Work Text:
In dreams, the Winter Soldier is always falling.
It’s not the crash that kills him.
He exhales with the pull of the trigger. The target is dead. Screaming starts up and he is already gone. He is commended for a job well done.
They are almost kind as they push him into the chair.
The rubber bit slides into his mouth. He feels his teeth slide into the grooves on both sides.
He’s been here before.
Pain—
The train is long gone and Steve is safe. That’s all that matters.
To think that he’d been afraid!
It’s not the crash that kills him though it should have. He is dragged for miles and miles until his blood draws the Iron Curtain on ice.
He feels brittle laughter bubbling in his throat. But his body is broken. No sound escapes. Snow smothers everything else.
Footprints behind him but none in front. He has no idea how long he has been walking, in what direction, from which way. His breath comes out as steam when he finally notices and stops, forces his legs to stop. He gets to his knees.
There is blood on his hands.
If the little spider is red, her Captain America Rogers is blue.
He’s not allowed to wonder how he knew him.
He is not—
He is not.
Howard Stark is too wily to be caught unawares. He builds his own car. He drives it, checks it every morning for signs of tampering as though he knows there is something wrong, something festering within the organization he built from ground up in the ruins of war and he has a wife, a son, his work and when the ice is thin, he ranges far north to the arctic in the polar waters where belugas sing and narwhals spar with their unicorn horns.
He knows something is wrong, he feels sick and he—
“Who the hell is Bucky?”
It’s like gut punch only deeper, in a place where their machines can barely scratch. He feels terrified when he wakes because the crash didn’t kill him and he’s still falling—he can’t see the bottom of this never-ending well.
His hand moves of its own accord. Chokes a bastard and crushes his larynx. He shrugs off the darts because he has to get out. More people are going to die if he doesn’t. The door opens and—
The man who follows him is not the target. The target has been eliminated. He must return. The Winter Soldier does not tolerate failure. His objective has been accomplished. He already knows how this will end.
He does not aim to kill.
It’s cold. There is a man on the other side of the glass. A funny-looking man that seems familiar. Impossible. He has no past, no memories. He is just a weapon to be used. Fear and panic have no place within him yet—
Pauchok he calls her affectionately.
She is like a dab of color on his black canvas.
The Malibu sun is harsh across his snow-beaten hide.
Smoke burns his lungs.
Accidents are always messy though he doesn’t know how he knows that. It’s a thought that slips him quickly like water through sieve. He doesn’t pursue. That is not his objective. It is not his mission.
Howard Stark stares glassy-eyed from where he juts out from the driver’s seat. The police will look. They’ll say it was an accident—a tragic one—but accidents happen. Even to men like Howard Stark. Especially men like Howard Stark.
He throws kerosene in the car and lights it on fire.
He thinks about walking away. For a moment, he hesitates.
A little girl runs after him, not so little. They ask him to break her so he does. She asks him to stay with her so he does.
He sees a flash of red and he—
He doesn’t have a name. That’s not how this works. They call him the Winter Soldier but that is not his name. That is simply what he is. It is the manifestation of everything they fear, crave and wish to destroy.
A man sits in front of him, a patient man, a man filled with purpose and goals and destiny.
He wants to shape history. Groom the world to their—his—their cause.
The man in front of him is a monster.
The engineer dies, limbs akimbo like a puppet cut from its strings.
His guardian on the other hand is very much alive. She recognizes him—she knows him.
They fight. She loses. Her name is on the tip of his tongue.
The crash doesn’t kill him but he wishes it had.
He sees his hands, one flesh, the other gone.
He sees his hands, one red, the other silver.
He sees his hands, both red, dripping wet.
He sees his hands, both red, dripping wet.
In his dream, he is always falling. He hasn’t stopped.
He digs the tracker out of her and crushes it before her eyes. She calls him a name. Repeats it stubbornly. He listens but it does not ring a bell.
His objective has been completed.
He turns to leave.
It’s not the crash that kills him.
It’s what they do after.