Archive of Our Own

Mission report. Your mask comes off and the mission - who was matching you blow for blow, step for step - falls to pieces. You were analysing him for the tiniest weakness and suddenly they're overloading you. He stops, he hesitates, his eyes widen, his stance fails, you could kill him a thousand ways in the time it takes his mouth to form the word "Bucky."

You could kill him a thousand times. (Who the hell is Bucky?) You can read weakness in every line as you move in for another strike. He's hesitating, talking, he says he knows you.

You're hesitating.

He says he knows you and you're still matching him blow for blow and he looks familiar. He talks, you don't listen; he leaves clear openings, you don't take them. His face is open, his face is familiar, you know him and their arm is striking but your arm is falling behind.

You get him behind the bus—you get him out of sight of the men they send with you. The men who stand behind you and pass you guns and wait for the moment when you hesitate and they can put a bullet through your spine. Collateral damage. You don't bring a broken weapon home from the battlefield.

There's a manhole cover that your arm can't lift but theirs can. Sparks run from the gouge in the metal shoulder down through their fingertips and across the iron as you lift it to meet the shield.

Sparks flicker across the white star and the mission buckles. When you grab the shield, your fingers burn and your body shakes but you can pull him by the arm and throw him down the hole. You drop through after, hold the cover over your head so it fits back into place—cuts off the light and the sounds and anything that isn't the mission.

Down here it's dark, damp and you can barely see for shadows. You can't see his face—familiar—and his voice echoes, could be anyone—"Bucky"—and he's still hesitating but you're not. Bend his arm back over the shield until it cracks, slam their elbow into his face, drive a boot down into his knee. He stumbles, goes down with a splash, gives you a moment to draw your last pistol. His shield arm is dropping, you fire three shots—shoulder, hip, arm—and he falls again.

"Bucky—"

You slam their arm into the side of his head and he goes down.

He goes down, and this time he doesn't get up. You pick up the shield in your hand, throw him over your shoulder with theirs and start walking.

*

Return to start. Mission report. You say the male target is dead, you left the body in the sewers, place the shield on the table when they ask for proof.

You knew him. You met him earlier this week on another assignment. You haven't slept since then, you haven't rebooted since then and that must be why your head is full of too many thoughts, too many rememberings.

He said he knows you. You saw him with a mission last week—do you remember that? Do you remember Fury, Nicholas J., three slugs to the chest? You remember waking up on a metal table and that face looking down on you, you remember he used to be smaller, you remember reaching out for a hand that lets you fall.

Do you remember last week? Do you remember last decade? You close your hands on the arm of the chair as they go back and forth on whether to wipe you clean again. Wipe you and put you back in your box and next time you won't have to think, you won't have to remember.

Black pads and blue light, you remember. Biting down on a leather bit so hard it split between your teeth. Worst pain you've ever felt but they say you won't remember and they're right—you forget everything before the pain.

He knew you, he called you Bucky like you have a name but you don't. You don't remember him, you don't remember that his name was Steve and he was smaller—taller—and he doesn't know your name.

You remember you had two arms, then one arm, then pain obliterated everything for such a long time. They say you've been awake for too long, say they should wipe you.

You remember. They told you it was twenty years on, forty years on put a gun in the arm they built and told it to pull the trigger. You learned to hold down the pain long enough to aim, fire, aim fire.

And then back in your box like a good tin soldier.

They want you to remember how the girl fights, how the man on the bridge fights. Not that man on the bridge, the other one. They say they had them but they escaped, mission is ongoing. Give you a new mission, the man who flew.

Missions: Romanova, Natalia A.; Wilson, Sam.

Complete: Fury, Nicholas J., Rogers, Steven.

They fix the hole in your arm, but not the holes in your head where the confusion is rushing in. You want to ask them to wipe you, you want to ask them to fix you, want to scream at them and kill them so they put you back in your box and the world will leave you be for another while.

"You shaped the century, and I need you to do it one more time."

You don't say it. You don't beg, you don't crawl. "I knew him."

The slap is weak - because all humans are weak—but it stays under your skin, like a scar. Hours later when your arm is fixed and your body is once more laden with weapons and you're sitting on a concrete floor waiting for him to wake up—you can still feel it.

*

The last time you were in DC, they were starting construction on the subway. The tiny room that served as your base for that mission is still there, still empty, although now every few minutes you hear the rush of a train passing by on the other side of the walls.

The mission is not dead, and not in the sewers and he is looking at you. The chains have left welts in his arms, but have held. As they should, they were made to hold you.

"Bucky," says Rogers, Steve (deceased).

Your kick catches him in the stomach, sends him flying back into the wall. The plaster dents, showering down on his shoulders. A train passes by outside, he looks up at you. All the confusion that you can't let yourself show is mirrored ten feet tall on his face.

He sits up slowly, doesn't put any weight on his right arm, rests a hand on his stomach like the kick might have hurt more than the bullets and the concussion. "I watched you die. In 1945, you fell ten thousand feet from a moving train and I—" He looks up at you, searches your face for something. Doesn't find it. "Seventy years on everyone I knew is dead or dying and you just show up." His head drops to chains around his wrists, something like a laugh escaping. "Two thousand fourteen, Buck. Remember back in the war, we never dreamed the world would make it this far—let alone that we'd live to see it."

2014. It's 2014. They never tell you dates, never tell you what year it is or how long you've been sleeping or if the men guarding your back on the last mission are dead. The people giving you missions changed voices, faces, names but the mission were always the same. Every time you woke up the buildings were taller, the guns were smaller, the explosions were bigger.

"Where's my flying car, huh?"

"I don't know you."

He has to move to get to his feet, the chain linking his hands to the floor only gives him enough room to stand close to the furthest corner from the door. You don't remember why you were in those chains, you just remember breaking your wrists trying to get out of them, screaming until men in hard hats came in and the person watching you put bullets right through the plastic and into their heads. The chains hold your feet too close for balance, give your hands room to hold a gun but not to fight. There are stains of red on the plaster behind him, bullet holes in the wall.

You don't remember what happened in this room.

"My name is Steve. Steve Rogers."

You want to kick him again. You don't want to get close. You point a gun at his head and he doesn't flinch. "I saw you on another mission."

"You knew me," Steve says, palms up like it might make a difference, like you could stop yourself from putting a bullet through his heart. "In another life."

"I don't know you." Not in this life, not in any life. He's slept and woke and slept and woke in so many cycles and in none of them did he know anyone.

"You're my friend," he says, solid and steady like even with your gun at his head he wouldn't doubt it for a moment and you forget that he can match you, forget that he'll fight, stand right up close and hold the gun against his cheek like you can brand him with it.

"You're my mission."

You're holding the gun in your hand. Theirs would have pulled the trigger. Yours doesn't.

"Your name is James Buchanan Barnes."

Their arm knocks him out and he crumples at your feet. The gun falls from your hand and you run.

*

He's sleeping, curled up with his back to the wall and the gun you dropped resting between his chained hands. You don't know how to get to it without waking him. There are no new bullet holes in the walls, none in the floor, did he try to escape or not? Did he break the chains and wait for you to return?

You draw a second gun, crouch in the doorway and watch him. After a moment he speaks, "Don't you sleep?"

You don't know when he woke up, if he was always awake, if he's even awake now. Sleep is dreams and soft beds and lowering your guard outside in the world. You keep your eyes open and their hand on your guns until they take you back and switch you off. Close your eyes, close the door, they open it again and tell you years have passed, tell you you've rested and it feels like blinking.

He opens his eyes. "Natasha—the girl on the bridge—she said they call you the Winter Soldier. She said you're an assassin."

Natalia Alianovna Romanova (alias: Natasha Romanov) is a mission. You are not a soldier, not an assassin, you are a weapon that they built from steel and chrome.

"She said you've killed twenty four people in the last fifty years."

You don't remember twenty four, you think it should be more—less. You don't remember.

"You killed a friend of mine. Something like a friend, at least. Nick Fury."

Fury, Nicholas J. (deceased). Steve is looking at the gun between his hands, as though trying to calculate if he can raise and fire before you do. He shouldn't be able to—you should have fired as soon as he woke up. But you hesitated, you hesitate, you keep hesitating.

He leaves the gun on the floor and looks at you. "You left."

You did. Left an active mission in a room no one else remembers exists—a room you shouldn't remember exists—and ran twenty miles through a city that looks nothing like it did last time you were awake here. You lost your head, lost your bearings, failed to lose the memory of this face looking up at you and saying, "Bucky," like a revelation.

"У меня нет имени," you say. "I don't have a name."

"Bucky," he says, at the same moment as a train goes by and you can pretend not to have heard. People have names, and you're not a person, you're a weapon. You were made.

"People can't do the things that I can do."

Steve sits up—leaves the gun—looks at you. "And what about me? I matched you, Bucky. I bet no one's done that before. If I can match you, and I'm a person, what does that say?"

"You have a weakness," you say. "You hesitate."

"Because I know you." He moves his foot and kicks the gun. It skids across the floor, spinning to a halt against your boot. "And I'm not dead yet."

"I could kill you," you say. You could. Pick up the gun in their arm and he'll be a corpse on the floor, throw him in the sewers (Mission report: target is dead). No more confusion, no more debate.

You're a weapon, not a person. Weapons don't have names.

"You could," he says.

You don't.

*

People used to name swords—you remember. Back in the days before you were born, if you were born; before you were made, if you were made. They built weapons from folded steel and fire and christened them like children. Did they name them Bucky and look at them with big, sad eyes? Did they slap bare hands on the blades and come away unharmed?

You aren't a sword. A sword you hold in your hand, you keep close. You fight your enemy in arm's reach, you meet his eyes. The Winter Soldier you aim and fire, like a bullet or an arrow. Стрела. You don't name an arrow.

When you tell Steve this, he laughs. "You should meet a friend of mine." He shifts to get more comfortable against the bloodstained wall (You're crouched in the doorway still, arm raised and holding the gun, you're starting to lose feeling in your legs but you don't move.) and smiles at you. "Can you make me a promise? If you ever meet Clint Barton, challenge him to a shooting contest. That would be a thing to see."

"You'll be dead by then," you say, which isn't a promise and isn't a no.

"Well, try to make sure Natasha sees it."

You want to shake your head at him, but it'll throw off your aim. You want to tell him he's got this all wrong, you want to tell him everybody dies and you're going to put a bullet through the head of every person he loves, you don't want to lose the small smile on his face. "Natasha Romanov," you say. "She'll be dead by then."

His eyes snap up. "I thought I was your mission."

"Rogers, Steven. Romanova, Natalia. Wilson, Sam." You keep your voice level, watch his face which isn't smiling anymore, looks as far from a smile as it could get. He's been focused on you for hours, but now he drops his gaze to the restraints again, tugging like they might break now where they didn't before.

The metal bites deep into his wrists. "You can't," he says. "Not them. Stay here, I can tell you everything. Your past, your name, just don't go after them."

You pick up the gun from the floor, place it back in its holster out of his reach. "I'm not going anywhere," you say, to see him relax for a moment. "They'll be looking for you. I'm waiting for them to catch up."

Somehow that gets to him more than anything else you've said, like it hadn't occurred to him until now that they were going to die because of him. Like they weren't missions only because of him. He lets out a cry, tugs his arms hard enough something cracks, throwing himself in your direction.

You stand up, ignore the pain in your leg—it's nothing to the other pains—move carefully out of range to examine the wall and chain. No visible damage, and Steve is pulling his wrist to his chest in a way that suggests the crack was bone. "Your employers," he says, breathless and shivering. "They know I'm alive? This was their plan?"

"Yes," you say. (Rogers, Steven. Deceased. Mission accomplished.) "They know."

*

He's examined every chain link he can reach, pulled at the ring set in concrete into the floor, begged and bartered in more ways than you can remember before falling silent, collapsed in on himself against the wall. "Bucky," he says, meets your eyes like he's still looking for the same old story he ain't gonna find.

You holstered the gun somewhere in the middle of it, gave up on crouching ready and just sat, watching him over your knees. You think his wrist is still sore, but he heals quick as you. Different to when you were younger and something that would knock you down would put Steve in hospital for mon-

You don't know him. You do not know him. Вы не знаете его.

"This isn't you, Buck."

This isn't Bucky. You aren't Bucky, but you knew that already and it's about time he got it. About time he realised he doesn't know you and you can't be fixed and it isn't worth the attempt.

"Nat saved the world," he says. "Natasha, Natalia, whatever you want to call her. You're only here to kill me because she stopped an alien invasion. Rest of us were wasting time looking for another giant metal worm to kill, and Natasha rides an alien spaceship over the skies of New York City, finds a solution no one else bothered to look for." He draws his knees up to his chest, like he's mirroring your position. "She was like you, did a lot of bad things. Doesn't seem fair for you to kill her before she can be happy she's atoned for them."

They always tell you you're saving the world, shaping the world, building a better world. They always tell you that before they put the gun in your hand, before they use the backdoor they installed years ago to creep back into your head and pull you out. Saving the world doesn't seem so special; kill him, shoot her, anyone could do it.

"And Sam?" Steve says. "Sam was out, Sam made it through, he survived. Imagine tomorrow you wake up and you're not doing this—no missions, no guns. How do you live inside your head when you've had all this and Sam—Sam helps people. He got into this because of me, because of my name and you—" He drops his head. "Kill me, that's fine. I'd rather die at your hand that anyone else's, but Nat and Sam—they don't deserve this."

"Do you?"

He lifts his gaze to yours, looks at you like he's seeing you for the first time. "I made you," he says, his voice so soft that even the whisper of a train in the distance almost blocks it out. "You were—I let you fall." He looks back at his hands again. "I suppose you don't remember that either."

Do you remember falling? You remember the train, holding on with all the strength you had, Steve reaching out for you and missing and your fingers failed you for the first time. You fell and you fell and you fell and when you landed it was like hitting a pillow at a hundred miles an hour and breaking every bone you forgot the name of. You remember losing your arm one inch at a time as the snow crawled further up your skin.

You were going to die. You closed your eyes to die. "I remember," you say, to see the way his face surges with hope that dies the moment he looks at you.

"I made you."

You remember, maybe, being born. Being made. Sitting in a chair and watching a saw bite through pink flesh, black flesh, red blood. You remember black pads and blue light in your head, "I" and "me" slowly turning into "им" and "они". You think in English, in Russian, in French and don't remember learning any of them. They built their arm up around the space where yours used to be and every bit of it was like the frost biting another chunk out of you, only this time it didn't stop, it didn't numb, it just kept going. Going. Going.

"Не бери ответственность за монстра другого," you say.

"Kill me," he says. "Spare them. Please."

You remember being remade, becoming this. You don't remember him, you don't remember the way he looks at you and you won't remember the promises you made him.

You won't.

*

He's said nothing for hours. He's sitting, picking at the chains around his wrist, staring past you at the door like he might be quick enough to save them when they arrive. You're watching him, the way his muscles tighten when he pulls at the chains, the way his mouth opens just a little when he thinks of something to say, then changes his mind.

You once spent three days perfectly still and silent waiting for a voice in your ear telling you to make a shot, three days on high alert, alone, and didn't think of anything.

You can't stop thinking now. It's like he cracked the dam keeping your mind out of your head and now you're stuck with memories you don't want and thoughts you can't keep in line. Is this what people are like, full of contradiction and pain and voices screaming at them?

No wonder they're so easy to kill. He's sitting there and you know him but he didn't make you. He knows your name, not that you have a name, and he's a mission but he's not dead (unofficially).

"За кого ты меня принимаешь?" you say, breaking the silence because someone had to, because the voices in your head are too loud for this much silence.

Steve looks up at you. "They didn't teach us much Russian during the war."

You cannot remember a time when you didn't speak Russian. Your memories and thoughts are mixing up and you remember holding out a key to Steve when he was younger, smaller and saying, "Я с тобой до конца линии." But that never happened and you don't know it, not really. You swallow to clear your throat, try to find the words in English but you can't say it, can't admit it. "Qui suis-je?"

Steve sighs, rests his chained hands on his knees. "Your name is James Buchanan Barnes," he says. "You grew up with me in Brooklyn, New York City. You were—mon ami. Comme mon frère." He shakes his head. "I was this stupid kid, tiny, 90 pounds at a stretch but always getting into fights I could never win and was too damn proud to run away from. You always had my back, coming in at the last minute to knock whoever it was out with one punch and steal all the glory." He cuts himself off, like the words are catching on something in his throat. Starts again quieter, slower.

"You never—you didn't care about that." The chains clink together when he rubs his jaw with one hand. "The serum they gave Schmidt and me—I think you must've had something like it. Erskein, the doctor, he said it amplifies the most important parts of you. For me, it was determination I suppose. A willingness to break any and all rules to do the right thing. Schmidt—it drove him mad."

He looks up at you. "I always thought your most important trait would be loyalty. You were always—you never let me down, never let anyone down. Once someone was yours, that was it, you wouldn't hurt them. You'd do anything for them."

You don't know if you'd call yourself loyal. Is a bullet loyal to the person who fires it, or is it just an inevitability?

Steve laughs softly at his own hands. "We were going to join the army together. At least I always thought—maybe you were just humouring me. There you were: big, strapping, could take a guy out with one punch, and then me standing in the line behind you, a stupid kid with asthma. Didn't even meet the height requirement." He looks up at you, still smiling that soft, sad smile. "Even after all this—" he gestures to himself. "You always said you were following that kid from Brooklyn. I was never more than that to you—or never less than this." He brushes a hand across his eyes, takes a deep breath. "That was—James Barnes. He was a good man."

And what am I now? You want to ask, you want to scream, you want to draw a gun and point it at his head until he tells you.

You bow your head over your arm, their arm, your arms. "I don't remember."

"No," Steve says. "You don't."

*

You almost miss the moment he breaks out. You're watching the way the metal in their hand flexes when you move your fingers and trying to remember what it would've looked like when it was skin. Knew it like the back of my hand, they say, but turns out that when its gone you don't remember the back of your hand worth a damn.

"I have to save the world," Steve says. "Don't make me go through you to do it."

She saved the world, you're saving the world, he wants to save the world. If the world needs saving this often, maybe it's time to roll over and let it go. You're staring at the way the metal fits together and you hear a clink that isn't a train and you lift your head just in time to roll sideways and avoid the fist coming towards your head.

Steve is standing beside the door. Behind him the padlock on the chains is open, a tiny shard of metal sticking out from the lock. "Nat taught me that one," he says. "It's quicker when she does it."

You remember being in those chains, three gunmen pointing machine guns at your chest and when you picked the lock six bullets hit out of thirty. They slowed you down long enough to get you back under lock and key, but not enough to save the three men. The bloodstains under Steve's feet are theirs.

He tries the door, same as you did however many years ago. However many sleeps ago, blinks ago. It doesn't open, and he turns back to you. "Give me the key, Buck."

You are loyal. You are a bullet in a gun loyal to the direction you've been aimed. You push yourself to your feet and watch him—his arm is still hanging a little, his wrist is still twisted, he's still going to hesitate and you're going to kill him. You are. "Нет."

He slams his shoulder into the door, same as you did. He can match you, step for step and blow for blow but he won't. He has a weakness and it is you (you have a weakness and it is him.)

"People are going to die, Buck. I don't know how, but I know I have to stop it. Please, you're my friend."

" У меня есть миссия," you say. "You're my mission."

He closes his eyes and you don't strike, he drops his head and you don't strike, he lowers into a fighting position and raises his fists and you don't strike.

The punch comes, you step around it, grab the arm that's already broken once, twist it back. His good hand grabs at your neck and you bend the arm further until he cries out. Even then he stays upright, holds their arm like he might be able to stop you. "You going to pull off my arm?" he asks, breathless, waiting. "Do you think you could fix me up with one of those shiny metal ones instead?

You twist half an inch further and his knees give out. "You don't want it."

He moves, fast as a snake, kicks your legs out from under you and when your grip falters for an instant he breaks out, you see a hand going for your throat and move to block and his knee drives into your stomach and for a moment you can't breathe. Both his hands take their arm, the metal buckles in the grip and he slams you face first into the wall. "Seems pretty useful."

You think you could feed wires and electric shocks into every nerve centre of his chest, hang a weight he can barely life from his neck and burn metal into his bones. You could build a machine that is never still where every motion is a new stab, a new shock a new bite. See if he could talk then, if he could call you Bucky, tell you to remember. See if he can think.

"Maybe I'll fit it myself," you say, with the last of the air you can pull into your chest crushed against the wall. "Weld it onto your bones and watch it tear you apart from the inside out."

He releases the arm like it burnt him and you turn, get metal fingers around his neck and lift him off the ground. His neck feels thin, breakable, beneath their fingers and their fingers are wired up to their brain which they made, which they programmed, which you own, which is in your head.

Your hand—their hand—spasms and he falls to the ground. This time you jump before he can kick your legs out but he's already rolling upright. He punches and you block, his hands grab at your uniform, searching for pockets, for storage. His fingers catch at holsters but he doesn't take a gun.

You don't draw a gun. You drive a knee into his stomach, he slams an elbow into your throat. Your arm claws at his face, theirs grabs his shoulder and turns him, slams him into the wall, leaves a dent. He ducks your punch, turns uses the wall for support to jump and kick at your ribs with both legs. Something cracks, you stumble backwards and he's following you—punch to the broken rib, punch to the solar plexus, jams three fingers into the join where their arm meets your chest and a scream tears out of your throat.

He draws one of your knives, slams it in after his fingers and you drop to your knees. He grabs your arm—your arm—and twists, snapping it clean down the centre. It falls into your lap like a stone.

"Bucky—" he says, leans down to look you in the eyes and you're going to kill him, any moment now, you're going to—"I know you." He says.

He kicks over the brick by the door and takes the key underneath. Turns back to you, "I'll come back. I promise. I'm with you. To the end of the line."

конец линии.

*

He leaves the door open. When you remember how, you stand up. The wound in your chest is bleeding, but it doesn't matter, you've suppressed worse pain. You use their arm to hold yours against your chest. It does what you tell it to—it has always done what you tell it to. You can't stop a bullet once it's fired. Once it's fired, it doesn't belong to anyone.

You walk out onto the streets and everyone is too distracted by the three machines up in the sky to notice the blood on your chest, dripping out your sleeve, the guns on your back. The people that do look too close don't hold your gaze for long. You put one foot in front of the other and don't think of where you're going, of what you're doing.

Mission report: He is alive. She is alive.

Mission report: I lied. He is alive.

You don't bring a broken weapon home from the battlefield. It might take three men to kill you—it might take a hundred—but better to kill you now then wait and see which direction this bullet is flying. It's exciting, you don't know yet. You take your broken arm and your limp and the arm that might be theirs or might be yours, you haven't quite decided.

James Barnes was born in Brooklyn. The winter soldier was born in Moscow. And you? You could build yourself from scraps and shards on the streets of Washington DC, hide in the sewers and eat rats until you remember how to sleep, until you remember your name.

The planes—they must be planes, three planes so large they could block out the sun—are rising higher. You can see guns coming out the bottom like spines of a hedgehog, like they couldn't possibly fit more in. Three men couldn't take you down, but three planes could, maybe. When you have a broken arm and your chest is still bleeding and you're sitting by the river waiting to feel a bullet through your heart.

You wonder if you should be surprised. Around you people are screaming, pointing at the sky. You slept and the human race had been to space. You slept and there were nuclear bombs. You slept and there were three giant planes with guns that swivelled to target strangers on the street.

You slept and they rebuilt the world and you don't fit into it anymore.

They are going to kill you now, or tomorrow or three years from now and you don't remember the past but the future is clear enough. Easy to recall.

Return to start, mission report, if they wipe the memory of what you've done, does that wash the blood off your hands? If saving the world didn't save Natalia Romanova, will forgetting save you?

"You should be up there."

You turn. You don't recognise his face—he's a man with a gun and there have been so many men with guns. This one is holding it like he plans to kill you, like he thinks he could, like maybe you'd let him. Maybe you will.

"We were trying to build a better world. You could've had a part in that. You could've built something."

You stand up and he flinches back, but the gun stays steady. "Я то, что они сделали мне," you say, walking closer to the barrel of the gun. He doesn't fire, doesn't fire, pulls the trigger too late and the bullet ricochets off your shoulder—their shoulder—you close your hand around the gun and break his hand. You don't make a weapon to build a world. You make a weapon to tear one down.

There are explosions behind you. You turn to see the three planes, all shooting each other out of the sky. The explosions light up the horizon, like fireworks you can hardly remember.

From the middle one, you see a shape falling, a man falling, Steve falling. "C'est ça, votre nouveau monde?" you ask the man behind you.

The knife he stabs into your back is hardly worth noticing, for all that it drives you to your knees and forces the breath from your lungs. You turn and pull it out in one motion, drag it across his throat. His eyes are wide, mouth open in permanent surprise as his blood spills out over your hands.

Mission report: It's over. Mission report: you lost. Миссия сообщить: я жив.

You use your arm to push yourself up, metal sliding on metal, grating around where it was dented. You stumble, trip, fall forwards. The surface of the river is broken by fire, by metal, by shards and debris falling from the sky. Nothing rises from beneath, nothing surfaces.

You fall forward, let the water embrace you in. It's dark, cold, swirling red around your arm, your chest, your back. Your arm sinks, pulls the rest of you down, down, down.

Я его знаю, you think, as your eyes close and the river floor comes closer.

Their arm, your arm, the arm that bites into your flesh and burns your skin flexes its fingers, stretches out, and starts to pull you forward.

You close your eyes.