MCU fic: Renovation

[domarzione]

Renovation

3800 words | PG-ish | Bucky Barnes, Wanda Maximoff, Steve Rogers



"Are you ready?" Wanda asked softly.

The answer was no. The answer was always going to be no if Bucky had his druthers, but he didn't. Not when his past was still such a danger to everyone, not when Steve was willing to destroy his whole world to protect someone who could still be more enemy weapon than a man wearing his best friend's face. And so the answer had to be yes.

They were lying on a picnic blanket in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere (that was actually the Pine Barrens), not quite touching but near enough to. Steve was sitting a few feet away on his own blanket, headphones on and sketchbook out and drawing the peaceful world around them like this was actually a picnic. Bucky didn't want him there, didn't want anyone to see or hear what might be in the warzone of his mind, least of all Steve. But while Wanda was sure that she could handle herself and handle him, Bucky wasn't as confident. Which was why Steve was the compromise, present but not, within arm's reach but out of earshot.

"Close your eyes and follow me," Wanda said in the same soft voice and he wanted to ask where and how, but after a moment he understood. Somewhere beyond the back of his eyelids stood Wanda in a pool of light surrounded by darkness.

He felt himself walking, or at least getting closer to her, and when she was near enough to hold out her hand to his, she gave him a knowing smile that was more comforting than anything else. "I suspected this would be the case," she said with a nod. "But this will not do. We are not here to tell a ghost story, we are here to do history."

He shook his head, not understanding what she was saying even as he understood she was talking about him. "What--"

A mirror appeared a few feet away from them, an old mirror with a fancy frame and legs. Wanda led him over to it and he saw. Or, rather, he didn't see. He was invisible. He could see the clothes he was wearing, but there were no hands coming out of the sleeves, metal or flesh, and there was no head upon his shoulders.

"The person we are in our own minds is never the person the rest of the world sees," Wanda explained. "We have only our consciences and our self-esteem as our mirrors and they do circus tricks. But I find it easier to talk to a face, so please choose one. You don't have to be honest about it; they're not permanent. Your image here will change many times over, especially because you are still deciding who you are and who you can become."

He didn't ask how to do it; he just thought of how he looked and the Winter Soldier appeared. But then Bucky Barnes took his place, the one from Brooklyn, the one who'd never seen war except on the newsreels, looking impossibly young and innocent. It hurt to see that man-child and know what would become of him, but then the Winter Soldier returned, haunted and gaunt and gray with the ashes of the boy who'd been him long ago.

"That'll do for now," Wanda said. "Come, we have much to accomplish."

She started walking into the darkness and Bucky followed, then stopped. "Wait," he called. She turned back. "Why do I see you as you are?"

Her smile turned wry. "Because I am in your head and it is polite to dress appropriately for a visit."

For a moment, she flickered and then she was back... except not. Her right side was just skull and bones, no sinew or muscle or flesh. "Half of everything that I am died with Pietro," she said. "And I'm still learning to grow the rest back."

And then she was regular Wanda again, rings on pink fingers and matching blue eyes and she smiled once, too brightly, and then turned toward the darkness and gestured behind herself for him to catch up.

They did not walk in the darkness long; light started to fill the space, slowly, like a dawn. When it was light enough that he could see Wanda instead of just sensing her presence next to him, she stopped.

"Imagine a destroyed office," she told him. "Papers all over the place, furniture broken, just a terrible mess."

He did and then realized that he hadn't imagined anything, he'd remembered, and the space around them darkened into nothing again. He'd chosen an office in Strasbourg, 1974, right before he'd murdered the UN Deputy Undersecretary for African Economic Growth in his home.

"Try again," Wanda said gently in the darkness, her voice carrying no pity. She used to dig through people's nightmares for a living, so he supposed there was little that shocked her in anyone else's head.

This time, he chose to remember intentionally, but with more care in selecting the memory. The room they found themselves in now had once been in Holland, the library of the mansion of one of the local lords turned collaborators who'd been strung up by angry mobs by the time the Commandos had come through. It was opulent and old and utterly destroyed, antique tables and antique books in pieces strewn around the room, paintings marred, walls scribbled with graffiti. The bookcases were intact because they were built-in, but the rest looked like a hurricane had come through.

Wanda smiled as she took in the scene, but then sobered. "This room is now your mind," she told him. "Every piece of paper, every book, every overturned chair, everything here is a memory of yours and you have to clean it up if you want to be able to use this place again."

He looked at her sharply and she only raised her chin and looked right back at him in challenge.

"You came to me because you cannot order your own mind. You cannot tell what is memory and what is a lie HYDRA told you and what is a lie you told yourself so that you could survive what happened to you." She waved her arms to indicate the mess surrounding them. "I cannot do that for you. Nobody can do that for you. Nor should you want them to. You must order this place yourself so that you can live here--" she tapped her forehead with her fingers "--but also here." She put her hand over her heart. "It will not be quick or easy, but a task as important as this should not be rushed."

He looked around at the mess he'd blithely created before he'd understood why. "And if I just set fire to it all instead?"

He'd agreed to let Wanda mess with his head so he wouldn't be a threat to Steve or anyone else who didn't deserve it. He hadn't agreed to relive a hundred years of a life spent mostly in hell. He didn't want to go through his memories methodically and with care -- how many of those books lying broken-spined on the floor were scrapbooks of the Winter Soldier's deeds? How many of them were written in the blood of his victims? How many of them were written in his own blood and tears?

"Then you'd cease to exist," Wanda replied, unprovoked. She'd understood why he'd asked. "You'd be the golem HYDRA always knew that you were not. You'd just be Steve's to control instead of theirs. And you know that would destroy him as surely as you would destroy yourself."

He said nothing; she knew he would never do that to Steve and, in truth, did not want to do that to himself. But he knew that everything he touched in this room would bring pain -- even the good memories would bring the sharp sting of loss -- and he had simply experienced too much pain to be able to accept more easily, however good the cause. He hurt, in ways and at a depth he could not explain to anyone. He could fight if he had to, would run from anyone trying to capture him, and he would die for Steve as quickly now as he would have seventy years ago. But to willingly dive into this sea of pain... he couldn't help but hesitate and it had nothing to do with courage or toughness.

Wanda crossed the room carefully, mindful not to step on anything in a way she hadn't earlier. "I could lie to you and tell you that it will get easier after the beginning, although it will not. But while the bad will always be bad, after a while, the good will start being good. Will start doing good. You will never not miss what you have lost, who you have lost. But those memories will bring you joy again. That I can promise you."

He nodded, aware that her wisdom was probably true and probably true because it came from personal experience, but he wasn't ready to hear it yet and have it mean anything.

"The first thing to do is pick a corner to start in," Wanda went on after a moment. "And then create some containers to hold everything. You are free to organize your thoughts as you wish, but just for the time being, I would suggest just sorting your memories into broad categories -- Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier, for example -- and then under each things that you know are true and things that you aren't sure about."

He turned toward the corner nearest them, in which a club chair was on its side, a brass floor lamp leaning against it at a precarious angle, and books and papers piled high on and around them. He walked toward the pile carefully, not knowing if the papers underfoot were pictures of his siblings or crime scene photos, and righted the lamp, which had no working bulbs.

"Can I just think in new lights or does it have to be done metaphorically?" he asked, a little more sarcastically than he really meant.

"Sometimes a lamp is just a lamp," Wanda replied with a wink.

He frowned at the lamp and soon it had three working bulbs. And then a lampshade because he could.

Behind him, he could hear Wanda laugh. It wasn't a pretty laugh, but it was genuine. He carefully collected the debris strewn atop the chair's exposed back and set it on the floor in a messy pile before uprighting it, too. And then pausing because this wasn't a chair that had come from the mansion outside of Breda; it had come from a living room in Brooklyn. He knew that if he moved his left hand he would see a small stain on the arm from where his sister Millie had spilled Pa's coffee and that if he took a deep breath, he'd smell his father's pipe tobacco. He set the chair down gently, as much for what was still on the floor as for the chair itself, and then just looked at it. Remembered it. Where it had sat in the front room (near the window, further from the radiator than Ma's). What his father had looked like sitting in it after dinner with his pipe and his glasses, reading the newspaper and turning down the radio when he thought nobody would notice. He remembered sitting in it as a little boy, on his father's lap and on his own pretending to be his father, and when he got to be too old to do either and had to watch his brother and sisters still enjoy the privilege. He remembered the first time he'd sat in the chair after that, which was the first time he came home from the war -- the only time he came home from the war -- already a sergeant and already too old in his bones and he remembered his father telling him to sit there because even if he wasn't the man of this house, he was still a man of this house. And how that had almost made the both of them cry, for different reasons.

He took a deep breath and sat down carefully now, listening for the squeak from the right rear leg and smiling when he heard it because it seemed to loosen something inside. Not more memories, not precisely, but... Wanda had gone with the metaphor of a ransacked room and that was fine, that worked. But in his own imagination, he'd seen a warehouse, one of the Army depot kinds with tens of thousands of identical boxes piled high as far as the eye could see, all locked and some of then with no labels and most with wrong labels and in those boxes had been his life broken down into pieces and he hadn't known which ones to open, which ones to cherish because they'd been good memories, and which ones to burn unseen because they were covered in blood and gore. And here he'd gone and opened the first box and it hadn't caused a new wound and he knew it was messed up that that was enough to be a victory.

When he looked up, Wanda was watching him from a stool she'd righted and he nodded. He was ready to go on.

"Build yourself some containers to hold what you've gone through," Wanda told him.

Four metal footlockers with handles appeared in the small bit of empty space against the nearest wall.

Wanda sighed. "Don't make them look like garbage cans, James," she said with a frown. "File cabinets or suitcases or whatever you old-timey people used to use to hold things that meant something to you."

The footlockers morphed into steamer trunks, since he'd hate to disappoint her with something from the twenty-first century. He labeled two of them Bucky Barnes and two of them Winter Soldier and then he paused because the next step was possibly going to put him on top of a landmine.

The first paper he reached down and retrieved from the floor was blank on the back, but when he turned it over, it had writing on it. The words described a mission he'd been sent on in Vietnam in 1952 and suddenly he could see all of it in his head. He'd been dressed as a French soldier, sent to make sure that Giáp's troops weren't annihilated near Nghia L? by taking out anyone on either side who looked like they could be problematic. He shook his head to clear the images and the smells and the rest of it, then put the page in the trunk marked Winter Soldier: True.

"Here." Wanda held out a book to him. "Better story, I think."

He accepted the book, wondering briefly if he should be embarrassed that Wanda was there, sifting through his memories alongside him. Or angry at the violation, maybe, after he'd gone so long having nothing of himself to call his own. But he wasn't, not really. Better her than Steve, who'd have a personal reaction to everything, good or bad. Wanda didn't know all of his history, he didn't think, just the overview and not the details, and she was too young in most ways -- and too jaded in others -- for those details to impact her the way they would Barton or Wilson. Who'd grown from boys who'd idolized the Commandos to men who'd been warriors long enough to appreciate what kind of a threat he'd been as the Winter Soldier -- and who saw Steve as a friend and worried for him when he wouldn't worry after himself.

The book was from -- of -- his childhood, the summer of 1924. He and Millie and Doris had been packed off to their Grandmother Barnes in Indiana to spend two months on the farm and stay out of trouble and, although they hadn't known it at the time, allow their mother to take in washing and other work that was possible with only the baby to take care of. He flipped through the book and remembered how much fun he'd had chasing chickens and learning to milk a cow and how awful manure smelled and how it was too quiet at night and how many stars there were in the sky so far from Brooklyn. He felt the prickle of tears in his eyes as he put the book carefully at the bottom of the Bucky Barnes: True trunk, glancing over at Wanda to see if she'd noticed, but her back was to him. She was making piles on the floor, not sorting anything, it didn't look like, but clearing a path among the clutter.

The next piece of paper was Alexander Pierce telling him what he now knew were lies so that he'd be willing and eager to slaughter a promising cancer researcher. He knew the memory was true inasmuch as this is how it had happened, but Sungki Chon had never consorted with terrorists and had never worked on neurotoxins and the Winter Soldier had never saved anyone by killing him. He crumpled it up and tossed it into the Winter Soldier: Lies trunk. It didn't make the memory disappear, or even fade, but... somehow, he felt surer of the truth now and the pull of the conditioned lies felt weaker. Maybe it was just in his head -- beyond the fact that they were in his head already. But he felt better, a little less confused, and he'd take it.

He went through the papers by his feet for he didn't know how long, some good, most horrifying. He saw things he couldn't believe he'd forgotten, mostly as the Winter Soldier -- little acts of astonishing cruelty, larger atrocities he'd midwifed into being, events that made him sick to recall now and he realized that the mindwipes HYDRA-as-SHIELD had put him through were to keep him from remembering those events as much as keeping his pre-HYRDA past from him. They'd relied on context and a constructed reality to control him, but there was no context that made palatable what he'd done in their name and they'd known that, too.

"James."

He opened his eyes; he'd closed them for a moment, just to take a break from the pendulum swings of the emotions his memories brought forth. Anger, mostly. Humiliation. Horror most of all. And once in a while a blessed respite of a good memory that left him aching with longing for both the people he'd left behind and the person he'd been when he'd known them. It was exhausting.

"It's time to go," Wanda told him. She was standing up and she held her hand out to him, an offer to help him stand. Her right hand, which didn't exist here except for show, to be grasped by his left, which even here he couldn't pretend was real. He doubted she meant it as a message, but he could take it as such.

The room was still a disaster, he saw as he stood. Wanda had cleared a path through the debris, but there was still so much scattered around unmanaged and, for a moment, the scale of what sort of job he had ahead of him overwhelmed him.

"A part of me still wants to burn the place down," he said as they started walking through the cleared path toward the door. He'd gotten through a few pages and felt worse than if he'd run for miles; there was an entire library here to read and remember and assess and process and... and it would take time, time he wasn't sure he had, to undo seventy years of HYDRA's perversion. It would take strength, too, and that wasn't anything that HYDRA had given him -- it was what they'd taken away. But maybe George and Winifred Barnes had given him enough for the task. Maybe Steve could cover the rest; it would be his kind of long odds.

"As long as the rest of you understands the consequences," Wanda replied, but there was something in her voice that made it clear that she wasn't worried that he actually would set his past aflame. She stopped walking before they got to the door. "You won't need me to come back here, now that you know where the room is. Try not to be too much like Steve and think you can get it all done at once if you just work hard enough."

He smiled weakly. "I know better."

Wanda opened the door and went into the darkness and he took one last look behind him before following.

A moment later, they were back in the field, lying on the blanket. The sun had changed position, so a few hours had passed, but it was still high in the sky and he was surprised because it felt like it had been much longer, like night should have fallen while they were away in his head.

Steve was on his blanket still, but he was lying on his back with his hands folded behind his head and his eyes closed. He wasn't asleep, that Bucky knew before Steve stirred to full alertness the moment Wanda moved to sit up. Bucky followed suit, but with less grace; he felt a little hungover.

"How did it go?" Steve asked, shifting so that he was sitting up with his legs folded. His gaze flitted between Bucky and Wanda before settling on Bucky, who let himself be examined. He'd gotten used to this little role reversal -- before, it had always been him giving Steve the once-over, even after he was Captain America -- and, far from resenting it, he'd grown to appreciate it. It was nothing like the examinations for defects and damage he'd submitted to as the Winter Soldier, was its opposite with Steve's clear concern for his happiness and well-being as primary over how efficiently he could perform physical tasks. Whatever Steve saw now, at least, he could live with and he returned his attention to Wanda.

"It was a good beginning," she assured. "But only a beginning,"

Steve nodded, then looked back at Bucky. "How do you feel?"

Bucky laughed at that because over the course of this adventure he'd felt almost everything. "A little worn out," he answered, since he saw no reason to lie. "A little less confused."

The glad smile he got back was the reason he'd never burn the room down.