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A good soldier doesn’t think. A good soldier obeys.
He doesn’t remember where he first heard the words, just like he doesn’t remember how he came to be in the room with the chair, or who the men with the clipboards and uniforms are. He doesn’t remember why parts of his body ache, why sometimes he hears a voice screaming from a long way off. It might be his voice. Would it matter if it was?
A good soldier doesn’t think.
The words are a mantra, a constant whisper in the back of his brain that becomes a shriek if he begins to wonder for too long.
He knows some things. The alphabet. Basic math. How to put on his clothes and wipe his ass and fall asleep. He knows snatches of lyrics to some songs with titles he can’t remember. He knows what colors you mix together to make other colors.
He knows other words too: hypnosis, imprisonment, reprogramming. He watches them float lazily by.
It’s a simple order to follow. Thinking is difficult. Obeying is easy. Or so the men with the clipboards tell him.
The first time he sees the blond man with the distant eyes he feels a shock of something like pain, deep down in his guts, except this isn’t the sort of pain anyone can explain. All his vitals are good and he hasn’t sustained any injuries. No reason this particular target should cause him any upset. There has never been a mark he couldn’t bring down, he has never been assigned a purpose he could not carry to its finish.
The man gets away. Then he gets away again.
“Bucky,” he says, horror freezing his face to cold stone. “Bucky.”
The Soldier doesn’t understand. That word is nonsense. But the man keeps saying it.
“Bucky!”
“Who’s Bucky?”
It...unsettles him. Teases something loose that he then continues to worry at like a broken tooth. Knowledge yanked out of him at the roots.
“That man on the bridge,” he says. It still takes effort to hold his thoughts together for long very long. “Who was he? He knew me.”
“He was no one,” says the man with the hard voice and the short hair. “Forget about him.”
So the Soldier does.
He does until the moment he is above him with his fist in the air, looking down at a beaten, swelling face. A puffy eye and a bleeding mouth.
The memories hit him more in the gut than the brain, visceral and steaming. Three of them, three quick hits to his core.
The first is cold. Concrete crunching beneath his feet and breath steaming in the air. The metal beneath his fingertips is so cold he can feel it through his woolen gloves. He standing on a balcony, holding onto a wrought iron rail, looking down at a boy bleeding freely from his nose.
“Stevie, you idiot! You’re going to bleed to death!”
Steve gets frequent nosebleeds because Steve is tiny and anemic and is going to end up dying young. At least, that’s what people say.
“My nose blood is freezing!” Steve yells up from the driveway. “Can I come inside?”
The swollen eye blooms a fresh memory, and this one is hot. A humid, wet heat, pure white porcelain and a neat pink mat on the floor. Whoever had been in the bathroom before them had just showered, the water turned up far too high. It smells like soap. The mirror is fogged over, turning them into indistinct shapes, formless ghosts.
“You know, Stevie.” He holds up a wet cloth to the more swollen of the two eyes. “You can just let things go. The world isn’t gonna get any worse because some drunk yahoos are spouting off.”
Steve tips his face away. He doesn’t like being touched, especially when he’s vulnerable. And here with two black eyes and a bruised cheek, he’s never looked more vulnerable than he does now.
But no, that’s wrong. There was another moment, this one neither hot nor cold, just weightless. When Steve had looked at him with eyes so longing and sad, like he was looking at something he had already lost, even though it was right next to him. His mouth was swollen and red then, but not with blood. With flushed pressure and the persistent bites left around his mouth. They taste like whisky, smell like sweat, and he doesn’t know how this happened. Only that it fills him with a burning, formless longing.
The smashed-in face is telling, but the man beneath him gasps and shakes and writhes, and that is an even greater balm to his memory. The rush of power from looking down at someone and knowing that you could truly destroy them. Back then he could have crumbled Steve’s world way with nothing but a single look, a single harsh word. Bucky was all Steve had. He deigned to see him when no one else could.
Now, hundreds of feet above the earth, he feels it again. A heartbeat in his hands.
“I’m not going to fight you,” Steve says.
The soldier remembers.
After the ships fall, he drags him out of the lake before he can drown, the same way he has dragged Steve out of every scrape, every misplaced show of heroism he couldn’t back up--resolutely, roughly, and perhaps with less kindness than he deserves.
The soldier’s memories are a mess; it will take weeks, months to sort them all back in order. And he believes there will be blank spaces that never close up, moments from his life from before that will never return. But he is alive.
And he remembers.