Work Text:
The Asset has been contained for the past twelve hours and fourteen minutes, unmoving in his cell. His scheduled wipe has been forgotten in the sudden rush of activity on-base, hurried footsteps and hushed voices echoing though the halls.
He’s heard little of what’s happening and doesn’t care— it will not affect him; his mind is free (in a sense; nothing about him is actually free) to wander— and so it focuses on the bridge.
More specifically, the man. The words.
A name.
B u c k y .
It had been spoken with a conviction and knowledge that couldn’t be faked, a thousand memories shielded within blueblue eyes that pierced the terrible haze of nothingness that was the Asset’s everything.
It was meaning, it gave him meaning. Something to latch onto— a name meant a person, a life;
M e m o r i e s.
Things the Asset had never thought about, was conditioned to forget. Things the Asset suddenly feared having lost, once upon a time.
He couldn’t shake those eyes from his mind.
A long buried, thought dead part of him chanted, I knew him. I knew him.
The man on the bridge. Blueblue eyes.
I knew him.
A sliver of a memory— t h o s e eyes staring down at— him?— with a heartbreaking, joyous relief; frantic hands pulling away leather straps from his chest; a breathy voice— “It’s me. It’s Ste—“ shattering into nothing in his broken, broken mind.
I knew him.
Footsteps sound in the hall, a heavy object being dragged along the dirty floor.
His head snaps up, eyes made carefully blank; the Asset as he should be.
A creak of metal, and sudden light piercing the dark cell, and he can see four of his handlers, throwing a heavy body in with him before slamming the door shut again.
A blond head lifts, and then—
And then.
Blueblue eyes meet his own.
A part of him screams and cries and shouts with joy.