Bucky had been there for about two seconds when the guy in the bed leapt from it, sword in hand.
"How do you come here, fiend?"
"—I don't know," Bucky said, stepping back.
"If you intend my demise, this is a poor attempt indeed," said the guy, advancing upon him. "You ought to have gone with poison, or an arrow from afar. If you meant to stab me in my bed, you should have done it before the dawn. Coward's methods all, but still, you might have succeeded in them, as you will not succeed in combat."
"I'm done with that," Bucky said (though he wondered, for a moment, if maybe he wasn't—but his head didn't feel the way it always had when he'd come up from being the Soldier, so that wasn't it). Another person might have been frightened, but it had been a long time since he'd viewed this kind of thing with anything more than weariness. "I'm supposed to be in Wakanda."
The guy paused. "I'm not familiar with the city of Wa Kanda. It can't be in Archenland or I'd have heard tell of it. Do you hale from Calormen, then?"
"I'm from Brooklyn," Bucky said. "Wakanda is a country."
He didn't need to waste time calculating the chances: his arm versus a guy with a sword was something that could only end a couple ways. All he had to do was brace himself for the charge to come, which it would as soon as this guy got done trying to confuse him.
Except that wasn't what happened.
"Ohhhh," the guy said. He brightened, and sheathed his sword. "All becomes clear."
"...Not for me."
"I am King Rilian of Narnia. You are most welcome here. Come, break your fast with me, so I may explain everything."
***
"I've never heard of one from your world entering Narnia in such a way. Are you certain it happened so?"
"Yeah, I'm sure. I should still be sleeping." He'd been supposed to sleep until they found a way to break his conditioning, keep him from hurting anyone else just because someone knew the words to take control of him.
"That is passing strange." Rilian shrugged. "I suppose Aslan must have his reasons."
"Who the hell is Aslan?" Bucky asked, for though he'd let other unknown names go by without asking about them, this one was for some reason the last straw.
***
The answer turned out to be 'a lion.' Bucky didn't really believe it until they left Rilian's quarters and he began to be introduced to the peoples of Narnia...only some of whom were human. By the end of the day, he'd spoken with everything from Talking Mice to Talking Bears.
"This is the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me," he said to Rilian later.
"You're the strangest that's come here," Rilian countered. He glanced at Bucky's metal arm as he said it, as most of the Animals Bucky had met had glanced at least once. (They'd been too polite to ask about it, other than the Mouse who'd wanted to know if he'd earned it in battle, and the young Raccoon who'd attempted to steal it, earning a scolding for himself and a deluge of apologies for Bucky once his mother saw what was happening). "It's not unusual for people from your world to visit Narnia. You're simply the least..."
"What?"
"You seem to me to be the least likely of them," said Rilian. "Though I have myself met only two others for myself, and in a circumstance itself much different than this one, so it may be I am mistaken."
They sat down together for supper, which was a venison stew. Bucky looked at it until Rilian saw his expression and laughed, assuring him it wasn't a Talking Animal, of course, and so nothing at all like eating a person.
"What did you think Leopards eat, or Bears?" he asked with a gleam in his eye, and it was only later Bucky would realize he was teasing.
***
Over the next few days, in-between one audience or another, Rilian told Bucky everything he knew about the others who'd come to Narnia. He'd learned those stories at his father's knee, and seemed eager to explain them to someone who'd never heard them before.
"You won't be able to stay for ever," he said, as matter-of-factly as he'd pointed out that not all animals speak, but without the gleam in his eyes, this time. "Aslan will send you back to your own world someday. It is always thus, once you've finished the task you were brought here for."
"Any idea what that is?"
"None," Rilian admitted.
***
Bucky didn't worry about it.
At first, it didn't seem to matter if he stayed in Narnia or went back to his own world. Neither was really any stranger than the other, and it wasn't as if he'd chosen to sleep because he'd wanted to.
As long as he was here, there was no one who knew him as the Winter Soldier—or worse, as the Asset. If anyone in Narnia had known about the book or the words, they still wouldn't have had them, still wouldn't have been able to use them.
As the weeks and months passed, Bucky picked up on the things he needed to know in this new world. He learned how to shoot a bow, the closest thing Narnia got to a sniper rifle. He learned how to ride a horse (though not a Talking Horse). He learned which subjects to pursue and which to avoid for any Animal he might speak to. He learned how to fit into Rilian's court, in a way he hadn't fit in anywhere in a very long time indeed.
***
He learned, as well, of things no Narnian knew—for no Narnian shared Rilian's chambers at night, and all were forbidden from approaching it between sunset and sunrise outside of the greatest of emergencies.
Bucky wasn't forbidden. On the first day, Rilian suggested Aslan might have meant something by Bucky's initial arrival, that perhaps he was meant to spend his nights in Rilian's rooms rather than in quarters of his own. Bucky didn't care one way or the other as long as he was dry and warm, and so he agreed.
On the third night, Bucky woke to a scream in the night, and looked over to the other bed to see Rilian thrashing among his bedclothes, and calling out.
"Set me free, set me free," he said. "By the Lion..."
Bucky got up and went to him, and, though he knew how dangerous it can be to wake a person in the dark when you've previously witnessed that same person leaping from his bed with the intention of stabbing you, he nonetheless took Rilian by the shoulder and gave him a firm shake. For the second time since his arrival in Narnia, Bucky braced himself for an attack that did not come.
Rilian gasped awake. "Where am I?" he asked, and instead of reaching for his sword, he grasped at Bucky with desperate hands. "Am I in Narnia? Tell me this hasn't been some mere bright dream. I beg of you."
Bucky told him it wasn't, that he was in his rooms at Cair Paravel. After the fifth or sixth such assurance, Rilian even seemed to believe him. He lay back down in his place, then, until his breathing had calmed.
Bucky made to go back to his own bed, but Rilian grasped for him again. "I wish you to stay," he said. "I would give no such command, so you may do as you will. But...I wish you would stay."
Rilian's bed was enormous, wide enough to fit four without any person brushing against any other. Bucky didn't know what he thought of sharing a bed, as he hadn't known what he thought of sharing a room—but it was as comfortable there as it had been in his own bed, and it wouldn't hurt either of them.
They had lain there together for a good few minutes before Rilian began to speak. He told of his own history this time, not Narnia's, and for the first time Bucky realized how little Rilian had truly said of himself before now.
He told Bucky of the Green Lady who'd stolen him, held him under a geas for ten years. He told Bucky of the chair he'd been bound to every night, and the monstrous things he'd done and planned when he wasn't in it...
It was all very familiar.
"No Narnian may know how deeply this yet troubles me," Rilian said toward the end. "To them, it's over, and has been since they dug me out of the earth. If they knew of this...I fear they would lose faith in me, if they knew."
There was no way he wasn't wrong. In the three days Bucky had been in Narnia, he'd seen the way Narnians of all shapes and sizes looked to Rilian. There was love there, and great joy, and a relief Bucky hadn't understood til now. It wasn't the kind of thing you could break that easy.
He hadn't figured out how to say as much when Rilian said, "Never mind. It's over, in any event."
"How long has it been?" Bucky asked, the first time he'd thought to ask the question.
"We arrived back in Narnia on the night of the Great Snow Dance, early this past winter," Rilian said.
He'd told Bucky before about the Great Snow Dance, and what fun it was, the first night every year there was snow on the ground.
It was early spring now—so early all anyone had talked about all day had been the hard frost of the day before, and whether or not it would be the last.
Bucky said, "If it's only been a couple months, it's not over."
"No?"
"Not even close," Bucky said. The silence stretched between them, Rilian's despair a palpable thing, as it can only be in the darkest hours of the night.
Bucky had never intended to speak of his own past, yet now he found himself trying to figure out the right place to begin.
Once he'd found it, he told Rilian his own story, the things that were different from Rilian's own tale, and the things that were the same. He left out nothing, with the exception of the pieces lost from the years he'd been the Asset to the ones who'd used him and the Soldier to the ones he'd been used against. What he had and what he remembered, he admitted to, all of it.
When Bucky was done, he said, "It's been two years for me, and it's still not over—but it's better than it was."
He'd barely felt human, when he'd taken his life for himself and run. Over the next two years, he'd grabbed onto the parts of himself he wanted and turned his back on the rest. Day by day and step by step, he'd done it, and if he wasn't the Bucky Barnes who'd fallen from the train, he wasn't what they'd tried to make him, either.
"Perhaps this is why you came to Narnia," Rilian said. "To tell me to take heart."
"If you want me to tell you something, how about you should hit more things with your sword," Bucky said. Going to the shooting range had always helped him more than spending too much time sitting around thinking about it.
***
Rilian's dreams recurred at least three times a week. After a month, Bucky forsook his own bed out of practicality. He found this alerted him to Rilian's dreams sooner than before, for he would feel the tremors of the mattress minutes before Rilian would have begun crying out.
One night, something else happened. Bucky woke to Rilian's thrashing, as usual, and shook him awake no more or less roughly than he always had before.
"Am I in Narnia?" Rilian asked. "Tell me true. Show me, if you can."
"You're in your bedroom in Cair Paravel," Bucky said, as he'd said so many times before. As he said it, he lit the lamp by the bed, as he had the other times Rilian had demanded to be shown. They didn't even have to leave this room for the proof he he wanted, for he'd told Bucky these had been his father's chambers, barely changed since Rilian's own boyhood.
"Show me," Rilian said again in the yellow light, but he didn't sound like he meant it the same way he always had before. How he did mean it became clear a moment later, in the softness of his lips against Bucky's, the rasp of his stubble against Bucky's own as their mouths met and parted and met again.
If there had been no one for Bucky to hold onto through his own darkest years, now he held onto Rilian just as tightly as Rilian ever had him.
The rest of that night was spent in the pursuit of something far sweeter than any dream, and the sleep which followed was for Bucky deeper and more restful than any he could remember.
In the gray of the dawn, Bucky woke first, with enough time to wonder if Rilian would regret what they'd done, when he woke—but when he stirred and few moments later, and caught Bucky watching, he only smiled, and reached for Bucky again in the morning light.
An hour later, listening as Rilian settled a dispute between two groups of Moles, Bucky decided he was never going back to his own world, Lion or no Lion, no matter what his task was supposed to be.
***
Several years passed. There was the occasional skirmish, Rilian riding into battle ahead of his men, Bucky covering him from farther back—but for the most part things were quiet, for this was a time of peace and prosperity in Narnia. Rilian's peace was kept from his throne much more often than it was in the battlefield. They were long days, filled with as much frustration as joy, but it was good work, a king's work. All of Narnia spoke of his kindness, and of his underlying steel, which are the two most important qualities for a king.
No one spoke of how he no longer thrashed and moaned entreaties in the night, for no one other than Bucky had ever learned of Rilian's dreams.
One night, Bucky came to the room they shared, and found Rilian white-faced and grim. In the next moment, he saw who and what had come to them, the enormous Lion standing beside their bed.
Had Bucky really thought he could shoot a Lion, if he had to? This Lion? In the crosshairs of those dark eyes, Bucky found he couldn't move his feet, couldn't even dream of reaching for the bow hung by the doorway.
"You're Aslan," he said.
"He's come to take you," said Rilian, and if there were no tears shining on his cheeks, his eyes were raw, his voice as rough as an eagle's talon. "He's come to take you away from me. It's just as my father told me, in all the stories of people from your world. He'll tell you you're too old to ever come back to me. We'll never see each other again, and he'll never even tell us why."
During this, the Lion's gaze turned from Bucky to Rilian. When Rilian had finished, he spoke:
"O King of Narnia," he said, in a voice so rich and deep it seemed all others were merely echos. "This is not for you."
The rebuke cut deeply enough for Bucky to feel it, too—and to remember all he'd forgotten, those things that had passed from him, growing fainter in time with Rilian's fading dreams. He'd forgotten his time as the Asset, as the Soldier, but now he remembered everything. He sank to his knees, and did not know how long he stayed there, or whether Rilian passed close by him on his way out of those chambers.
After a time, the Lion approached him, until he was close enough to touch, if Bucky had so dared. "Son of Adam, do you really believe I would call down judgment upon you for what you had no choice in?"
Bucky thought of all the stories he'd heard, most of which had seemed like wives' tales, all of which now seemed possible. In the end, all he could say was, "I don't know what you'd do."
"Stand, Bucky Barnes, and walk with me. We have much to discuss."
Bucky stood. "You're not really gonna tell me I'm too old, are you?"
"You are and you aren't," the Lion said. "Now, ask me the question you most greatly desire the answer to."
What question? "I don't want to go back."
"You must go back," said the Lion, and this time there was a growl in his voice, the lowest of rumbles. "There is still work for you to do in your own world. No other may take your place. It is for you alone."
Once he'd said it, Bucky knew it was the truth. He could nearly see the shape of it, figures and events seeming to move behind some gray veil, calling for him. He came very close, then, to asking what was coming. If he had, his journey would perhaps have turned out quite differently (or perhaps not, for few are ever allowed to know what might have been). "Does it have to be now?"
Aslan stopped, and turned to look at him again. This time, his eyes were soft, and sparkling with good humor. "That is the right question," he said. "Well done."
***
"And then?" Rilian asked.
"Then he said I could choose," Bucky said. "I can go back now—or I can stay in Narnia for as long as you live."
"And which did you decide?"
"What do you think?"
Rilian bowed his head, as if to weep—and the both of them realized Aslan was still with them, watching from the doorway. After a moment, Rilian stood, and went to him. Bucky went to the window and looked out upon the courtyard below as they spoke. When he turned back, Rilian stood there alone, and Bucky went to him.
"Aslan spoke to me," Rilian said. "He said I've been given a gift. He said to use it well."
"He told me the same thing," Bucky said.
***
The gift of rest, the gift of time; the gift of peace and of healing. Narnia's greatest perils were never the only perils, its greatest friends never its only friends—and in some times and for some visitors, perhaps Narnia was a friend in return.
Rilian's reign would go on be the longest and most fruitful of any King of Narnia. And through it all, Bucky would remain by his side, the both of them ever mindful of Aslan's command, and of how glad they were to follow it.