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She was doing it again, sharpening knives in the middle of his living room floor. He rolled his eyes and pretended to be annoyed by it. He wasn't. He found it kind of endearing, which was probably concerning. Sergeant James Barnes amused by a knife wielding Red Room assassin. Go figure. His therapist would love to hear about that.
She knew about Yelena, of course. Bucky had told Doctor Raynor about her pretty soon after Christmas. He'd been feeling pretty low at the time after parting ways with Sam or Captain America as people were calling him now.
They'd tried to make it work for six months, the whole mission partners thing. It didn't work. He supported Sam. He respected him, but he just couldn't work with him. He was aware enough to recognise a potentially toxic thing when he saw it.
Sam wasn't Steve and expecting him to live up to every expectation Bucky had of the man who carried on that mantle was unrealistic to say the least. Not to mention unfair and damaging to any kind of friendship or trust that existed between them.
Not that Sam was entirely blameless either, but Bucky was done picking him apart over it, analyzing everything Sam did and contrasting it to what Steve would have done. It wasn't healthy and it sure as hell wasn't helpful. So he and Sam agreed to put some distance between them for a while.
He'd help if Sam got himself in a tight corner and needed an assist. Of course he would. But that wasn't going to be a regular thing. Sam was perfectly capable on his own, not that it had taken him more than a month to find a new partner, which told Bucky that Sam recognised things weren't going to work with the two of them.
It was fine. Torres was a good kid, smart and loyal and committed to never letting Sam or his country down if he could help it. He'd be a good Falcon, if not a great wingman, since it was pretty open knowledge that he and Sam were a little more than mission partners.
Good for Sam. It wasn't easy to go on missions with a significant other. Not that Bucky had a significant other. Well, he and M'Baku wrote to each other sometimes, but they weren't dating or anything.
He just missed him and he'd been told pretty damn firmly by the Dora Milaje that he wasn't wanted in Wakanda after the whole debacle around springing Zemo from prison, which, yeah, he could see how that wouldn't sit well with the Wakandans. Sam had been right about that.
Maybe it was a good thing. Not Zemo, but distance from M'Baku. He was a little too ready to disappear into the mountains with him. It would be easy. It was hard, going to therapy and trying to build some kind of stable, normal life. He resented therapy less now. It was easier now that it was his choice to go.
It never had sat right with him, being compelled to go to therapy, to talk about the things he'd witnessed, the things he'd been a part of unwillingly, the things he knew. People didn't talk about Hydra and live. That wasn't how they worked.
But they'd been wiped out so thoroughly by the Avengers, their secret projects broadcast so widely by Natasha Romanoff that he could speak about his own experiences with relative freedom. He was thinking about writing a book, actually.
Not a book that would ever be published or read by anyone else, just a book for himself, a compilation of his journals, only in a more cohesive form than his current thirty odd notebooks. Yelena supported that. She had her own horrific experiences to come to terms with.
That wasn't what drew them together into their own odd partnership. People thought it was. The ex Red Room assassin and the much feared former Hydra agent getting it on behind closed doors. That wasn't what happened when Yelena stayed at his place, which she did four nights out of seven this week.
There was nothing sexual between them, nothing romantic. Yelena was aroace for starters. Sex was off the table when it came to her and Bucky never looked at her like that anyway. He was touch aversive as it was. That was part of the reason he walked away from Sam. The guy was big on handshakes and hugs and Bucky just couldn't deal with that on top of hearing “you'll get used to it, Buck.”
He wouldn't and that was the military attitude, wasn't it? It really hadn't changed. If you don't like something, get over it. He couldn't and it was one of the things that made him recognise the toxicity of working with Sam. Sam knew a lot about things like survivors guilt and PTSD, but not this, not seventy years of periodical torture and a level of dissociation so complete that his body didn't feel like his own sometimes.
He didn't blame Sam for not handling it perfectly. It was hard for most people to understand. People that weren't Yelena, that is. She'd lived with chemical forms of mind control and brainwashing from the time she was a child. She knew at least part of what he went through and that was why she spent nights at his place, so they could share nightmares and coffee together.
It was nice to feel understood and she'd quickly become like the little sister he'd never… Well, he'd had a little sister, but Becca and Yelena were nothing alike. The older brother feeling stuck though, even seven months on. He missed his sister and the man he'd looked at as both best friend and brother.
Yelena was grieving her own sister and grappling with her identity post Red Room. Bucky had experienced and continued to experience the same struggle. He only knew what he wasn't anymore: the Winter Soldier, but he also wasn't Bucky. He felt like a big part of that identity went away when Steve did.
He much preferred to be called James these days. It was a reminder that he was his own person before Steve and that he could be again after, that he wasn't just Captain America's best friend, but a person with a story that was very separate from Steve's, even though their paths had converged at times.
Yelena always called him James. She was good like that. He set a cup of coffee on the floor in front of her, earning a small smile from Yelena, who paused in the middle of sharpening her knives to ask him a question.
“Have you ever built a pillow fort?”
Bucky frowned, considering as he said, “Yeah, I guess… When I was a kid. Have you?”
Yelena shook her head. “No. I never was a kid,” she said quietly. “The Red Room took that from me. We didn't build pillow forts there and it wouldn't have protected us if we had.”
“We?” Bucky said, gently prompting, encouraging her to open up to him if she felt safe enough to do so.
“My sister and I. Natasha,” Yelena explained, her voice breaking on the last word.
“Natasha.” Bucky sighed, needing to say aloud the name that was part of the reason Yelena had sought him out at all.
Her mother or the closest thing Yelena had to it, her real mother as she always claimed Melina was, having known no other, had connections to the Winter Soldier program and the experiments conducted on his brain, mapping it and determining the center for mind control.
Those scientists pinpointed it for the Winter Soldier's masters to use with deadly consequences. That connection wasn't one he liked nor was it even a healthy one, but it had drawn Yelena and Melina to him, the former searching for answers about her own chemical subjugation and her sister's psychological manipulation and Melina searching for redemption.
“I dreamt about Natasha again,” Yelena admitted, setting down her knife and picking up the cooling cup of coffee. “Do you ever dream about her? You knew her.”
“Not very well,” Bucky muttered with a doubtful shake of his head. “It didn't matter to her, of course. She knew Steve. That was enough. Natasha was… very protective. I didn't deserve that. Not from her… Yeah, I have dreams about her sometimes…” He paused, then added, “She deserved better.”
“If everyone got what they deserved it would be a very different world,” Yelena observed, taking a cautious sip from her cup.
“You're not wrong,” Bucky replied, moving to sit opposite her on the floor.
He never got tired of it somehow. Talking to Yelena about Natasha and even his own history with Hydra wasn't something he could easily share with anyone else. The world had moved on in a sense. Brainwashed assassins now paled in comparison to alien attacks and reality altering stones. He'd felt erased in the wake of it. Of course that had literally been the case in the Snap, but Yelena was helping him reclaim his life, building an identity he was comfortable with owning.
“Hey, do you wanna build that fort?” he asked when some minutes passed without Yelena speaking.
The assassin frowned and tossed him a doubtful look as she said, “With you?”
“With me, yeah,” Bucky agreed, nodding his head. “I used to be pretty good at it. I built a lot with Steve when we were kids. It felt like it was just the two of us, like we could keep the world out if we tried hard enough.”
Yelena frowned and set down her cup. “You couldn't though.”
She was right of course. Yelena had no illusions about safety, having been effectively raised in the Red Room, torn away from the only family she had ever known and subjected to the harshest and most damaging of treatment in an attempt to make her unbreakable. It saddened Bucky to think about it sometimes. Despite the monstrous things Hydra had done to him, he'd at least had a childhood. Yelena hadn't. Not really. Not hardly at all.
“Sometimes it's nice to pretend for a little while,” he said quietly, struggling to keep his voice even.
“Alright, James,” Yelena agreed with a small smile. “...just for a little while.”
The resulting pillow fort lasted for a good six months. Bucky found that he had fewer nightmares when he slept in it, with Yelena a couple of feet away, close enough for comfort, but not so close that he felt suffocated and stifled, reliving trauma through unwanted touch. It was things like pillow forts which a lot of people wrote off as childish and silly and something that he should have outgrown years ago, that made the biggest difference in the world.