Bucky died very firmly.
He was floating up by the ceiling when he made the decision, the last one he'd ever get to make. The doctors were below him, working on his body. That thing that looked like him, anyway. That thing he'd been stuck in for months, maybe years now. The thing they beat, and froze, and burned, and told truths and lies to until he could barely remember what his name was supposed to be.
Something had happened. Bucky didn't know what, but the body beneath him was corpse-white. They'd just finished cutting off its left arm, the one that had gotten all mangled somehow. He didn't remember how. He never remembered anything that happened when they had him out, if he could help it.
The machines were screaming. The head doctor was, too, and the rest of them looked about ready to piss their pants. Bucky was pretty sure his body wasn't breathing anymore. He was also pretty sure it would only have a chance if he came down from where he was.
"Nope," he said, with nothing but relief. "I'm done."
***
The room faded out.
Bucky figured he would get to go find Steve now. They'd told him about what had happened to Steve. Back when they'd been studying his reactions to things. Before they'd decided they liked him better when he couldn't remember enough to care about the awful things they told him.
He thought he'd get to go find Steve, and tell him just what he thought about that last stunt of his...but instead, he found himself wandering. He did that for a long, long time, with everything changing around him. The cars people drove, the clothes they wore, everything. Whenever it had been a while, Bucky made sure to go wander through a Sears, just to see what all they'd come up with now. It was frustrating that he couldn't touch anything, what with being dead and all, but just getting to see things was really pretty neat. A hell of a lot better than what he'd been doing before.
He didn't sleep anymore, though he did seem to doze off sometimes, gliding through a few years before picking up where he'd left off wandering. He did dream sometimes, nightmares that yanked him off the street and threw him behind a knife of the scope of a rifle or his own two hands around the throat of a stranger. Sometimes when he got back, he wondered about that, but then he remembered he'd only had the one hand, at the end, and stopped.
Through it all, he always felt like he was looking for something. He was never quite sure what it was. Not Steve. Steve was just as dead as he was. Steve hadn't even bothered to stick around and wait for him for a little while. He's just gone on to whatever was next, without so much as looking back over his shoulder to see if Bucky was coming.
Bucky didn't realize he'd been looking for Steve the whole time after all until he found him.
***
Even as a ghost, you picked up on things. And what Bucky had picked up on lately was that there was a new Captain America. He'd dozed through another few years, and when he'd gotten back, New York had been attacked by aliens, and there was a new guy who thought he had the right to carry Steve's shield around.
It didn't take any looking to find that guy's apartment in Washington, D.C. One perk of being dead was that you only had to think about a place to be there, including places you'd never been before.
Bucky found it, and then he trashed it. He'd never been able to touch anything before, but maybe he just hadn't been mad enough. Oh no, there went Captain America's books, all over the floor. Uh-oh, somehow his kitchen chairs had gotten smashed over his counter. Whoops, somehow a coffee mug had landed right smack in the middle of his TV. (It was a beauty. Bucky almost had to wipe away a ghost-tear.)
Bucky went in in a rage, but the more things he smashed and threw around, the better he felt about things.
At least someone bashed in the door, and in came a tall, muscular blond guy. He could have been Steve, if he'd been a lot shorter and thinner than he was. He looked at Bucky, and all the color drained out of his face, and he said, "...Bucky?"
"Yeah," Bucky said, and suddenly he remembered something that had gotten lost in all the years he'd been wandering, all the time he'd had to think about the way things used to be. He hadn't thought much about the war in that time. Hadn't wanted to. Hadn't been much there worth keeping. He'd remembered Steve as a little guy, when Steve hadn't been, the last year or two. When Steve had been big, and strong, and the only thing that could have kept Bucky from letting them ship him back to the states. When Steve had looked like this guy. Like this guy exactly. "I, uh. I can explain about your apartment."
***
Turned out what Steve really wanted was for him to explain why hugging didn't work when he tried it. (Neither would Bucky trying to help Steve clean up, when they got around to that a bunch of hours later.)
If Bucky had been thinking straight, he'd have left out parts of the story. Like everything that had happened to him after falling off the train, just for an example. But he hadn't actually had a conversation with anyone since the last time he'd talked to Steve. Turned out he couldn't make the words stop, not once they'd started.
When he was done, then Steve told his story, which was pretty much the same bullshit Bucky already knew, except for the part where he hadn't died when he put the plane down. He'd been frozen, that was all. He'd been frozen, and all Bucky could think once he made the comparison was, thank God it hadn't been the other way around. If one of them had had to be in the plane and the other one had had to be in the chair, the universe had gotten that one right.
He wasn't stupid enough to share that opinion with Steve, though. One look at Steve's face while Bucky told his story was enough to let him know they'd never see eye-to-eye on that one...and once Steve got ahold of one side of an argument, he would never, ever let go.
***
For the next few days, Steve stayed home. Bucky could have tagged along with him wherever, but they wouldn't have been able to have a conversation without Steve coming off like a crazy person. It had been a couple years for Steve, and somewhere between a couple and seventy for Bucky; there was a lot to talk about.
Then, while they were talking about movies--Bucky had seen them all, and he knew which ones Steve would like better than anyone else--Bucky was suddenly wrenched away. He hadn't slept since he died, but now the nightmare was clearer and more chaotic than ever. There was blood, and screaming, and he was the one causing all of it, looking down at two hands, one silver and shining, and the other close enough to his own that it could have been.
How long he was in the dream, he didn't know. When he made it back to Steve, everything seemed weirdly translucent for a few minutes. Steve was standing in his now-mostly-repaired living room, talking urgently into his smartphone. (So cool. Bucky would've died again to be able to have one and poke around on the little screen. He'd bossed Steve around for an hour the other day, making him open this app and that one, just to get a better look than he'd ever gotten to have before.)
When Steve was done talking, he put his phone back in his pocket, and sat down. He put his head in his hands.
Bucky was about to ask what had him so down, but that was when Steve started bawling. The real, awful kind of bawling. The kind you don't do except when you're alone, especially if your name is Steve Rogers and you're constantly pissed off at the whole world because you came into it like you did, and don't really feel like giving it any more ammunition.
Bucky had cried that way a few times. Every time he remembered doing it, Steve had been basically on his deathbed. He'd tried to die a lot when he was a kid, which was probably why he'd decided he wanted to try to die in Europe once there was a war on. He'd had a habit of it by then.
Who or what Steve could be crying for now, Bucky couldn't figure out. Maybe someone else they knew had died, though as of the other day, everyone either of them knew of had still been fine.
He guessed Steve would tell him when he came back later and pretended like he hadn't been here to see this...but when Bucky did come back, Steve was sitting on his couch, looking through a thick manila folder.
"Hey," Bucky said.
"Hi," Steve said, closing the folder and tucking it in between himself and the arm of the couch. "Where've you been?"
He sounded tense. Bucky figured he would have sounded tense, too, if Steve had shown up as a ghost and then just disappeared for an unknown amount of time. "I had another one of those dreams."
Steve's mouth tightened, but he didn't look surprised. Later, Bucky would look back and think he should have known something must be up, if Steve wasn't surprised.
Later--maybe the same day, maybe a day or two later; even though Bucky was with Steve this time, time was getting thin again--Steve went into his bedroom and started getting undressed.
"It's not exactly fair of you to give me a strip tease when I can't do anything about it," Bucky said. Not because it bothered him, but because it had been a really long time since he'd been able to give Steve hell about something non-life-threatening.
"I have a mission," Steve said. "You should come."
"Sounds great. You can talk to yourself just enough to get shot trying to sneak in to wherever it is."
"I'm not worried about it," Steve said, and the craziest thing was that he probably wasn't.
He finished putting on his new and improved Captain America suit, and off they went.
***
"Aren't we going to pick up the rest of the Avengers at some point? Don't you need a team?" Bucky asked, a little later.
"Not this time," Steve said.
That couldn't be a good sign.
***
They'd taken down enough Hydra bases together for Bucky to pick up on the fact that they were doing it again pretty quickly. He just didn't know why, or why they'd come without backup. N until they made it into the innermost level. That was where they always kept the experiments; it was where they'd kept Bucky, before he'd died.
He didn't know why, until Steve had fought his way past all of them, and they were alone in the room with the thing behind the glass. It was almost as pale as Bucky remembered from when it had been on the operating table far below him; and it had am arm and hand as silver as he remembered from his dreams.
"We shouldn't have come here, Steve," Bucky said. He thought about flashing back to Steve's apartment, to try to get a look at that folder... but he thought already knew what it was. He must have been dreaming for longer than he'd thought, this last time. Long enough for Steve to make some calls. Long enough for Steve to connect the dots. Long enough for Steve to make the connection Bucky had never wanted to, and to decide to do something about it.
"I couldn't just leave you here," Steve said.
"That's not me. Not anymore." It was true when Bucky started saying it, but by the time he was finished, it was a lie. By the time he'd finished talking, he'd looked at the frozen thing in front of him, and he'd felt the connection. The one he'd have felt before, if he hadn't stayed on another continent this whole time in order to avoid it. The one he'd have known about, if he hadn't jumped so quick and so hard into the assumption that he was definitely, positively, one-hundred-percent more dead than he'd been before he'd gone on his vacation from the whole having a body thing.
It was him, the thing behind the glass. It wasn't Steve that had tethered him to the world, after all. It was this. It was his own body, and the tiny part of him that was still in it.
"You don't want to wake that thing up," Bucky said, but he already knew Steve wasn't going to listen.
""I'm not going to leave you here," Steve repeated.
"So don't. Shoot it."
"...I'm not going to help you kill yourself, Buck."
"No, you're just going to get your stupid ass killed because you don't know when to stop," Bucky said as Steve approached the control panel in front of the glass. All the buttons were in Russian, but they had colored symbols on them too, and it would have taken a real idiot not to be able to figure it out. "You always think you know better than anyone else, you know that?"
"I've been told," said Steve, and hit a button. Something hissed; almost immediately, condensation began to form on their side of the glass.
"Well, you don't know better than me about this. In a few minutes, there are going to be two of me, and the one that actually exists is going to try to kill you. We're not the same person. Even if we were together, we wouldn't be the same person."
It wasn't just going to try to kill Steve; it was going to succeed. No matter what Steve had read in that file, he couldn't know how fast it was, how strong. Stronger now, probably, with that arm. More ruthless than it had been when Bucky had been inside it, putting up the losing fight. It was going to finish the job Steve had started when he'd aimed that plane at the ground. It was going to kill him, and when it was done, Bucky would still be here, wandering, for another seventy years, or maybe another few.
Steve hadn't said anything. He was doing that thing he always did. The one where he was done arguing with you, no matter how right you were and how wrong he was; that thing where he was going to do what he was going to do, and to hell with the consequences.
And there was only one person who could do anything to change it now.
"Bye, Steve," Bucky said, walking/floating over to the glass. He hadn't been able to touch anything except for the time he'd spent five minutes as a poltergeist; but this close to himself, he could feel the condensation on his hands when he reached for the glass. "If we get out of this alive, I get to play with your phone any damned time I want."
"I'll buy you one," Steve said. "Better yet, the next time Tony wants to give me a prototype, I'll--"
Whatever he said then, Bucky didn't hear it. Bucky had stepped through the glass. Bucky was gone.
***
He opened his eyes. There was a stranger there in front of him.
There was a protocol for strangers who came in alone, who weren't dressed right. Security breach. Eliminate.
He should have attacked immediately. Offensive measures. Eliminate. He didn't. It would be thirty-seven weeks before he'd know exactly why. Before he'd remember being split off from himself, and everything that had happened there.
For now, even though there wasn't anything familiar about the stranger at all, some part of him deep inside said, just as firmly as it had first split itself away so many years ago, That's Steve. Don't you ever hurt him. Don't you even think about it.
The stranger said, "Bucky? You can come out now. I won't hurt you."
"I don't know who that is, Steve," he said, and took the stranger's offered hand.