A/N: Hi everyone, this is my very first venture into the Stucky fandom (and my very first Marvel fic too), so please go easy on me! X) I know, I know, I'm really late to the party – but better late than never, right? I hope you like my story, please feel free to let me know what you think (and to check out my other works if you want – they're all about the tv show Heroes, and the delicious couple of Peter Petrelli and Sylar).

Okay, that's me done now, I promise X) Enjoy!

The Last Word

"Longing."

A deep, gruff sound. A voice. His own voice. It cracked the dusty silence of the room like a whip, reaching to all corners of the small, cluttered apartment.

Then he was alone again.

Alone like always, a solitary soldier, an outcast even within his own mind... what was left of it, anyway. He barely knew himself anymore. He hadn't for a long time, for longer than most people even survived upon this earth. Longer than all of his victims had lived put together, no doubt. How strange a sensation, to look into your reflection and not recognise yourself. From two different walks of life. He was almost used to it now... but hopefully that was all about to change.

"Rusted."

The word ground through gritted teeth and a chill traced shivers down the man's spine. The hair on one arm and the back of his neck stood up in honour of goosebumps, but he just set his jaw harder and stared so intensely at himself that he might fall clean through the looking glass had his arms and legs not been bound to the chair.

He thought he was strong enough now to withstand it. Strong enough to stay in control, and prove to himself that he was more than what they made him. He had avoided this moment for so long... but now he was ready. Surely he must be by now...? This routine, this torture, these words were the biggest chain holding him back, the heaviest shackle around his throat tethering him to a life he wanted no part of anymore. He only wanted to be free.

"S-seventeen."

The thick, heavy straps around his wrists were reassuring in their discomfort. One scratched and chafed his right wrist, while his left perfectly endured the issue with the strength and resistance it had been built to possess. They were secured as tightly as he could manage – he could still taste the leather from where he'd tugged them with his teeth – and all he could do was hope they'd be enough to hold him back if...

"Day...break."

Suddenly he jumped, and a loud pang of metal against metal sang out in the compressed space as his elbow clanked off the armrest of the chair. The heightened senses of a trained weapon honed in on the raucous voices passing by his front door. It was only a group of kids, but his pulse continued hammering in his ears long after they disappeared into one of the upper apartments.

Bucky huffed out a deep breath and tried to force himself to concentrate again. He lifted his eyes to meet the exhausted, dark-rimmed ones of his reflection once more, and took the time needed to settle himself back into it. Bucky... 'Bucky?' ...Bucky...even if the name didn't quite sit right around his shoulders, like a uniform he had long since outgrown, it was the sentimental value of it that made him cling so stubbornly. It was also the only name he had, after all. And slowly... slowly it was beginning to feel better. He had called him "Bucky"... that man... the blond-haired one who haunted Bucky constantly in his dreams, his memories and every single news stand he passed.

He had almost forgotten his own appearance – sometimes from the inside it was too easy to forget what everyone else used to see. What they still saw. He'd barely recognise his own face in a photograph nowadays – even it it was of a different "Bucky" from a past life. But that other face... the one that followed him everywhere, the one he couldn't blink away, the one he found himself scrawling in the pages of his precious notebook over and over and over again... that one, he knew by heart. And it made him strong.

"Furnace."

Bucky peered at himself through curtains of dark, limp, stringy hair and the eyes of a severely tortured soul. He used to be a normal person once, he knew. It had said so on that plaque, in that display, through the dozens of photographs and videos of the same two young men, best friends and brothers in arms. They looked so content together, like the people Bucky watched every day: laughing and smiling and crying as they went about their normal, daily lives.

That was all he wanted... to be normal. Again. The wires within him were connected to the rest of a living body of flesh and bone after all, and the heart that beat within his aching chest pumped the genuine, pure concoction of blood through his veins. He was human... so there was definitely hope that he could be that way again. True, he didn't even know the sound of his own laugh, and it hurt whenever his face contorted into the unfamiliar, forgotten grimace of a forced smile. But the crying... that he had no problem with. Which was a start, at least.

"...Nine."

His voice shook this time, and the word tasted foul on his tongue. It was getting difficult to draw breath now, and his inhuman arm was twitching irregularly – due to simple nerves or the curse of the damned words, he was unsure. Skin shining in the dim light, hot and sweaty and struggling for breath, Bucky gripped the arms of the chair so hard it crumpled in his left palm, and fought with all of his resolve to keep his confidence from deserting him entirely.

He had to do this.

After living for so long in an unrelenting tornado of terror and self loathing, he had eventually decided that the only way to break this spell was to tackle it head on. Fear held him in its clutches, but fear's power only continued until the very moment he decided to step out from under its shadow. And so that was what he'd do. He had to be brave, he had to be strong! He couldn't hide away here forever in this eternal purgatory between where he had been and where he wanted to go. He had to be better than this – like someone who would fight for decades to stop a secret organization from taking over the world. Like someone who would evacuate an entire expanse of a crumbling city while it rose higher and higher into the atmosphere before ever thinking of himself... like someone who would continuously risk his life to save the soul of a seasoned, tortured assassin out for his blood.

"...B... benign."

He watched helplessly through blurry, wet eyes as pain stabbed into his mirror image as deeply as it did within his own ribcage. His throat compressed as vivid images danced before him like a grotesque film reel. He was forced to re-live his horrid past as dozens upon dozens of people died by his hand, the life leaving their eyes as simply as if someone had shut off the light, their phantom screams echoing louder in Bucky's pounding, splitting head than the bustling city just outside the apartment walls.

He wished he could tell them all how sorry he was. But nobody could reach them where they were now.

"...Home... homecoming..."

Suddenly Bucky was aware that his eyes were scrunched closed, but he couldn't remember when that had happened. His pulse was bubbling just below his skin, his throat dry and raw and he had barely even been able to whine that last word intact without his voice breaking on him. His entire being was struck with tremors, rolling through him from head to toe and all the way back again, a gruesome concoction of remorse, despair, terror and desperation that he couldn't even begin to break his way free from.

So close... so close... he had to do it... he had to...

"One...!"

That one had been the toughest. He barely breathed it out. But with it, came a sudden wave of serenity, washing over his strained, aching body and soothing the burns that tore at his battered and violated heart. Bucky blinked tiredly into the mirror, taking in the drained, flushed appearance of the person sitting opposite. The tear tracks staining his face, the veins standing out vividly on his neck and arm, the ever cold, unyielding hardness of the deadly, mechanic appendage welded to his left shoulder. He still didn't really know the man in the mirror. But he fully identified with the anguish that was etched deeply into every pore of his skin.

It was almost over. And then he'd have won. He'd have taken back his freedom and finally be able to hold his future in his own hands for the first time in over seven decades! That, or everything he had worked so hard for this past year would be ripped from him all over again. All because of those god-damned words. It was all a mind game, really, but he'd endured too many of those to last him ten lifetimes, and the scars of his past mistakes ran too deep to ignore. Either way, he had to take the chance. He had to be brave, the way he used to be when he was young and carefree and loved by a friend who he loved equally in return.

He had only to rest his eyes for a second before that same, familiar face danced before his vision, as pristine and perfect as it always was. Instantly, Bucky's resolve strengthened. If nothing else, he should do it for him. All he had to do was say the last word, and it would be all over. One way or another. Even if he lost himself for the countless time and he never became sane enough to track down his inspiration in person, if only just to apologise, at least he would have been brave enough to try.

For him... do it for him... for him...

Bucky's lips twitched a final time. But he didn't have the strength to go through with it. That man smiled at him behind his eyelids, warm and welcoming and, most importantly, home. He was too important, even just these half-formed thoughts of him were too precious to lose. Despite the effort it had taken to fight his way to this moment, the risk was just too great, in the end. And Bucky couldn't go through with it.

So instead, his last uttered word was the most important one of all.

"...Steve."