Chapter Text
In a safe house in Roslyn, the Winter Soldier, Holodno Soldat, the asset, strips off his armor. Snaps, leather, kevlar re-enforced, because the asset was valuable. That’s what assets are.
Jacket, shirt, belt, pants off. He runs his fingers--his real fingers--over them, looking for anything that could cause him harm later. Shrapnel is usually the problem. His other hand doesn’t have the fine nerves to feel little things, like a twist of metal woven into cloth that will burrow into skin while fighting, perhaps slow reaction times. When he’s fighting, he only wants the pain he knows, intimately, and the pain he causes.
He runs his metal hand over them next. This latest upgrade can send micropulses to disable any bugs, any fingernail sized spyder technology that has been planted on him. He’s clean.
He checks himself. He has wounds. A dislocated shoulder. Any number of cuts and abrasions. They will heal.
He doesn’t remember his instructions for where to go, unless this house is it. He’s done that before, followed patterns with his body that he can’t remember in his mind. The body has memories that the electroshock can’t erase.
Maybe the metal has memories too. He feels it in the false nerves that connect to real ones, the way Captain America’s face felt under his fist. Like hitting a rock, at first, but then the damage began to show.
He feels the places that the Captain was pressed against him when he pulled him out of the water. Shoulder, hip, a forearm around his waist, until he could walk, and haul the Captain out by a strap on his shoulder.
He trusts his body’s memories more than his mind’s. His mind--in those first years, he thought of it as a broken mirror. They never let him see mirrors.
No, not a mirror. It reflects nothing back. It’s a maze where every turn is wrong. It’s a forest where will-o’-the-wisps beckon unwary travelers. The phrase doesn’t seem like his own; someone told it to him once upon a time. It’s a darkened street, with dangers in the alleys. He can’t follow the lights, the temptations.
“Your brain heals itself too quickly,” he remembers one of the technicians saying. That’s why he had to keep going back. He remembers when they had to force forgetting on him. He remembers when he welcomed it. Not oblivion, never that, but the walls it put up between this memory and that, the cracks, the chasms he couldn’t cross.
He pops his shoulder back into place. A moment of pain on the right to match the perpetual pain on the left.
The facade of this safehouse is a brownstone perpetually under construction. No one will bother him here. From the outside it looks too dangerous for anyone to want to enter. On the inside, it’s serviceable enough. Especially for someone like him. A bed, a stove, a working sink and shower. Extensive first aid kit. He could, and has, dug bullets out of his own flesh in places like this, doing the work no matter how injured he is, before the days pass and fast healing means he has to cut healthy flesh.
He lies down on the bed. Someone will come for him, tell him he did well, put him back to sleep. The cold always starts where metal meets flesh. He lies back and traces that seam. He remembers that too, one of the memories they can’t touch, a memory written in the bone. First the elbow and down. And then a voice saying they had to go higher, the nerves weren’t strong enough there. Higher, and higher still.
If he--someone--the asset--hadn’t killed that surgeon, he might be all metal now, but the surgeon went far enough, into chest and healthy flesh, making those cold, cold connections where living nerve meets metal. The arm’s sensations are always sharp, the physical equivalent of a speaker’s feedback whine. Always too much, always too harsh.
*
He avoids memories. Someone will come for him. Still, he avoids reaching out, sending up any of the usual signals, the way he’s been trained in emergencies. He doesn’t think about the mission that is past. His first failure.
There was no need to kill Captain America, not after the floating ships fell out of the sky.
He’s never made decisions like that before, at least not that he can remember. Or if he did, that was when they fractured his memories again, to make sure it would be a long time before he remembered how to think for himself again.
There is a mirror in the bathroom. He rarely looks in mirrors, and when he does, usually he has his mask, but he forces himself to look. This is the face of a man called Bucky.
*
No one comes. He runs through the food. There is money. He goes out at night, wearing gloves on his hands, a hood pulled up, into too-bright bodegas, and brings back more cans. He can’t stand to be in the bright light so he pulls down whatever he can reach. One day all he got was corn. He made himself eat it all before he went back for anything else.
In time, memories reassemble themselves, as they always do. This was why at the end he asked for the treatments, the fist in the mirror.
They come in the early mornings, sometimes, when he’s woken naturally. They are butterflies, they are moths, flitting things that he knows will disappear if he chases them. They are flashes of Captain America’s face, and he, the asset, is always following. That face is always beckoning, and always turning away.
*
He keeps the local news on the safe house’s TV, turned low. He’s conditioned to react to certain words, even if they are barely audible, the words to tell him if someone is still looking for him. He learns that Pierce is dead. Hydra in ruins. Secrets splashed out over screens and lives.
Hydra is dead, he thinks. Hydra was supposed to be dead a long time ago.
He doesn’t know why that’s something he knows, something that should matter to him.
He knows that they call him the Winter Soldier, so he listens for that, though he's never been able to think of himself that way. Cold soldier, the Russian, that is better, for the cold that comes over him when they put him to sleep.
If he's free, he can lie in the sun, he thinks. He can be warm again. He's not a person who gets to be free, though. He knows that. The protectors of freedom can never be free. They must always be vigilant.
It doesn't feel like his thought.
He's not going back, though. No one has come for him. If he stays away, no one will. That is what the helicarriers crashing means. That is what Pierce's death means. There is no one to take away his memories, no one to put him away until he is needed again. No one to make it all stop. He has no name, and no purpose.
*
It takes a long time, maybe a week, before he feels ready to go. Puts on clothes, over armor; without armor he might as well be naked. More layers of clothes, a hood, a hat. He walks the streets at night in his naked face until he can stand the day, and then further afield, into a press of people. People who, he has to remind himself, are neither targets, nor between him and his targets. There must be a way to walk through a crowd without thinking of killing any of them.
The museum is bright and full of people. Sun streams through high windows and warms him, though it doesn’t touch the cold underneath. He wants to attack whenever anyone brushes by him. So easy, his metal hand clenches in his pocket as though it’s around a throat.
He gets a ticket for the Captain America exhibit. The woman who takes the it is a small brunette with shadowed eyes. Her hands touch his for a moment and she smiles shyly at him. He just stares at her until she shakes her head and presses her lips together.
"Welcome home, soldier," she says.
He almost runs then. The only thing that stops him is remembering that the asset doesn’t fear people. The asset is a weapon, and weapons do not know fear. They do not know compassion. The asset only runs to protect himself. When he has eliminated his target, his job is done and his new job is to keep safe until he has a new target. That is the only time he may run. It's those words, the only memories, the only knowledge he has that is absolute that keeps him still.
He feels her fingers on his, like the touch of Captain America's body in the water, long after the sensation should have faded.
There's a line to get into the Captain America exhibit, but he doesn't mind the wait. He watches, counts the exits, counts the guards, the guns. He could get out of here easily if he needed to. There are a thousand ways he could disappear.
Then there he is, Captain America, Steve Rogers, little Steve, all grown up, take care of Steve, not that he had to be told, there's something underneath it all, take care of Steve. Protect him. Something he knows in the flesh.
“Do you still think he’s a good guy?” a ten-year-old boy asks his father. “I heard you say--”
“Yes,” the man cuts off his son. He has a worn-in face, a face aged by sun and wind, the stoop of an older man. He has seen war.
“But he disobeyed orders,” says the boy.
“Sometimes a soldier has to disobey his orders to serve a higher good,” says the father. “There are things I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
Then there he is, the face infrequently glimpsed in a mirror. The asset can't look for long, but here is the truth. Once his face was the same one worn by a young soldier named James Buchanan Barnes. He reads the words about Barnes’s life and death once, and then moves right back to the top again.
His eyes are wet when the needle goes into his neck, and it takes a few precious seconds before he remembers to fight. Then he falls into the darkness.