she could, in any way she could, but they both knew that wouldn't be enough.

"I don't remember much," He said as he fiddled with the straw to his drink. He tried to avoid her eyes, instead exploring their surroundings with his nightmarish hyper awareness. "It was, uh... a long time ago."

Uxolo just smiled and gave a slight nod. Encouraging him. Reassuring him. "Just tell me what you can," she said.

Bucky gulped; he didn't want to think about it, let alone talk about it. But her fingers traveled to the back of his hand, tracing along the seams firmly enough to ground him, and he sucked in a shallow breath.

A sickly feeling grew in his gut while he worked through the basics. After the fall, he'd been captured again, he told her. His left arm mostly gone, probably caught on the rocky cliffs he tumbled down, and he'd expected to bleed out there in the snow. He had welcomed it. But he'd been found and brought to another bunker, this time in Siberia. He couldn't tell her how long he'd been kept there, because he didn't know himself.

Bucky didn't speak any Russian at the time, but, unfortunately, he was a fast learner. The names of their tools came first; he quickly learned what they called the scalpel and bone saw and soldering iron, though he wished he hadn't. It was better, easier for him when he didn't know what they were going to do to him, when he didn't understand their plans days in advance. When he still thought they might help him, might fix what was left of his arm and then let him heal. When he didn't hear them muttering about bolts and drills, discussing experimental techniques and the odds of the prosthetic limb taking. He wished he was ignorant, so he would only have to suffer through the pain once, in real-time, instead of over and over in his head between each procedure.

That time in his life was fuzzy enough— Hydra offered no sedation, no painkillers, and when he wasn't being actively operated on, the deep-set agony in his chest and arm was bad enough to make him wish that he was. At least when the pain was that fresh and sharp, he was sometimes lucky enough to fall unconscious. The delirium that set in during that period was a refuge, but it made it impossible for him to track the hours and days he lost strapped down on the operating table.

When his new arm was firmly attached, rooted deeply under his skin and bolted into his bones, haphazardly wired straight to his brain, his indoctrination began.

"That's kind of where I... lose it." Bucky glanced down at the table; his plate of pastries sat full, and untouched in front of him. "The memories."

He had spent years trying to dig through his convoluted consciousness— especially after DC, when he found his way to Bucharest without knowing who he was— but all he could recall were the vaguest fragments of sensations. The smell of blood and gunpowder, the texture of crunching sinew and cartilage. None of it made sense. None of it connected.

But all of that wasn't important; how he got there didn't matter.

"I only know what I did after that because I read about it," he continued. He couldn't trust his own mind, but he could trust history, trust the records and files. The reports didn't mention him by name, of course; the Winter Soldier was a ghost story. But there were characteristics he could look for: missing persons with ties to political figures who disappeared without a trace, assassinations made to look like accidents.

Explaining it to her, he tried to keep it linear. Tried to make as much sense of it as he could.

Uxolo looked pained to hear the words come from him, to watch the memories flicker through his eyes, but she let Bucky speak, and finally, when he was done, she took a deep breath.

"Bucky," she said carefully. "You got all of that information from news reports and the trial, right?"

He nodded, and she gave him an apologetic smile. "That's all public information."

He didn't understand.

"I want you to tell me something they don't know, no one knows, but you."