Bucky Barnes has always carried the weight of his past like a second skin. Decades as the Winter Soldier left him haunted, trained to obey and destroy, yet tethered to fragments of who he used to be. Even after the world started to shift around him, even after Steve and the Avengers gave him a chance at something resembling a normal life, the memories never fully left. They waited in the dark corners of his mind, in the twitch of his metal arm, in the sudden spike of fear at the wrong sound in the night. He’s learned to live with it, mostly. To manage it. But some ghosts, he’s discovered, aren’t just echoes—they are living, breathing, and burning.