Work Text:
“Take a trip with me,” Tony says, collapsing on top of him, grabbing the remote out of his hand before Bucky can stop him and turning off the TV, cutting Megyn Kelly off mid-sentence on another one of the seemingly endless roundtable discussion on the Winter Soldier’s place on the Avengers roster.
At this point Bucky is pretty sure he can do an accurate impression of both sides of the debate. Bucky the Victim vs Bucky the Assassin. Rarely, they get creative and add in the ever popular (and Bucky’s personal favorite) Bucky the poor unstable woobie, those brave Avengers for taking him in, I hear Tony Stark’s dating him, how precious, now lets keep him away from the weapons but no need to lock him up, of course!
(It’s rarely used because its hard to sum the position up in a snazzy caption, you see. Tony calls it the ‘Bucky the Dog’ argument. ‘You’re like a rescue,’ he’d explained. ‘Apparently we need to feed you, house you, but not let you out because you’ve been raised badly and don’t know any better, and might go gnawing off some poor kid’s arm for looking at you the wrong way.’
Tony hates Bucky the Dog.)
“Ignore the crazies,” Tony wheedles. “Pay attention to me.” He makes grabby hands that Bucky grabs up and uses to drag his boyfriend closer. “So take a trip with me?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to take a trip?” Tony says, affecting an innocent expression. “Because the Tower has access to too many 24 hour news channels? For the opportunity of new and exciting places to have sex? Bucky! Stop with the patient eyebrows.” Bucky mouths ‘patient eyebrows’ to himself, shaking with laughter. “It’s a surprise.”
“Oh, God,” Bucky groans. The last ‘surprise’ of Tony’s was a cake filled with strippers. For Natasha.
Tony seems to read his mind and points an accusing finger at him. “You cannot deny that was amazing and she loved it.”
Natasha had loved the strippers. She knew at least eight new ways to bend now.
“Alright,” Bucky agrees, and accepts his boyfriend’s gleeful, slightly sloppy kisses with a smile.
“It’s not an argument of what James Barnes deserves, that’s a complete strawman. It’s a question of what he can handle. The man has had an incredibly difficult life, one that’s produced well documented instances of PTSD and dissociative attacks. This is not a man equipped to handle the kind of stress the Avengers are put under every day-”
“He was a monster, plain and simple. And maybe we can believe Mr. Stark and Captain Rogers here, maybe the monster has been taken out, but what kind of scars did that leave-”
“I mean, in all honesty, how can he ever be trusted? How will we ever know?”
“Hey.” A foot kicks at his own, knocking Bucky out of his miserable recollections.“I know that face. This plane is a That-Face Free Zone.”
He kicks back at Tony. “It’s nothing, Punk,” he says, mustering up some semblance of a smile. It just makes Tony grimace, then crawl over so he can sit beside him.
“How ‘bout just no faces at all?” he asks as he settles. “For a former super spy you have horrible facial control.” Bucky stiffens up beside him and Tony sighs, taking his hand. “James.”
James. That’s all its ever taken from Tony. His name, said in that fond, slightly impatient tone. “James,” Tony had said, finding James in the aftermath of a panic attack that had ended in the destruction of his living room. “James,” he had said when he built a new arm and the first thing Bucky did with it was play fetch with the bots. “James,” he had said when Bucky had finally surrendered and kissed him. “What took you so long?”
Now Tony sits with him, patient, staring out the window so Bucky feels distinctly unenclosed. He hadn’t been like this at the start of their relationship and its nice, sometimes, to think that Bucky has taught him some things, too.
“They’re not wrong,” he finally says, and Tony takes that as his cue to finally turn and look. “The news. I’m a complete mess three days out of five. I remember all of it, everything I did, so it’s all still there in my head. I can’t be trusted.”
“I trust you,” Tony responds immediately. “Am I an idiot?”
“No.”
“No, James, I am very smart.” Bucky smiles painfully and Tony clenches his hand. “Look, you being an Avenger? That’s always your choice. I’m sorry if we’ve pressured you-”
“You haven’t-”
“Oh, we totally have. Especially Steve. But you’ll need to discuss that with him. As for the rest - those vultures have only ever seen skin-deep, trust me on this. If I listened to them, let them dictate my life, I’d’ve ended up face down in a ditch bleeding Patron by the time I was twenty five.”
Bucky pulls his hand away so he can wrap his arm around Tony and hold him close. “You hate tequila,” he mutters, and Tony laughs.
“See? They don’t know anything. All they saw of me was a drunken overgrown fratboy and all they see of you is the Winter Soldier. Thing is, yeah, they’re not wrong every once in awhile, but they never have all the story. The Winter Soldier is not everything you are. You’re Buck, you’re James, you’re Sergeant Barnes.
“And by the way, you’re only a mess two out of five days. At most. The other three?” Tony smiles at him. “You are the best, the bravest man I have ever known.”
“Jeez, Tony,” Bucky breathes, because he never knows what to do with these pep talks. He wants to believe him, but he is constantly surrounded by heroes nowadays, and he is always reminded of his bloody past and how painfully he falls short, how impossible it seems to ever come back from that, even when he sleeps every night next to a man who did just that. He drops a kiss on Tony’s head and leans back into the chair. “So where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise, Buck. A s-u-r-p-r-i-s-e? Your dementia is showing again, old man.”
“I’ll show you old-” Bucky tips his boyfriend over in the seat.
“Oh God, I’m so glad you believe in stubble-”
“'Believe?' Facial hair’s not like Santa Claus, doll-”
“James.”
They touch down in Washington, DC. Tony takes them to a hotel first to freshen up, which for some reason means busting out the baseball caps and shades for both of them. Then they hope in a car that drops them off at the Mall. Tony leads them to the National Museum of American History and Bucky stops dead.
“The Smithsonian? Tony, I’ve been here before…”
“Yes. When you had just broken your brainwashing. Somehow I’m thinking you weren’t exactly absorbing all that you could.” Tony looks at the ground, the space where Bucky has taken a step backwards, and grabs his hand. “I just wanted you to see something, but we can leave.”
Bucky stares up at the building. The last time he’d been here was a blur of memories without context and a constantly building terror at what had happened to him. He had been scared. But Tony is with him now. “No, I’m fine. Show me.”
The Captain America section is as busy as ever, and this time Bucky notices how many of the exhibits bear a tiny inscription under the description: Donated by Howard Stark and the Stark family.
Tony smirks when he notices where Bucky’s gaze is lingering. “Yeah, let me tell you there is nothing quite like meeting the men your dad literally collected.” Bucky waits for a moment to see if his smirk goes sharp and sad, but Tony just wanders on. He’d let go of his anger about Howard around the same time he’d let go of his anger towards Bucky.
They stop in front of the glass wall bearing his name, date of death (which bears a new addendum in tiny print of his miraculous recovery in 2016), height, serial number, rank, and a summary of his life.
“James Buchanan Barnes,” Tony murmurs.
“In five hundred words or less,” Bucky says. He doesn’t mean to sound as bitter as he does, but Tony just smiles sympathetically at him and takes his hand, leading further.
They pass wall after wall of Steve Rogers, Captain America, Brooklyn’s Favorite Son, and American Legend. Bucky can see where the facts have gotten muddled: for example, he knows for a fact that the assault on the HYDRA base on the border of Luxembourg was planned by Dugan, not Steve, and was a smashing success, but facts rarely stand up to myth. “Bet Steve hates that.”
“He does. We’ve been petitioning to make them get their asses in gear and change that for years,” Tony groans lowly.
Tony tugs him further, further into the exhibit, a part Bucky never visited before, too skittish about lingering last time. There is a wall with a long line of booths cordoned off by black curtains. The Howling Commandos: From the Other Side, a banner reads overhead, and Tony leads Bucky into one. They squeeze onto a seat, Tony puts his arm around Bucky, and then he presses play.
An old man appears on screen, looking to the side as if listening to someone. He nods, and chuckles. “My name is Peter Montcourt,” he says, his French accent extraordinarily thick. “I was nine years old when the Howling Commandos liberated the town of Bayeux from Axis control. My hometown.”
“I had lost a brother, a father, already. My town was overrun with Nazis, Italians. People disappeared during the night, never heard from again. Everyday we heard - it might be you. You might be next.
“Then one night we heard gunfire and explosions and I remember thinking that this was it, they had grown tired of watching us, now they were killing us all. A soldier burst into my house with a gun, and I stood over my mother, but the shot never came. He was gunned down.
“I never met Captain America. Steve Rogers did not liberate Bayeux. He was leading another push. Bayeux was liberated by-”
“It was me,” Bucky breathes, tears in his eyes as he remembers, and Tony’s hand smooths down his arm.
“Sergeant James Barnes. The same James Barnes who gunned down the man who wanted to hurt us. He came into our house after that, he told us who he was and that he was a sniper, and asked us kindly if he could take a position in my room upstairs, because it had good sightlines. We of course agreed. He told us to hide, but I stayed and watched him. He remained calm, and efficient. He never panicked. He was very brave.
The man grows a little teary-eyed. “People do not talk about Bayeux much, because the very same day Captain Steve Rogers freed a POW camp near Lyon. But I do not forget. None of us in this town do. We owe Sergeant Barnes and his men our lives. I was very sorry when he died. He was a good man.”
The video freezes and Bucky lurches forward, pressing his hand against Montcourt’s face. “He grew up, James,” Tony whispers. “Had a family. All because you saved him.”
“I’m not him,” Bucky says hoarsely, tears nearly blinding him. “I’m not the sergeant.”
“Mm. But he is a part of you.” Tony intertwines their fingers. “I just…I wanted you to see, know, I guess, that you are…more than the Winter Soldier. More than whatever they call you. That there’s as much greatness in you as darkness. You were a good person, Buck and…we can’t all be war heroes. Sometimes we’re just victims. It doesn’t diminish you or what you did or what you can do. I’m - shit, I’m sorry, I’m so terrible at this. I just thought you should see.”
Bucky is quiet for a very long time, staring at Montcourt. He remembers that little boy and his mother. He had remained in their home for three days, defending it and taking out enemy soldiers. The woman had brought him food that he never ate. The boy kept him awake with conversation. They had been the brave ones.
He withdraws his hand and places it over Tony’s. “Thank you,” he tells him, and the other man smiles tentatively. “I - I get it.” He isn’t the Soldier or the Sergeant. He’s just Bucky now, with shades of all of them thrown in, but maybe…maybe that isn’t so bad. At the very least, he remembers how to be strong and good. And if he needs a reminder, he has Tony and Steve and the Avengers.
They don’t get to decide what he is or isn’t. Only Bucky does that. And he doesn’t have to be a hero. He can just be…an Avenger.
“Are there more?” he asks, gesturing towards the screen. Tony’s smile goes full-blown and Bucky can’t help it, leaning forward to kiss him soundly. “I love you.”
“You, too,” Tony replies softly, pulling away. The moment goes soft and sweet for a moment, but that was never Tony’s particular style and sure enough he pulls away, his grin going positively wicked. “Ninette three booths down tells a charming story involving you, her, Dugan, my dad, two goats, and a modified washing machine. I would love to hear your version of it.”
Outside the booth an old man is waiting his turn with his wife. He steps aside for Bucky and Tony but freezes dead when he catches a good glimpse of Bucky’s face, looking back over his shoulder at the Barnes Memorial for a moment before turning back. Bucky freezes when the man raises his hand, but he merely salutes.
Bucky returns it, sloppily, then heads for Tony, who has been lowly calling his name: “James.”