Run (A Bucky Barnes Recovery Story)

87 Walk

He told himself that he was okay as he wandered DC, following the way the rising sun was hot on his back despite the cold and the way the receding dark was interesting to him. He paid a street vendor for some bread pastry he didn’t know the name of, but found he had no appetite to eat it and handed it to the next homeless man he saw around the corner. He didn’t really know where he was going or what he was doing. All he knew was that he couldn’t stay there.

He knew Steve and Natalia would find him gone and would panic. They would look for him, they would recruit others, but Bucky didn’t want to be found quite yet. He wanted to be alone because he had his own search to pursue. He had to find out where to begin, or else simply how to carry on. He needed to see that starting point because where he was now, he just didn’t know where to go.

Bucky avoided places he knew Natalia and Steve would look. He looked at things in shop windows and crossed streets he didn’t know the names of and tried not to think about the bad memories. And mostly, people left him alone, excluding the uncomfortable stares that he was bound to receive, until he sat down at a table outside a restaurant sometime in the afternoon, when the day was becoming just a little warmer, and was approached by a little boy.

“Where’s your arm?” The kid asked and Bucky looked at him and wasn’t quite positive how to respond. He wasn’t used to talking to strangers.

“It, uh, it got stolen,” he admitted and the kid nodded thoughtfully until an embarrassed parent showed up, a mother holding an infant and trying to pull her five year old away.

“I’m so sorry, sir,” she was saying. He shrugged.

“It’s fine,” he replied, because it was. And then, the kid continued and said, “Are you Bucky Barnes?” Bucky stared at him, stunned, unsure if he’d really heard what he thought he’d heard. And he supposed that he knew there were museum exhibits about him and that he’d been in the newspapers and that since Captain America and the Howling Commandos were household names, he should be recognized every now and again, but he remained shocked.

The embarrassed mother scolded her son and then turned to Bucky and tried again to apologize.

“He really loves Captain America,” she said. “He asks anyone he thinks might look like him.”

“If you wait around long enough, I’m sure he’ll show up,” Bucky told the kid, because it was true. “He and the Black Widow have been on my tail all day.” The look on the little boy’s face made Bucky smile a little.

“You are Bucky?” The boy asked and although Bucky’s first impulse was to say something like, ‘unfortunately’ or ‘I’m still not entirely sure’, he couldn’t disappoint this poor kid, so he finally just smiled weakly and nodded.

And besides, he remembered what Steve had said about identity and how he would always be Bucky. And he remembered other things now, too. Melting snow cones at the Rogers’ home. Christmases gone hilariously awry. And whether or not he was entirely convinced that he would ever be okay again or redeemed again, he at least knew he could make some kid on the street happy and that Steve Rogers believed that he had good enough in him to be Bucky Barnes.

“Yeah, I’m Bucky,” he admitted and the boy couldn’t seem to contain his excitement. He watched him scramble for a paper and a pen and Bucky felt a little flattered and happily signed the napkin the boy found, even though he needed help holding it down because he didn’t have a second hand to do it himself. And that encounter had delighted Bucky so much that he wasn’t even overly upset when he noticed the kid’s mother’s face go white when she realized that her son was getting a napkin signed by the Winter Soldier and hastily hauled him away. He waved to the little boy as his mother hurried him along and the boy waved cheerfully back.

He decided then to stay at the restaurant and wait for Steve and Natalia to catch up to him, so he ordered himself a bowl of spaghetti and sat, waiting. It had been a long day and he hadn’t realized how hungry he’d become and that he couldn’t remember the last meal he’d eaten.

Natasha found him first, as he had suspected she might. He could see tension slip off her shoulders and face when she spotted him and she ran to him, taking out her cell phone.

“He’s here, he’s on the corner of Monroe and Davis,” she was saying. She sounded so relieved and she collapsed into the chair across from him as he wound more pasta around his fork slowly.

“Took you long enough,” Bucky teased quietly as he pushed his spaghetti around his plate. Natasha glared at him, her arms crossed.

“You think this is a game, Barnes?” She retorted. He only raised his eyebrows and stared into his food. “You went AWOL, you just… Disappeared! Do you have any idea how scary that was for us?” Bucky took another bite silently. “We had no idea what had happened to you, what if it was Hydra, what if you were hurt, what if you out there, confused?!” Bucky was silent. It hurt him a little to think that she’d believe it plausible that he would simply leave because he was confused or that he could be so disoriented to think he was in some war again, but it hurt more to force himself to accept that it wasn’t so outrageous an idea. He wouldn’t put it past himself sometimes on a Bad Day. “James?” She cried. “Are you listening to me?”

“I met a fan today,” Bucky told her, mostly because he was still in shock about it and because he didn’t want to have an argument right now, didn’t want to take a scolding. “Would you believe that? A fan. Of me. He recognized me, wanted an autograph.” Bucky stirred his pasta. “I thought all that stuff was just for Steve, you know?” Natalia didn’t say anything. She leaned across the table and looked at him until his eyes shifted back up to focus on her face for the first time since she sat down. “Spaghetti?” Bucky asked, offering her his fork.

“No,” Natalia muttered, sitting back. “Eat. Heaven knows you didn’t at all yesterday.”

When Steve arrived, he pulled up another chair across from Bucky, both of them sitting directly across from him like disappointed parents.

“I thought you weren’t going to leave,” Steve said. Bucky shrugged.

“Just took a walk,” he replied.

“A thirteen hour walk?” Steve said and Bucky didn’t respond.

“I was going to come back,” he said finally.

“How do I know?” Steve asked.

“Maybe it’s none of your business,” Bucky said back a little too hastily, a little too angrily, his eyes flicking up to glare at Steve. Steve’s face hardened and he sat back. And, whoosh, there it was, that fire anger, the one meant for himself, meant to burn him, but instead lashed out and struck people who were getting close only to try and help. But Bucky didn’t know how to apologize, so he just set his fork down and leaned back as well, looking away into the street where cars roared by loudly.

“Finish that,” Natalia instructed him and on impulse, Bucky replied with, “Not hungry.”

“I didn’t ask if you were hungry,” she shot back. “You’re going to hurt yourself, just eat a solid meal, please?” And only because she said please did Bucky lean back into his bowl, frowning, and picked up his fork again.

When he finished and paid the bill, Steve hailed a cab and had them all driven back to the apartments, complaining about the cold that Bucky had seemingly forgotten to notice.