Rivets - Part 2
Title: Rivets
Author: jaune_chat
Artist(s): disreputabled0g
Fandoms and Spoilers: The Avengers (film),Captain America: TFA, Captain America: TWS
Characters/Relationships: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers, James “Bucky” Barnes/OFC, James “Bucky” Barnes/OMC
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 12,517
Spoilers: Film
Content Advisory: Violence, piercings, explicit sex, uncertain memories
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing.
A/N: Written for a prompt from avengerkink. Written for journeystory. Thanks to brighteyed_jill for betaing!
Summary: The Winter Soldier was starting to remember, and would stitch himself back together any way he could.
He went to a professional for the rest of the metal so that the placement was perfect. He always picked the smallest, smoothest studs, his quick healing preventing them from migrating, keeping them solidly in place as if they had been a part of him from the beginning. Soon both ears were thick with metal, all over. Eyebrows, with tiny spikes, in several places. Nose. Lips. Tongue. Playing with the barbell helped when he couldn’t touch any of the others. Like a lightning rod, it grounded. Every bolt of metal a memory, fixed in time, put in order.
(Born in New York, I had a younger sister and brother, Steve and I were best friends - are best friends. Fought the good fight, protected him, he protected me. He would have done anything to save me.)
Some of the returning memories hurt like shoving a red-hot poker through his brain.
(Fatherly voice and casual cruelty, a message he had to hear to continue to operate. Cold-blooded murderer, and he was so, so good at it.)
Pierce, he learned from watching the news, was dead. Good. One less thing to put on his list.
Some memories nearly made him faint with nausea when they came into focus.
(Battering Steve’s face to a pulp because it was the only thing he could think to do to finish the mission that had been the only certainty in his world.)
Some memories were a little uncertain, but welcome, in a good way. He remembered the girls he’d flirted with before, smiling at them, exchanging small talk, dancing, and sometimes more. He’d wanted, before. He’d desired, and been able to do something about it.
He wanted to be able to do something about desire again. He wanted to be whole, no matter if he had to be stitched together with metal to do it.
James had switched motels again, to one with embarrassingly large mirrors in the bathroom. (Touching a stud in his left ear, he recalled a mission where he had to wait in a place like this for three days for his target. His support team had made enough crude comments to fill a TV series during that time out of sheer boredom. The asset hadn’t been bored. The asset hadn’t felt anything.) But it suited his purpose as he stripped in the caustic bright light of the tiled room and looked himself over critically. He hadn’t had much cause to think of his body as anything more than a vehicle for his head, and it was time to see what other memories he could jar loose and nail down.
For having endured seventy years of frozen hell, James has to admit that he actually looked very good. Aside from the scarring around the metal arm, he was clean, unblemished, courtesy of whatever chemicals and compounds Zola had used on him. Hard-muscled from a training regimen he had seen no need to stop, his body was healthy. He watched himself for a long time, letting what memories float to the surface that would, and ran his right hand down his flank, along his chest, over his nipple. Pleasure sparked and he drew in a sharp breath. Steadying himself, he reached down and held his penis, looser and less businesslike than when he urinated. Waited again, breathing, and let unmoored memories of laughing, pretty faces, flushed with desire, acres of skin exposed when he leaned over them, gasps and breathy moans, let all of that play across his mind’s eye. When he came back to himself, he was hard, and had a lingering memory of quashed guilt as he stroked himself, chasing the physical high the boys laughed about when the adults weren’t around. He touched the ninth stud up in his right ear and remembered washing out a stained sock in the sink so his mother wouldn't see the evidence of puberty. At the time, he'd been defiant and mortified. Now, it made his lips crease in a rusty smile.
James let himself go and regained his calm - he still had that desire somewhere in him. They hadn’t taken it from him, just made him ignore it. Not anymore. He grabbed his coat and headed out for the body piercing parlor he’d picked out.
--
James lay back in the chair as the artist arranged her needles, gauze, and the barbells he’d picked. Sleeves connected by straps across his collarbones still covered his arms, hiding the flesh-metal join of his shoulder. What could pass in the chaos of a concert or the casual scrutiny of walking around in public would never be able to be hidden if he had to take his shirt off, so he hadn’t even tried.
The asset had almost never been used for undercover missions due to the fact that they kept frying his brain, but they had made sure he could walk in a crowd or take public transportation if he had to (though in the latter decades, that had fallen by the wayside as they needed less stealth and more shock and awe). The arm was always a problem for disguise, but during such need the asset had been tasked to move it like it was fake instead of a superior replacement, swinging stiffly and using the hand as a crude pincher instead of a weapon in its own right. It was an easy disguise to assume. He’d told the artist a version of the truth she could accept to back up his story.
“I was in the army, lost my arm on a mission. I want to keep the cover on, if you don’t mind.”
James… Bucky had been a good liar, if the cause had been right. No one was going to be so much of an ass as to ask to see his war wounds in public, at least not anyone he was going to let near him with a needle. The parlor and artist he’d checked the same way he assessed a threat in the field. Their records were clean, and he knew where the exits were.
The artist was named Galena, and she was everything his prep team technicians weren’t. She didn’t resemble a single one of them he could remember, female or male, her shop was clean but eclectically decorated, the chair was very different, and he wasn’t strapped down and being offered a mouth guard so someone could try to simplify the world down to what the asset needed to know.
Galena didn’t need to know she was about to put nipple piercings in one of the most feared assassins of the 20th and 21st centuries.
He waited patiently as she put out the sterile equipment, put gloves on her clean hands, and forbore from telling her he'd once pulled a bullet from his own intestines with the help of a rusty spoon, so infection really wasn't going to be a problem.
“Most men find this more painful than their facial piercings,” Galena said, picking up a needle and checking the placement of the marker dots on either side of his right nipple. James just made a vague sound that could have been interpreted as agreement, part of his attention elsewhere, hunting for a surfacing memory to attach to the newest metal about to go into his body. Galena gently pinched the nub of flesh to make it stand up, and James found an image of a smiling girl, her head lying on his chest, her fingernails scratching over the tight, pink peak to hear him groan.
“Do it,” he said. A brief pinch and feeling of pressure, a sensation of heat, and a few moments later a barbell was neatly seated in his flesh. Galena was as good as his observations, and James found another memory to anchor as she approached his other side.
When she was done, James let his eyes close to focus on the memories of touch, pleasure, hot mouths against his skin and hands covering him. His heartbeat sped up a little, and James could feel a host of much older memories wanting a place to stay. None of them belonged to the asset, not a single one, because HYDRA hadn't cared for him to be distracted. They'd tried to destroy desire along with his past, making him into a murder machine, not a man.
James was a man. Bucky... Bucky had been, was, a man, a man who'd had women who'd lain against his naked chest. He reached up to brush his hand against the metal in his nose and mouth, remembering the scent of them, the taste of them, their skin and lips and so much more, hands in his short hair (HYDRA had kept his long, why? To make him unrecognizable to himself in the mirror, maybe), tugging as he put his mouth to work on them.
“It looks like you heal fast,” Galena said, throwing away the needles in their containers, and putting the other tools in the autoclave.
“I do.” James took his hand away from his mouth and moved his down to his belt. Galena's eyes followed, and she raised a speculative eyebrow.
“You're looking for some more, I take it?”
If he had to stitch himself together, he would do it to regain everything that he had. He promised himself that he would.
“Yeah.”
Galena smiled. “Let's see how those heal up, and then we can make another appointment.”
--
He made more than one. A lot more. There were a lot of memories in the flesh, a lot of smiling faces, a lot of dark rooms and passionate moans, some purely his own, others when he was joined in chorus with one or more. Sex had a lot of memories, a lot more good than bad, and each barbell in his flesh, whether along the shaft of his penis, through the head, or far lower, held another piece of himself together.
Apparently, before everything had happened, he'd been quite the horny devil. The thought made him smile when he ran his hand down the shimmering metal that decorated him.
There were other memories that surfaced when he felt the smooth metal against the hard, flushed skin of his dick. Memories he wasn’t exactly sure of, things he might have misinterpreted, less memories of encounters and perhaps more along the lines of speculations and half-forgotten daydreams. He and Steve had been close, and Steve had always been looking for the right partner. Maybe one or two of their glances had been a little more heated than just close friendship. Or maybe he was looking too closely at things that hadn’t made sense even back then.
But he wouldn’t know until he tried.
--
James wanted to try. He wanted to see if everything he’d learned, everything he’d discovered about himself, had made a difference. Could he be as human as he thought he was, as his newly-anchored memories said? Could he get close without hurting himself or someone else if something unexpected surfaced? It was a risk, a damn big risk if he miscalculated.
(A part of him was proud of that thought, that he could consider the life of a stranger to be important enough to worry about. The asset had only cared about who he was told was important. Collateral damage had literally meant nothing.)
Life was risk. And he was not the only damaged person in the world.
-
Her name was Simone. She wasn't really a fan of the concert he'd gone to, any more than he was, but she surveyed the crowd with an attention he recognized, even if her purpose was far more benign than was his usual. Little sparks of metal glinted from her skin nearly dark as his hair, striking sparks like lightning as the spotlights and lasers played over the crowd. Her smile was wide, genuine, brilliant and healthy and confident. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and what she wanted out of them.
Good, because James (Bucky) wasn't quite up for taking the lead on this one. He touched a stud near the top of his right ear and remembers Agent Carter (he had never gotten comfortable calling her by her first name except when Steve was waxing eloquent about her virtues around the campfire). He wasn't going to be diminished by a strong woman. No, he needed a woman who knew a hell of a lot more than he did right now.
“It's Simone,” she told him, when the crowd eventually let him drift close enough to her. She looked him up and down. He hadn't even said a word yet, but she'd already divined his purpose. If this were a mission, he would be so very compromised right now.
He brushed the seventh stud in his left ear with a carefully-stiff hand. He'd been punished when he failed. He wouldn't be punished now.
“James,” he managed. Simone looked him over, assessing him, and James had to wonder what expression was on his face that her smile turned dazzling. She raised an eyebrow in a way he vaguely remembered, and he nodded.
“Let's get out of here.” And she grabbed his right hand to pull him through the crowd.
One thing he did remember - things moved much faster in this time. That was all to the good.
Simone paused only once when they had tumbled together on the hotel bed, bracing herself against him, her hand sliding to the unyielding form of his left arm and the cloth that covered it. The brush of his hand against his right ear was quick as he slid his hand around her waist, pulled her closer, and whispered to her what he had to Galena.
She yielded in understanding, her hand coming to cup his face (he directed her down to his neck, not wanting the cascade of memories from his left side piercings to sully the moment). No panic was stirring, and James felt his blood heating as more of Simone's body was laid bare. His tongue touched the studs run through his lips, and he slid down her body until her thighs cradled his head (“Bucky, please, God, right there, please, please, just touch me, please!”) and leaned in to touch his tongue to the salt of her folds.
Simone screamed when she came, and there was no sound of pain or loss in it.
He felt his heart clenching, a part of it melding together whole, when she urged him up to have her own way with him.
-
His name was Chad. He was a month after Simone, another concert, another band, another city. He wasn't confident as Simone, but he was grinning and eager and intrigued by James' looks, and James needed that enthusiasm because his memories of this were murky. Unrealized. Thought about, but never really acted on.
Another thing to like about this time - when Chad planted a laughing kiss on his mouth in the middle of the crowd, barely anyone reacted.
He reminded James a little of a younger version of Morita, with less sarcasm and more jokes. He certainly could use the laughter.
Chad didn't seem to even give his left arm a second look, too intrigued by the novelty of the modifications James had made to his body. The look gave James a sudden surge of recklessness, brushing against a tiny stud he found a slow, dirty smile somewhere in him when he whispered where they could go to be alone.
Sex wasn't so different than with Simone. Different parts, but certainly nothing he hadn't seen before, and James (Bucky) felt the surge of pleasure take him by surprise when Chad ran a slick-lubed hand down his condom-covered cock, his fingers catching slightly on every small ball of metal up and down the shaft and head. Chad's hardness pressed against his in return wasn't so strange, not at all. It felt good, hot, and the heat let James move, explore, squeeze both of their cocks together, sliding in stuttering rhythm. It built something new in him as he threw his head back, right hand clenched hard on Chad's shoulder, barely holding back his strength.
He was still coming down when Chad had gotten his clothes on, and pressed another fast kiss to James' mouth.
“That was fun, man. Text me if you're around sometime.”
The door had shut before Bucky could even formulate an answer. By the time he had, all he could do was laugh. If Chad had come back, he might never have been able to understand.
But Bucky did. Right now, he did.
-
It was hard to get used to, being able to want, being able to act on it. And easy. New for the way he was now, anchored by the metal the held his past. Now there were new memories to entwine with the old, and the new ones stayed without needing to be riveted through his skin. He felt... like Bucky, like someone who could be him. Saying the name inside his own head didn't feel foreign anymore.
He headed for New York the next morning.
-
He mailed a message to Steve Rogers at the tall, ugly new building with Stark's name on it. SHIELD might have fallen, but Steve was never without a place for long. Information from his briefing on Steve Rogers as a target had mentioned his connection with Tony Stark, though that hadn't been a factor in his kill plan. (Primarily because Tony Stark had publicly retired from being Iron Man, and Project Insight would have destroyed him before Rogers would have sought help. Tony Stark had been mostly irrelevant to the mission at the time.)
It hadn't taken HYDRA intelligence to track Steve's current whereabouts, however. Not with fan sites with trending “Cap Sighting” hashtags.
(Hashtags. He doesn't have any old memories for them, they're all new. Annoyingly new.)
The message was simple, a post card with a phone number, and one sentence - “I shouldn't have punched you in the face, but I couldn't figure out what else to do.” It was flip, he knew. It was also true, both for the Bucky in his old memories, and the newer ones he had made. The post card told Steve that the man he knew hadn't come back from the place he fell decades ago, though he has come somewhere closer.
Bucky could be flip if he wanted to. He had been nothing at all for far too long. To laugh, even at himself, was a godsend. It was something, it was real.
Steve called the phone number Bucky gave him the day the letter arrived, bypassing possibilities of tricks for hope. He knew exactly how that felt.
“Bucky?” Steve's voice was hopeful and cracked, also very slightly breathless, as if he'd dashed for a phone the moment the post card was in his hand. Captain America got a lot of fan mail, Steve Rogers only a little less. But he still read all of it. Bucky brushed a smooth ball of metal above his right eyebrow, remembering Steve sitting at temporary headquarters, reading through a huge bag of mail at lightning speed, a huge grin on his face. Sending the post card had been as calculated as any assassination he'd ever performed as the asset. But this time the outcome would be better.
It had to be.
If Steve's friends knew who had sent that post card, Bucky would have already been caught, so he knew for this moment that this was just the two of them. Separated by technology, it was already better than their last meeting.
“Yeah, it's me, now,” Bucky said. Now, now that I've had the time to figure things out. This is me, now. He had to know the same as Steve did, what he would think. If he remembered their past the same way... He pressed the hard bar of one of his right eyebrow piercings into his flesh. “Steve, can we meet?”
“Where? When? You could come to the Tower, it's safe,” Steve said instantly, trust and hope thick in his voice.
“Your friends?” Bucky had to ask; he'd worked too hard to be free to have his life sidelined again.
“They know about you. I was looking for you-”
Bucky felt a bubble of something lodge in his chest. They knew. Steve's friends knew and they hadn't found him, hadn't turned him over to whatever authorities remained after SHIELD's fall. The prideful part of him wondered if they'd ever managed to find him at all. The cool, practical part of him pointed out he'd spent weeks compromised, and maybe he'd just been left alone.
“I was looking for you too.” Not like Steve had, probably searching old HYDRA bases, but looking nevertheless.
Steve fell silent for a heartbeat. “I'm so sorry, I-”
Bucky cut him off, unable to hear Steve's guilt when he had a stud in his left ear reminding him of attempting to pulp Steve's face into the decking of Helicarrier Three. “I'm coming to the Tower. Make sure no one tries to shoot me.”
“Bucky...”
He made his words as forceful as possible. “You. Never. Hurt. Me. One hour.” He hung up the phone as the spinning, too-light sensation of unmooring threatened, and he tasted the barbell in his tongue, working the metal until the memories settle, good and bad and stupid and nightmarishly horrible. Steve, this was Steve who was going to trust.
------
Part 3
Part 1
Master Post
Author: jaune_chat
Artist(s): disreputabled0g
Fandoms and Spoilers: The Avengers (film),Captain America: TFA, Captain America: TWS
Characters/Relationships: James “Bucky” Barnes/Steve Rogers, James “Bucky” Barnes/OFC, James “Bucky” Barnes/OMC
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 12,517
Spoilers: Film
Content Advisory: Violence, piercings, explicit sex, uncertain memories
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing.
A/N: Written for a prompt from avengerkink. Written for journeystory. Thanks to brighteyed_jill for betaing!
Summary: The Winter Soldier was starting to remember, and would stitch himself back together any way he could.
He went to a professional for the rest of the metal so that the placement was perfect. He always picked the smallest, smoothest studs, his quick healing preventing them from migrating, keeping them solidly in place as if they had been a part of him from the beginning. Soon both ears were thick with metal, all over. Eyebrows, with tiny spikes, in several places. Nose. Lips. Tongue. Playing with the barbell helped when he couldn’t touch any of the others. Like a lightning rod, it grounded. Every bolt of metal a memory, fixed in time, put in order.
(Born in New York, I had a younger sister and brother, Steve and I were best friends - are best friends. Fought the good fight, protected him, he protected me. He would have done anything to save me.)
Some of the returning memories hurt like shoving a red-hot poker through his brain.
(Fatherly voice and casual cruelty, a message he had to hear to continue to operate. Cold-blooded murderer, and he was so, so good at it.)
Pierce, he learned from watching the news, was dead. Good. One less thing to put on his list.
Some memories nearly made him faint with nausea when they came into focus.
(Battering Steve’s face to a pulp because it was the only thing he could think to do to finish the mission that had been the only certainty in his world.)
Some memories were a little uncertain, but welcome, in a good way. He remembered the girls he’d flirted with before, smiling at them, exchanging small talk, dancing, and sometimes more. He’d wanted, before. He’d desired, and been able to do something about it.
He wanted to be able to do something about desire again. He wanted to be whole, no matter if he had to be stitched together with metal to do it.
James had switched motels again, to one with embarrassingly large mirrors in the bathroom. (Touching a stud in his left ear, he recalled a mission where he had to wait in a place like this for three days for his target. His support team had made enough crude comments to fill a TV series during that time out of sheer boredom. The asset hadn’t been bored. The asset hadn’t felt anything.) But it suited his purpose as he stripped in the caustic bright light of the tiled room and looked himself over critically. He hadn’t had much cause to think of his body as anything more than a vehicle for his head, and it was time to see what other memories he could jar loose and nail down.
For having endured seventy years of frozen hell, James has to admit that he actually looked very good. Aside from the scarring around the metal arm, he was clean, unblemished, courtesy of whatever chemicals and compounds Zola had used on him. Hard-muscled from a training regimen he had seen no need to stop, his body was healthy. He watched himself for a long time, letting what memories float to the surface that would, and ran his right hand down his flank, along his chest, over his nipple. Pleasure sparked and he drew in a sharp breath. Steadying himself, he reached down and held his penis, looser and less businesslike than when he urinated. Waited again, breathing, and let unmoored memories of laughing, pretty faces, flushed with desire, acres of skin exposed when he leaned over them, gasps and breathy moans, let all of that play across his mind’s eye. When he came back to himself, he was hard, and had a lingering memory of quashed guilt as he stroked himself, chasing the physical high the boys laughed about when the adults weren’t around. He touched the ninth stud up in his right ear and remembered washing out a stained sock in the sink so his mother wouldn't see the evidence of puberty. At the time, he'd been defiant and mortified. Now, it made his lips crease in a rusty smile.
James let himself go and regained his calm - he still had that desire somewhere in him. They hadn’t taken it from him, just made him ignore it. Not anymore. He grabbed his coat and headed out for the body piercing parlor he’d picked out.
--
James lay back in the chair as the artist arranged her needles, gauze, and the barbells he’d picked. Sleeves connected by straps across his collarbones still covered his arms, hiding the flesh-metal join of his shoulder. What could pass in the chaos of a concert or the casual scrutiny of walking around in public would never be able to be hidden if he had to take his shirt off, so he hadn’t even tried.
The asset had almost never been used for undercover missions due to the fact that they kept frying his brain, but they had made sure he could walk in a crowd or take public transportation if he had to (though in the latter decades, that had fallen by the wayside as they needed less stealth and more shock and awe). The arm was always a problem for disguise, but during such need the asset had been tasked to move it like it was fake instead of a superior replacement, swinging stiffly and using the hand as a crude pincher instead of a weapon in its own right. It was an easy disguise to assume. He’d told the artist a version of the truth she could accept to back up his story.
“I was in the army, lost my arm on a mission. I want to keep the cover on, if you don’t mind.”
James… Bucky had been a good liar, if the cause had been right. No one was going to be so much of an ass as to ask to see his war wounds in public, at least not anyone he was going to let near him with a needle. The parlor and artist he’d checked the same way he assessed a threat in the field. Their records were clean, and he knew where the exits were.
The artist was named Galena, and she was everything his prep team technicians weren’t. She didn’t resemble a single one of them he could remember, female or male, her shop was clean but eclectically decorated, the chair was very different, and he wasn’t strapped down and being offered a mouth guard so someone could try to simplify the world down to what the asset needed to know.
Galena didn’t need to know she was about to put nipple piercings in one of the most feared assassins of the 20th and 21st centuries.
He waited patiently as she put out the sterile equipment, put gloves on her clean hands, and forbore from telling her he'd once pulled a bullet from his own intestines with the help of a rusty spoon, so infection really wasn't going to be a problem.
“Most men find this more painful than their facial piercings,” Galena said, picking up a needle and checking the placement of the marker dots on either side of his right nipple. James just made a vague sound that could have been interpreted as agreement, part of his attention elsewhere, hunting for a surfacing memory to attach to the newest metal about to go into his body. Galena gently pinched the nub of flesh to make it stand up, and James found an image of a smiling girl, her head lying on his chest, her fingernails scratching over the tight, pink peak to hear him groan.
“Do it,” he said. A brief pinch and feeling of pressure, a sensation of heat, and a few moments later a barbell was neatly seated in his flesh. Galena was as good as his observations, and James found another memory to anchor as she approached his other side.
When she was done, James let his eyes close to focus on the memories of touch, pleasure, hot mouths against his skin and hands covering him. His heartbeat sped up a little, and James could feel a host of much older memories wanting a place to stay. None of them belonged to the asset, not a single one, because HYDRA hadn't cared for him to be distracted. They'd tried to destroy desire along with his past, making him into a murder machine, not a man.
James was a man. Bucky... Bucky had been, was, a man, a man who'd had women who'd lain against his naked chest. He reached up to brush his hand against the metal in his nose and mouth, remembering the scent of them, the taste of them, their skin and lips and so much more, hands in his short hair (HYDRA had kept his long, why? To make him unrecognizable to himself in the mirror, maybe), tugging as he put his mouth to work on them.
“It looks like you heal fast,” Galena said, throwing away the needles in their containers, and putting the other tools in the autoclave.
“I do.” James took his hand away from his mouth and moved his down to his belt. Galena's eyes followed, and she raised a speculative eyebrow.
“You're looking for some more, I take it?”
If he had to stitch himself together, he would do it to regain everything that he had. He promised himself that he would.
“Yeah.”
Galena smiled. “Let's see how those heal up, and then we can make another appointment.”
--
He made more than one. A lot more. There were a lot of memories in the flesh, a lot of smiling faces, a lot of dark rooms and passionate moans, some purely his own, others when he was joined in chorus with one or more. Sex had a lot of memories, a lot more good than bad, and each barbell in his flesh, whether along the shaft of his penis, through the head, or far lower, held another piece of himself together.
Apparently, before everything had happened, he'd been quite the horny devil. The thought made him smile when he ran his hand down the shimmering metal that decorated him.
There were other memories that surfaced when he felt the smooth metal against the hard, flushed skin of his dick. Memories he wasn’t exactly sure of, things he might have misinterpreted, less memories of encounters and perhaps more along the lines of speculations and half-forgotten daydreams. He and Steve had been close, and Steve had always been looking for the right partner. Maybe one or two of their glances had been a little more heated than just close friendship. Or maybe he was looking too closely at things that hadn’t made sense even back then.
But he wouldn’t know until he tried.
--
James wanted to try. He wanted to see if everything he’d learned, everything he’d discovered about himself, had made a difference. Could he be as human as he thought he was, as his newly-anchored memories said? Could he get close without hurting himself or someone else if something unexpected surfaced? It was a risk, a damn big risk if he miscalculated.
(A part of him was proud of that thought, that he could consider the life of a stranger to be important enough to worry about. The asset had only cared about who he was told was important. Collateral damage had literally meant nothing.)
Life was risk. And he was not the only damaged person in the world.
-
Her name was Simone. She wasn't really a fan of the concert he'd gone to, any more than he was, but she surveyed the crowd with an attention he recognized, even if her purpose was far more benign than was his usual. Little sparks of metal glinted from her skin nearly dark as his hair, striking sparks like lightning as the spotlights and lasers played over the crowd. Her smile was wide, genuine, brilliant and healthy and confident. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and what she wanted out of them.
Good, because James (Bucky) wasn't quite up for taking the lead on this one. He touched a stud near the top of his right ear and remembers Agent Carter (he had never gotten comfortable calling her by her first name except when Steve was waxing eloquent about her virtues around the campfire). He wasn't going to be diminished by a strong woman. No, he needed a woman who knew a hell of a lot more than he did right now.
“It's Simone,” she told him, when the crowd eventually let him drift close enough to her. She looked him up and down. He hadn't even said a word yet, but she'd already divined his purpose. If this were a mission, he would be so very compromised right now.
He brushed the seventh stud in his left ear with a carefully-stiff hand. He'd been punished when he failed. He wouldn't be punished now.
“James,” he managed. Simone looked him over, assessing him, and James had to wonder what expression was on his face that her smile turned dazzling. She raised an eyebrow in a way he vaguely remembered, and he nodded.
“Let's get out of here.” And she grabbed his right hand to pull him through the crowd.
One thing he did remember - things moved much faster in this time. That was all to the good.
Simone paused only once when they had tumbled together on the hotel bed, bracing herself against him, her hand sliding to the unyielding form of his left arm and the cloth that covered it. The brush of his hand against his right ear was quick as he slid his hand around her waist, pulled her closer, and whispered to her what he had to Galena.
She yielded in understanding, her hand coming to cup his face (he directed her down to his neck, not wanting the cascade of memories from his left side piercings to sully the moment). No panic was stirring, and James felt his blood heating as more of Simone's body was laid bare. His tongue touched the studs run through his lips, and he slid down her body until her thighs cradled his head (“Bucky, please, God, right there, please, please, just touch me, please!”) and leaned in to touch his tongue to the salt of her folds.
Simone screamed when she came, and there was no sound of pain or loss in it.
He felt his heart clenching, a part of it melding together whole, when she urged him up to have her own way with him.
-
His name was Chad. He was a month after Simone, another concert, another band, another city. He wasn't confident as Simone, but he was grinning and eager and intrigued by James' looks, and James needed that enthusiasm because his memories of this were murky. Unrealized. Thought about, but never really acted on.
Another thing to like about this time - when Chad planted a laughing kiss on his mouth in the middle of the crowd, barely anyone reacted.
He reminded James a little of a younger version of Morita, with less sarcasm and more jokes. He certainly could use the laughter.
Chad didn't seem to even give his left arm a second look, too intrigued by the novelty of the modifications James had made to his body. The look gave James a sudden surge of recklessness, brushing against a tiny stud he found a slow, dirty smile somewhere in him when he whispered where they could go to be alone.
Sex wasn't so different than with Simone. Different parts, but certainly nothing he hadn't seen before, and James (Bucky) felt the surge of pleasure take him by surprise when Chad ran a slick-lubed hand down his condom-covered cock, his fingers catching slightly on every small ball of metal up and down the shaft and head. Chad's hardness pressed against his in return wasn't so strange, not at all. It felt good, hot, and the heat let James move, explore, squeeze both of their cocks together, sliding in stuttering rhythm. It built something new in him as he threw his head back, right hand clenched hard on Chad's shoulder, barely holding back his strength.
He was still coming down when Chad had gotten his clothes on, and pressed another fast kiss to James' mouth.
“That was fun, man. Text me if you're around sometime.”
The door had shut before Bucky could even formulate an answer. By the time he had, all he could do was laugh. If Chad had come back, he might never have been able to understand.
But Bucky did. Right now, he did.
-
It was hard to get used to, being able to want, being able to act on it. And easy. New for the way he was now, anchored by the metal the held his past. Now there were new memories to entwine with the old, and the new ones stayed without needing to be riveted through his skin. He felt... like Bucky, like someone who could be him. Saying the name inside his own head didn't feel foreign anymore.
He headed for New York the next morning.
-
He mailed a message to Steve Rogers at the tall, ugly new building with Stark's name on it. SHIELD might have fallen, but Steve was never without a place for long. Information from his briefing on Steve Rogers as a target had mentioned his connection with Tony Stark, though that hadn't been a factor in his kill plan. (Primarily because Tony Stark had publicly retired from being Iron Man, and Project Insight would have destroyed him before Rogers would have sought help. Tony Stark had been mostly irrelevant to the mission at the time.)
It hadn't taken HYDRA intelligence to track Steve's current whereabouts, however. Not with fan sites with trending “Cap Sighting” hashtags.
(Hashtags. He doesn't have any old memories for them, they're all new. Annoyingly new.)
The message was simple, a post card with a phone number, and one sentence - “I shouldn't have punched you in the face, but I couldn't figure out what else to do.” It was flip, he knew. It was also true, both for the Bucky in his old memories, and the newer ones he had made. The post card told Steve that the man he knew hadn't come back from the place he fell decades ago, though he has come somewhere closer.
Bucky could be flip if he wanted to. He had been nothing at all for far too long. To laugh, even at himself, was a godsend. It was something, it was real.
Steve called the phone number Bucky gave him the day the letter arrived, bypassing possibilities of tricks for hope. He knew exactly how that felt.
“Bucky?” Steve's voice was hopeful and cracked, also very slightly breathless, as if he'd dashed for a phone the moment the post card was in his hand. Captain America got a lot of fan mail, Steve Rogers only a little less. But he still read all of it. Bucky brushed a smooth ball of metal above his right eyebrow, remembering Steve sitting at temporary headquarters, reading through a huge bag of mail at lightning speed, a huge grin on his face. Sending the post card had been as calculated as any assassination he'd ever performed as the asset. But this time the outcome would be better.
It had to be.
If Steve's friends knew who had sent that post card, Bucky would have already been caught, so he knew for this moment that this was just the two of them. Separated by technology, it was already better than their last meeting.
“Yeah, it's me, now,” Bucky said. Now, now that I've had the time to figure things out. This is me, now. He had to know the same as Steve did, what he would think. If he remembered their past the same way... He pressed the hard bar of one of his right eyebrow piercings into his flesh. “Steve, can we meet?”
“Where? When? You could come to the Tower, it's safe,” Steve said instantly, trust and hope thick in his voice.
“Your friends?” Bucky had to ask; he'd worked too hard to be free to have his life sidelined again.
“They know about you. I was looking for you-”
Bucky felt a bubble of something lodge in his chest. They knew. Steve's friends knew and they hadn't found him, hadn't turned him over to whatever authorities remained after SHIELD's fall. The prideful part of him wondered if they'd ever managed to find him at all. The cool, practical part of him pointed out he'd spent weeks compromised, and maybe he'd just been left alone.
“I was looking for you too.” Not like Steve had, probably searching old HYDRA bases, but looking nevertheless.
Steve fell silent for a heartbeat. “I'm so sorry, I-”
Bucky cut him off, unable to hear Steve's guilt when he had a stud in his left ear reminding him of attempting to pulp Steve's face into the decking of Helicarrier Three. “I'm coming to the Tower. Make sure no one tries to shoot me.”
“Bucky...”
He made his words as forceful as possible. “You. Never. Hurt. Me. One hour.” He hung up the phone as the spinning, too-light sensation of unmooring threatened, and he tasted the barbell in his tongue, working the metal until the memories settle, good and bad and stupid and nightmarishly horrible. Steve, this was Steve who was going to trust.
------
Part 3
Part 1
Master Post