The Captain's Husband

2. Worth It

     "He seems to be sleeping well," Natasha murmurs as she joins me in the little bedroom I'm in.

     Bucky is curled up in my arms with his head on my chest and a blanket tucked in around him. We're just an hour from landing at the new Avengers tower in Washington D.C., and I've been wide awake since we got on the plane to come home.

I'm unbelievably excited.

He's in my arms.

He's safe.

     "He hasn't moved a muscle since he laid down," I tell her as she sits down beside me and rests her head on my shoulder.

     "I've never seen him so relaxed," she tells me.

It's been years since I have.

     Tony appears in the doorway, asking, "How is he?"

Fantastic.

     I smile and tuck Bucky's hair behind his ear as I say, "He's home." I look up at Tony. "Thank you."

     He smiles softly and nods, "It's the least I could do, Steve."

The procedure worked.

It's all I could ask Tony for right now.

     Tony leaves as Nat sighs and says, "Do you think he'll be ready for the United Nations' summit at the end of the month?"

      I nod and say, "I think he'll be relieved to finally address the hell he's gone through."

     "Are you worried that he's not going to be able to do it?" She asks.

     "Bucky will always have those memories of what he did while he was working for Hydra, but they can't touch him anymore," I tell her.

To test it, we had been consistently attempting to trigger him using that red book whenever he was conscious, but those words, they couldn't touch him. He actually understood that those words held him down and controlled him, and he broke through them, he didn't respond in Russian, or with "ready to comply," and he didn't respond like a machine when we addressed him as "the asset" or "soldier." He was just Bucky. My Bucky.

And Tony, God bless him, he saw all of Bucky's memories playing out before him while he was running the software through his head.

He spent a few months going through every single thing that the Winter Soldier had done, and when Tony saw the other soldiers and the Red Room, and how Bucky fought against it all, he told me that he realized just how wrong he was.

Tony then said that it took Hydra twenty years to break Bucky down, that he fought them with as much as he could whenever he started resurfacing, and that he went through so much torture it should have killed him time and time again.

He also told me that I was a key part of Bucky's recovery, that putting together the broken pieces of his memory was only possible because of my presence in them. I took his remark as a compliment.

    "What does that mean?" She asks me.

Bucky never gave up on me.

That's what it means.

My heart flutters in my chest, but my stomach rolls.

I shouldn't smack her with my emotions.

She already thinks I'm a total twink, and she still stood by my side — even when I cried like a baby at Bucky's cryo chamber for weeks on end. It was pathetic. I don't know how I made it, or how she's not holding it over my head.