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He’d been here for weeks. Seemingly endless.
Wake up. Animus session. Hours pass by in what seem like minutes, sometimes seconds, only to be escorted back to his cell of a room by Pierce’s assistant, Romanoff. The lousy meals he was fed were slid through a slit in the door at seemingly odd hours. It was hard to tell, he never knew what time it was anymore – there were no clocks in the room.
(Why’d he volunteer for this? Why’d he let himself be talked into being Fury’s data mine, the assassin sent to infiltrate. He thinks he knew once. The answer is on the tip of his tongue whenever he talks to Natasha.)
Half the time Bucky didn’t know whether he was dreaming or hallucinating, memories bleeding into reality just as easy as breathing, lashing out at people who weren’t there. Phantoms of a past he’d never lived. The dreams – no, nightmares – were worse than the ghosts, feelings of dread seeping into REM, leaving him awake with the sensation that someone – something – had had its claws within his skull, whispering words he couldn’t remember and leaving behind scratch marks that would scar.
Maybe he’d been here longer than he thought. Months, possibly. Surely no more than a year….
(This had been a mistake. Stupid. Noble causes, noble actions, right? Right. Foolish. A deed reaping little reward.)
He was losing his mind. Bits and pieces of personal identity falling between the cracks in binary codes and the Animus fragments of virtual history. Strip-mining his brain with each session until eventually (soon) there would be nothing but an empty slate.
He told himself he needed to stay focused, needed to find something to ground himself in the present. So he thought of Steve. Steve, who he’d known since they were kids at The Farm, who he ran off to New York with. Steve, who he needed to save, because he was next – Bucky’d heard as much. Steve, for whom he talked desperately to Natasha – practically begging her to recall her roots, to get the both of them out because god they did this to her, too.
(Why does it matter? He doesn’t know her. Or does he? Did he?)
When they stuck a needle and pumped a syringe into the side of his neck one morning before a session, the only thought he could manage before he blacked out was ‘this can’t be good’. The last thing he sees is a stunning golden light.
(He doesn’t remember it later, of course. He doesn’t even remember who sedated him – it was better that way.)
****
He woke up in his room to Natasha lightly slapping his face, her eyes concerned – which is new, nice, but familiar (he thinks that’s how they’re supposed to look, alive and caring – how they used to look), comforting. They usually look dead. A look he’d started growing accustomed to seeing in his own reflection.
“I’m getting you out of here.”
His head felt hazy, as if he’d overslept, but the words were all he needed to hear. He wasted no time getting to his feet, though standing felt fragile, like he hadn’t done so only a day ago.
(It had been just a day ago…right?)
“Take this.”
She handed him a knife.
There’s a brief fracturing of reality in which Natasha isn’t handing him the knife but plunging it into his chest, into his throat, only she’s not really Natasha, is she? Somewhere in history, he screams.
In this history, he repressed the impulse to strangle the hallucination, to strangle her, until it faded away. Sometimes flinching could feel like a victory despite the world around you screaming don’t blink.
(Or is that just his mind?)
They cut through Abstergo security in a blur of blood and daggers. Natasha moved with ease. Bucky just tried not to get lost in specters and illusions. Somehow, they made it out alive.
He drifted in and out of consciousness (he thinks) as Natasha drove the van – he didn’t remember the way, she did (he doesn’t ask how). The brief moments of clarity, of consciousness, were filled with notions, words that lingered like snow in shady places. Things like ‘almost’ and ‘turn around’, different voices, one familiar, one strange. Sometimes he’d wake without the knowledge of why he’d left Abstergo in the first place. Other times he remembered enough to remind himself that he would have died there.
(Somehow, he knows. Like a vision of a possible outcome - if he stayed, he bled; noble causes, noble actions.)
It was better this way.
****
Subject 15 waited in the van while Subject 16 paced the back alley of an art store, unknowingly waiting to capture his successor – to grant Abstergo with a Subject 17. Neither of them knew what that would mean for 16, if his use to the organization was spent or if he held promise of something more.
(He freezes when he sees Steve, and his mind blanks – a visual trigger. He strikes out as if set on autopilot.)
Clean slates, after all, left room for creation.
(It was better this way.)