thearena | When they write the story of our lives [closed]

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When they write the story of our lives [closed]

Who| 616!Bucky Barnes and MCU!Bucky Barnes
What| These biographies ain't worth two Bucks, they gotta go.
Where| The bookstore
When| Towards the end of the opening week
Warnings/Notes| /points at Bucky's

He's irresistibly drawn back to the bookstore despite the fact that he should know better. It can't be said that this Bucky Barnes is a man who always makes wise decisions -- but at least he mostly makes them himself now.

The book he knows is meant for him (the other one with the name Bucky Barnes on the cover is not, he saw that quickly enough) is as full of lies as Skye's was and also, more frustratingly than the outright falsehoods, small truths. Truth hidden under lies, things that make his head spin with their implications, things that make him angry and sick at the same time. There are names and locations and dates, accusations and unbelievably the idea that Hydra was nice, that they saved him. If he could laugh he would and it wouldn't be the type of laughter anyone would want to hear.

Your work has been a gift to mankind. it says and the worse that came after jump into his mind, You shaped the century. Pierce's voice, Pierce's tones as he talked to him like an unruly child. He reminds himself that Pierce is dead when he rips that page to shreds.

The photographs are worse and he finds it hard to look away from them as he crouches in a defensible corner of the bookstore. Everything from aching loss and sadness to pure loathing and revulsion rises inside his chest, the feelings dizzying in their intensity.

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But eventually, footsteps sound behind him.

They don't need to sound, to be fair. The other Bucky Barnes could be completely quiet if he wanted, especially now that he's gotten some decent damn shoes instead of those ice skates. But he figures that, either way, the other man is going to sense his presence. They share a certain amount of training, after all--among other things.

So he announces it. "Hey, kid." His voice is casual, like he knows his other self needs some grounding. Maybe he does. "You up for a bonfire?"

At the sound of the voice Bucky let's the knife he slipped into his hand from his sleeve disappear again, slowly turning his head and looking back over his shoulder at his counterpart. His expression is not as well schooled as he would like to think it was.

Haunted is probably the word for the way he looks right now.

Another piece of paper writ with lies rips and is crushed small in a metal hand as he considers the invitation. A decision is quickly reached, he wants them gone, the sooner the better. There's no answers here, only vulnerabilities. "Yes."

He closes the copy he's currently holding and stands up.

There's a stack of cheap paperbacks under Bucky's left arm. All of them have the same flashy pulp cover with his face on it. He doesn't say a word about them. He just nods to the other man and turns to head for an open space between several shelves, where several sofas and chairs are scattered for comfortable reading. "Help me move these things so we have some clear space."

He kneels down in the center of the area first and arranges the stack of books in a neat pile like wood in a campfire. Then he stands back up and starts shoving one comfy leather sofa away, speaking conversationally as he does so. "Too bad I haven't found any marshmallows to toast. It could be fun."

Not that he really expects to get away with setting the bookstore on fire. If he thought he could do that unchecked, he'd probably just burn the whole mall down.

Swiftly he gathers up all that he's found of the ones about himself (and the one of the other man) in his hands and follows at the other Bucky's heels, copying him when he places the books down and glancing around before pushing another of the sofa's away.

His mind is still buzzing as he works, "Marshmallows..." Bucky repeated, brow creasing and seizing on the subject. A taste, sweet and soft, eaten from paper bags drifts up to him from underneath the haze. "They're good like that?"

His left hand seizes a chair next, easily lifting it away from the pile.

With the chairs and sofas pushed away, Bucky settles down again next to the books. He reaches down and rips out a few pages, which he crumples up and sets around the pile as kindling. He works with practiced skill--wilderness survival is one thing he had to learn in training all those years ago, even if he never expected to be using those lessons like this.

He looks up at the question. "You don't even remember something that simple?" A beat. "What the hell kind of assassin did they make of you?" His words start off casual, but there's something a little forced in them as he goes on. "Did they airlift you directly on top of your targets or something? 'Cause if you tried to make it through an airport on your own you'd wind up killing someone with the contents of a jewelry kiosk."

Somewhere in that speech, he takes out a heavy-duty lighter that he grabbed from the sporting goods store. But he's clutching it a little too tightly in his right fist and not actually flicking it on yet.

"I remember... I had them before. They were..." Bucky's focusing, digging in his own head as he approaches him, kneeling down and staring at the books. "They were someone's favourite."

He almost has it, somewhere in there.

When the second part is said he looks briefly surprised, before his voice turns completely flat as he seems to recite, "The Asset is delivered to the proximate target location; proceed to eliminate target within mission parameters, return for extraction." and immediately afterwards he shakes his head, lip curled in displeasure at his own reaction. "... you, you operated differently?"

"Huh." A useless syllable. Bucky's almost annoyed with himself for vocalizing it, but he keeps that feeling to himself. He does his best to keep a lot to himself around this other version of him--but it's not always the same things he keeps to himself around others. Really, it gets confusing.

He lowers the lighter for a moment and picks up one of the books in front of him--the other man's biography--in order to thumb through it for a few seconds. Then he puts it back down. He looked at it briefly before, of course. HYDRA, and not Department X: that explains a lot, or feels like it should.

"I operated differently," he confirms. "The whole point was to have an agent who looked, talked, thought like an American, but was totally loyal to Department X and the KGB. I guess HYDRA wasn't as into the 'thinking' part of the deal."

Bucky flicks the lighter on and sets it to some of the paper kindling. He watches as it starts to catch.

Bucky watches him pick it up, watches him thumb through the pages and then set it back down but says nothing about the action, just looks with intense blue eyes. He had glanced at the other man's book too when he found it but not really read it, the format was strange and he had more pressing concern in finding his own, then been absorbed by it until his counterpart found him.

"No..." he confirms quietly at the assessment of HYDRA's operation, staring down at the pile as the flames start to lick upwards, his human fingers twisting in the fabric of his pants.

Humanity would be better off when removed of it's free will they had told him and he was their proof of that, the perfect weapon, the man unlucky enough to survive Zola's (the sharp smell of chemicals, acrid in his nose and throat) experiments, unlucky enough not to die when he should have. It's where the biography matches the truth of his existence under HYDRA's thumb; both wanted him to believe he had been working for the greater good. "They let you be a person."

Was it better that way? His first instinct is yes, perhaps simply because of his own yearning for what is lost to him, that he cannot even understand so much of what seems basic and easy to others. The real answer is probably much less clear cut, still involving having your mind ripped open and someone else's will poured inside.

The silence that follows that statement is heavy. The crackling of fire beginning to catch punctuates it. Bucky stares fixedly into the flames, the thoughts behind his dark eyes somewhere else entirely. "They let me be their person," he agrees, with only that minor correction.

He doesn't need to look at the other man standing over him to see the emotional scars left by being reduced to a machine made of mostly flesh and blood. He himself never had to deal with the painful return to functioning as a human being rather than purely a mindless weapon. He doesn't want to dwell too much on whether that makes it better. He tries not to think about those memories, after all.

Even if it's increasingly difficult to block them out in a place like this.

"That doesn't mean they saw me as a person," he eventually amends. "It was more like--"

A shrill, beeping wail interrupts him from all around them in the store. Above them on the ceiling, the smoke detectors begin to flash. A few seconds later, the sprinkler system switches on, and a thin rain sprays down.

Something passes over the face of the weapon when he hears that, eyes fixed on the comfortingly rising fire. It seems both of them find it easier to focus on something else entirely than each other when discussing this subject.

He can't even imagine it the other way around, he's not really capable and isn't sure he wants to. It was still a lie, and as the other man starts to go on he wonders if perhaps HYDRA had simply been more honest with him as to what he was to them than this man's KGB had been. There had never been any pretence for him, he knew exactly where he'd stood in the face of his masters.

Their lie had been that he had never been anything else.

The sudden eruption of noise startles him and he has the knife in his sleeve out in seconds, right before the water comes down on them both and the fire. It's so unexpected he stops where he's sank reflexively into a combat stance and blinks for a moment as his hair and clothing rapidly become soaked, before lifting his gaze upwards at the sprinklers accusingly.

It certainly puts a damper on their plan, proven as fire is hissing and rapidly starting to die already with maybe only half the pile of books burned.

He's not the only one who reacts with trained hostility. The way the other Bucky tenses up and prepares to fight is a little less obvious--he's had a lot more training in how to hide it, how to look like less of a naked weapon. But still, he rises to his feet swiftly and his right hand moves to the hilt of his knife on his belt.

It lasts only a split-second, though, before he realizes what is really happening. "Oh, come on." He flicks a glare up at the sprinklers. "Did you really have to ruin our harmless fun?"

The books might object to his description of it as harmless, if they could speak.

After about forty seconds, detecting no more flames, the sprinklers shut off. No sense in ruining all the books here with the damp, after all.

He shakes his head as the water shuts off before more effectively using his fingers to push his wet bangs aside, looking more sour than he did a minute ago.

Of course they did, it wouldn't be to the Capitol's liking if everyone could so easily destroy the evidence of their pasts this way. The whole bookstore would end up being burnt down if that was the case.

The knife gets put away as the younger of the two of them (relatively speaking) straightens up and then bends to pick up one of the damp, slightly burnt books. He flips it open to see if the water damaged it enough to make it unreadable. No such luck, the pages are wet but not to that point and will still be understandable if allowed to dry.

"What now?" they may have to go about this the more time-consuming way.

"What now?" He starts to glance down at the other man, only to realize that the way they're standing--both straightened up at this point--he has to glance up.

He really doesn't like being the shorter one. Chalk it up to some old flare of insecurity.

"Now we use our hands." He picks up one of the damp books, calmly breaks its spine, and starts pulling it apart. "I mean, they didn't give us the new one so we could hug people better, right?"

Is that a trace of bitterness in his voice? Yes, it's more than a trace. In this place more than ever--next to this man, more than ever--

He forgets he's capable of being more than a weapon.

"We're supposed to destroy things."

His instinct was right and he's pleased by that as he sets to obediently doing as instructed by the other man, metal fingers tearing through paper as if it's nothing. There's still so much of the conditioning in him, the desire to please and obey.

That brief flash of pleasure however is quickly sobered and pushed down about the talk of their left arms, the Weapon that replaced flesh and bone after he fell. They fell? He's not certain if he should assume his counterpart last his arm in the same way he did given how much else is proving different about their pasts and programming.

Except they both lost their left arms, that they both were -- are? -- the Winter Soldier for different handlers.

It makes Bucky pause in his work, for a moment more aware of the arm and it's purpose than he usually is, the solid weight of it and the thrumming of power beneath the smooth metal panels. He won't argue the point, it's what he's lived all his life out of the ice being told after all, ever since he fell from the train and a couple months running loose from HYDRA's control won't break that mentality just yet.

However... "I think books are new though." he says, with an inflection in his voice a few shades above a monotone weapon, one of those widening cracks through the Asset's shell that slips out without his notice.

He notices immediately, of course, that flash of satisfaction from the other man. It's another second before Bucky realizes where it's coming from, but when he does, his stomach twists. A grimace flashes onto his face, and he looks away.

It's not like he can tell off this other version of him for something like that. He knows too well how it feels: that certainty running deeper than his bones that what he does is follow orders.

But the metal fingers of his left hand curl into a fist of frustration. He doesn't think like that anymore. He can resist, now; he can fight back. Obey orders or defy them. Is there anything else? He hardly knows.

It's not until the other man speaks again that Bucky glances back at him, his eyes suddenly wide with surprise. "Did you just make a joke, kid?"

A faint smile ghosts over his face.

He keeps tearing methodically in the moments after he spoke, mashing faces and treacherous words together into an unreadable mess. Zola, HYDRA and Pierce destroyed under his hands, a poor substitute perhaps for getting his hands on those actually responsible for his condition (the worst ones already dead, forever out of his reach) but it's something, a quiet act of rebellion he can engage in here without fear of wipes or other punishment.

Though his fingers linger over the opening pages of family and home; Brooklyn, NYC.

When what's he just said is called out Bucky has to take a moment to backtrack, run the words over in his head to realise what he just said and he looks faintly startled himself, resulting in a dip of his head that's almost shy and definitely self-conscious.

Looking at his other self though, the smile that passes over his face, he doesn't think he did something wrong. So he gives a nod in confirmation, feeling tentatively pleased with himself yet again.

And in the next moment, that suspicion is confirmed: "That's good. Making jokes is what we both do, right?"

The smile returns again. A little hesitantly, but it's there. There's a weariness that accompanies it, an awareness of just how difficult it is to smile in a place like this. He doesn't normally allow that fatigue to show, of course--he has to be ready with a grin no matter what. But here he is talking to this not-quite-mirror image. If there's anyone he can trust with the truth, maybe it's him.

"'Cause Cap needs it," he adds, the smile growing a bit. "It's not like he can't make jokes himself, you know, but since he's so busy carrying the world on his shoulders, someone else has gotta keep him smiling sometimes. And that's us."

He speaks softly, but still, for a few seconds he's forgotten that what he's saying is being broadcast to a world.

There's an attention in those blue eyes when the older Bucky speaks, a line to his shoulders and back that speaks of intrigue as he is told about them, about Steve.

These are the sort of memories he wants, this is the knowledge he craves. Not the darkness of the dreams, the cold ice and the blood, the sensation of falling over and over into and breaking bones beneath his fingertips.

It's the promise that there is more to him than a machine, a weapon. That he was that, that he could be that again. It's different too to hear it from one who'd suffered as he had suffered, who'd gone through some similar to his own experiences than it is from Steve. Steve tries but Steve doesn't know what it is to be unmade that way, to be broken down and put together like someone's doll, a puppet on strings.

Different methods, same result.

"Someone has to look after him." he says decidedly. He knows that, Bucky Barnes looks after Steve Rogers, that is a Fact. "We do that."

Even if Steve said he didn't have to, even if he protested.

"Yeah. We--we do."

For a moment it seems like time skips as Bucky remembers that he's being watched. He takes a short breath, and then his expression is guarded again.

"Remember that, kid," he says after a moment, and his tone is more remote than before.

He kneels down by the pile of books, picks up one of the ones with his face on it, neatly breaks the spine in two, and starts shredding the pages.

He looks pleased again at another confirmation. There's no smile to hint at it but it's there in the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head that his instinct is right.

But when that switch is thrown and the tone in the other man's voice changes he feels something... disappointment? that the moment is gone. It takes him a moment before he hunkers back down to the task at hand again. He doesn't know, he doesn't completely understand and it is easier to do than to think.

A few minutes can pass this way as they work through the pile of books, in silence if the other Bucky does not speak first.

When this one does it's with a narrowing of his eyes at a half torn page from one of the last copies, eyes darkening in a renewal of earlier frustration. "That's not right..." he mutters, strange to say because the whole book is not right. But this one detail catches him, digs into his brain the way some things do.

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When they write the story of our lives [closed]

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