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Every time they wake him up it gets colder, he thinks.
Colder and colder until his blood is like ice and the metal of his arm burns at the touch.
He doesn't know what side he's fighting for, at this point. He doesn't know what year it is. He knows he's starting to feel old, as if he's tired down in the very bones, aging in the sallow curve of his cheekbones and the narrow jut of his hips.
He thinks, maybe, that they've forgotten about him. It's been weeks - months, perhaps, but it gets harder to keep track of time after a while so he tries not to think about it.
There's blood on his clothes and he smells sour because he's barely stopped. He's thinks he might have forgotten the mission, too, because he certainly has; it's cold and his ribs are pushing, up, up and up against his skin until he thinks they might break the surface. He's not hungry - he never gets hungry any more - but he can feel himself starving. He sleeps, he's sure, but he doesn't know when, or where. The nightmares are visceral and they slip away as soon as he awakes, a glint of blue eyes and the sickly swoop of his stomach as he falls -
He is in a haze.
He remembers that there was a brush of sun when he awoke, the leaves red on the trees, and now the snow is beginning to melt. His arm is rusted.
There's a city around him, the world passing him by. The buildings are grey and the people look miserable, heads bent away from the wind as they cross a teeming bridge, all suits and coats and huge, bundling scarves. They're staring at him, and he wonders how odd he must look to them, swathed in black and stained with blood. He thinks there might be a spray of the stuff across his jaw, black smeared around his eyes still, jumbled up with the sleep-deprived bruises hanging beneath his eyelids.
There's been no mission, so he's been walking. Walking and walking. He can't read any of the words on the signs, his stomach churning and his jaw going tight every time he tries to work the language out. Russian hangs thick on his tongue, crumbling to dust each time he tries to ask someone a question -
(Where am I? Do you know who I am? I had a friend once, a friend -)
and he thinks he might have forgotten how to speak.
He comes across the bridge, back into the thicket of enormous buildings. There's a bright splash of colour, camped around a cathedral. The signs make his head spin, the colours screaming at him - but they're smiling, singing, curved over guitars and paint pots even as they shiver in the cold. The tents stand out stark against the pale stone of the cathedral, haphazard monuments to a humanity he can't seem to process. They all seem odd to him, their smiles unfamiliar; a few look at him kindly, concerned, and he can't stand it.
He hurries away, blinking the colours and the smiles out of his head, and almost careens into a food stand.
There's a sweet-faced boy stood behind the counter, hair feathered and blonde, eyes sparkling blue in a way that makes his chest ache even though he doesn't know why. He drags his gaze away, filled all of a sudden with a surging, screaming want want want. The smell overwhelms him, starchy and warm, almost painfully good, and he stares down at the food instead, taps at the glass and holds up a finger. One.
He has no idea what's in his hands as he takes the package, but as he eats one his brain supplies helpfully: chips. He wonders if there will be more from it, asks for his name and gets nothing in reply, asks for a year or a date or a memory, gets a scab of blankness. He tries not to pick at it. That's what they've always told him - leave it alone, leave it alone, as he sees a face on the news, playing across an old television set rustling away in the background that they hurry to switch off, and asks why he recognises it. Leave it alone, it's better this way, the pretty nurse tells him as she slips a needle under his skin. He remembers it, the cold press of steel, but can't remember his parents, his family, wonders if he ever even had them or if he was simply made, created with steel and death in his veins and abruptly nausea overwhelms him, his mind a heady rush of half-remembered nothings and the blood he's spilled -
The chips burn his mouth and he chokes out a cough, pushing the few coins that have been rustling around his pocket across the counter. The boy raises an eyebrow at the foreign currency and he takes the opportunity to disappear when his attention is distracted, cradling the hot packet of food to his chest.
When it's gone and he's licked the salt from his fingers, settled down in the crook of some steps as it begins to rain, he spreads the paper out flat in front of him and tries to comprehend the words. The ink runs away from him, the words incomprehensible otherwise, the date smudged by the fat raindrops and eventually he's forced to abandon the scattered papers, hurrying to cover.
They find him that night, in the quietness of the alleyway. He's soaked to the skin, shivering, half-asleep and feverish, skin scalding even as he shivers. As soon as he feels the hand on his shoulder he's screaming, raw and cracked in his throat. Fury burns thick through him and he lashes out, metal hand moving faster than he can believe and the slick sound of a snapped neck is satiating and sickening all at once. More descend from the shadows, wrapping arms around him as he roars, animalistic now, blood smeared across his face, his jaw, caught in the thick hatchet of his hair as he kicks out, catches one of them in the stomach, mind screaming victorious.
There's a cold nick of a needle against his neck and he howls, arms shaking, even as his body betrays him and darkness descends. There's a puddle not far from him and he digs a hand out, scrapes nails against the pavement until they're ragged and raw, trying to find purchase against the rain-slicked surface. It's the last thing he sees, the last thing he remembers beyond the pain in his hands and the swift, testing kick aimed against his ribs, and he slips into aching bones and the long, cold sleep once again.
-
He still knows and remembers England. They don't send him back again but he gets twisted flashes of the place; endless rain, endless walking, lost and alone and stuck without a voice. The next time they wake him up he screams in Russian, long strings of incoherence, just to remind himself he still knows how to speak. He hangs onto the memories like stretches of string, untangling the knots as he goes, learns that the place he was found again was London, the walk he took hundreds of miles long.
They keep him in Europe, mainly; Italy, to steal away a girl. He charms her into the car and feels nauseated doing it - some distant part of him that speaks with a Brooklyn accent, grey and far away in his mind, screaming at him no, stop, please. She brings her flute, fingers clutched tight around the case, and they call him The American because they've pressed it into his head, the language and the accent. None of it's real, even if it does tug at something, low and heavy in his chest, each time his mouth twists oddly around the words, tight vowels and lazy drawls.
Another sleep. He's sent to borrow Alexandrov back. He comes back full of questions, chest tight at the thought of nuclear winter - they laugh, tell him that he'd survive all of it - just you and the cockroaches. His mind wanders, listlessly, at the thought - the last human on earth, him and the snow, as they laugh and tease, words sharp and cruel, you'll be the winter soldier, comrade. They clap him on the back and put him under and when he wakes up there are no more questions, no more fears, no more second-guessing or doubts or low, nauseated feelings. They tell him his name is Ivan, Alexei, Valentin, they call him death and destruction and, more common now, the winter soldier. His mind is a blizzard, white and fierce and blank.
He gets headaches sometimes, splintering against his skull. He doesn't mention it to anyone.
-
Sometimes, in the spare hour or so between the death and the return, he'll go to the bar and pick a fight with someone.
Anyone. He likes to fight, openly and noisily, screaming and brutal. He lives in a world of silencers and knives, slipped like a secret between ribs, murder efficient, human lives running through his fingers so quickly he can't keep up any more. The fights are different. He comes away with torn up knuckles, fast-fading bruises blossoming like kisses across his face. It's nice, he things, to damage without intent to kill.
He comes back more tattered and bruised each time. It's not until three of his ribs are cracked that they bleach that out of him too.
The funny thing is that he lets it happen. Some sick, sad self-destruction. He could kill any half-drunk oaf he takes on, but he lets them knock a tooth out, spits it from his mouth with a slick of blood and a gappy grin. He lets them rip out a handful of hair, beat his ribs with a metal bat in an alleyway where he pissed off some low-rent drug dealer.
They let him carry on for a long while, like it's a game. Almost as if they're waiting for him to kill himself, to see if he can. It's not until the ribs, the fractured jaw, the fingers smashed to a pulp, the shattered collar bone - all at once, so painful he can't breathe with it, air all tangled up in his lungs - that they stop him.
-
He sleeps for a long, long while after that. Sometimes he wakes - or perhaps these moments are the nightmares. He's packed in ice, suffocating, eyes fluttering open and he thinks -
He thinks thank God, thank God, they've forgotten me.
They wake him up again and he's dull. A rusted knife. His eyes are empty and he can't find his usual anger, the usual visceral hatred that used to fuel him. His hands shake for the first hour and he can't think past the cold. They tell him he will be called Ivan, recycling an old persona, an old passport - but he simply stares. They call me the winter soldier, he informs them, voice a husk, as if they don't know already.
They send him to Washington. He lingers in a house, huge with long stretches of glass windows. His fingers rush over the soft material of the couch and his eyes scan the exits as he approaches the kitchen, watches the strange man talk to his house maid. Watches him shoot her. Neither of them flinch, and there's a tiny, quiet voice screaming do you really want to be like him? He ignores it, because the voice is thick with a Brooklyn accent and if he thinks on it too long the headache will come back, lingering and sharp, a little like brain freeze.
He's leaving again, instructions set firmly in place, when his mind reels with it. The air is sharp with heat, sand in every fold of his clothes, between the crooks of his toes. There's a presence by him, although he can't see the face; warm and small, his arm looped around their shoulders, feeling them shift and bounce under the bones of his wrist. There's a howl of laughter, his own sharp hiss - the taste of ice cream on his tongue, the rush of brain freeze, the low-hanging sun of dusk and an almost-kiss brushed against his lips.
It's gone too soon and he chases it, picks at the scab. He's not hungry but he can feel himself starving. There's eyes on his back and a tinny voice in his ear but his skin is tight with sunburn. If he shifts his elbow just so, the scratch of his sleeve is like the scrape of sand against his skin.
It's a sad, pathetic moment of rememberance. Pitiful - but he clings to it, remembers the taste of heat in the air and a pair of crinkled, laughing blue eyes that had turned violet in the low light. He imagines there's sand under his clothes and pretends the cold he feels, a constant breath of ice just beneath his skin, is the ice cream melting against his fingers.
-
I remember you, I remember you, I remember you, his mind breathes like a drum, over and over, in tune with the pounding of his heart. He screams to drown the sound out, screams even as his mission stands there, face a beautiful agony. He feels as if someone's reached into his stomach and twisted. It's cruel, the mission is cruel even as his eyes are old and endlessly kind.
He wants to sob, can feel his mind fracturing and breaking apart, pain burning hot, skin flayed and tearing. He holds the man - the mission - down, over the edge, fist raised and shaking.
I'm with you 'till the end of the line the man tells him. Everything after that is a blur.
-
The Winter Soldier watches Captain America fall, and something feels awfully wrong about that.
So he follows. That feels better. Like the natural order of things.
(That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb to run away from a fight. I'm following him.)
He follows, leaps into the water, drags Captain America out of the river and waits for him to breathe before he leaves. His hair drags across his cheekbones, slick with water, the taste of it foul in his mouth and Captain America breathes.
The Winter Soldier breathes too. He hadn't realised he'd stopped.
He leaves, slipping into the line of trees, away from the city, rips out the tracking device in his metal arm and does enough damage to the one wrapped up in his flesh and bones, tied up in an artery that will kill him before he can get it out, that he might get some headway.
The Winter Soldier makes sure Captain America is breathing and then he runs.
-
Of course he comes crawling back.
He'd spent nights digging trackers out of his skin, stealing clothes, letting his hair grow longer, sleeping in alleys and abandoned apartments and every half-hidden, foul space he can find. He goes into a restroom on the edge of the city to wash blood out from underneath his fingernails
(he wakes up, sometimes, with scratch marks across his collar bone, his chest, his neck. The nightmares slip away too fast for him to catch but the evisceration is written plainly against his skin, raw and miserable)
and is shocked to find a rusted, stained mirror. His hair is longer than he'd expected, hanging lank and greasy in his eyes. He washes it as best as he can with hand soap and tugs off a strip of material from his t-shirt to tie it up with, bundling it all up underneath a baseball cap. His fingers shake - the blood is still there, crusted up beneath his fingernails, but he ignores it - as he runs it over the roughened line of stubble.
He doesn't remember the last time he looked in a mirror.
He doesn't remember a lot.
He remembers sitting on a bus last week and watching some teenagers with coloured hair and faces full of piercings, ink decorating their skin; they'd been playing music tinnily, almost obnoxiously - but his fingers had tapped out the beat against his knee. He'd gotten off at the next stop.
He remembers walking past a pretty man in a suit on his way here and feeling his stomach clench, cheeks a little flushed as the man had cast a glance and a smirk his way.
He remembers the smell of fries, wafting over from a street vendor just yesterday, how his stomach had rumbled. He's starving but he's hungry, now, too, and at night he tip-toes fingers up the sharp cast of his ribs and thinks I'm too skinny, I'm too skinny, I'm wasting away, and he grins with the thought, because at least if he's dying it means he's alive.
His nightmares are haunted by cracked skulls, the swell of blood in his mouth, the screaming agony of broken bones and his litany of scars. If he shuts his eyes too long he can see the children he murdered, the baby he smothered in its sleep years ago in Bosnia. But sometimes, too, he lets the sun spill over his face on a quiet afternoon, when he dares come out of whatever hiding spot he's holed himself up in, feels the heat of it and can just, only barely, remember a place called Brooklyn and a strange, small little man he perhaps once called friend.
There's some humanity bleeding back into him, and as he stares into the mirror, past the dirty smears and the spots of rust, he can see evidence of it all over his face. He'd always wondered if he'd simply been made, never born, just created from flesh and metal and bone - but his cheeks are sallow, dark rings under his eyes, a few lines around his mouth. Fingers trace the run of his features; the straight line of his nose, the long slope of his forehead. In the low light his eyes seem made anew; soft, the pupils large, all of their coldness giving way to vulnerability.
He cracks out a grin. Then a laugh. Then he's bracing himself on the sink, laughing and laughing and sobbing, forehead rested against the glass, letting the coolness soothe him until he's wrung dry, all the tears wrung out of him.
Yesterday, he saw his face on a bus. It had been an advert for a museum. He had ignored it, had nightmares about it, woke himself up screaming raw with it. Now he chases it, asks for directions, negotiates thick crowds of tourists and finds himself staring. A stranger looks back, eyes wide and distant and utterly unfamiliar despite being the ones he'd stared at in the mirror not long ago.
The exhibit is shadowed, thick with people; Captain America is still sprawled across every major news outlet in the country and the exhibit has only grown in popularity, little kids running riot.
A symbol to the nation, a hero to the world - the story of Captain America is one of honour, bravery and sacrifice.
He - not he, not him; James Buchanan Barnes, Bucky, who the hell is Bucky - has a whole board to himself.
His face is plastered across it in black and white. He runs a few trembling fingers across it, tracing it the way he had traced his own features earlier. Against a wall, scratchy, old footage plays out; he's laughing, turning to the man stood beside him, deferring to him. Captain America is smiling, trying to focus on whoever's stood behind the camera - but he looks distracted, the pair of them like naughty school boys laughing behind their hands.
He feels as if he's been punched in the stomach. He trips over his own feet, saying nothing to the couple he almost bowls over, desperately searching for an exit as he wheels round, wrenches his eyes tight shut.
Best friends since childhood, Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers were inseperable on the school yard and the battle field.
There's an ache in his chest and a nausea at the back of his throat, a sickly lump, because they're pumping facts out of tinny speakers, facts about him, facts about James Buchanan Barnes and he doesn't remember, doesn't remember any of it, and the recording is telling him
Barnes is the only Howling Commando to give his life in the service of his country.
His brain is screaming, bleeding, pleading with him to please stop, stop picking, leave it alone, it's better this way, but he's starving now and he's hungry too, his fists itching for a fight, every cell of him vibrating with pain and confusion, people are staring and he thinks he might be shouting, roaring and
I had a friend once, a friend
and
and
and there's a hand on his shoulder. Everything goes dark.
-
It can be overwhelming, at first. I know. It sure ain't easy, huh?
The most overwhelming part of it all is Steve.
There's the huge city, the god sat down at the breakfast table, the flashing lights and ever-present quiet, the too-familiar accents, the strange man who flicks at his metal arm the first time they meet, mutter hey, I've got one of those too then leaps off the roof into the night's sky, a suit of armour coming out of the walls to catch him. There's a voice in the ceiling and the bed in Steve's spare room is too soft so he sleeps on the floor with a blanket curled over his shoulders, and one day he sees Natasha training in the gym and spots a thick knot of scars in her stomach that seem awfully familiar.
And somehow, among the mess of it all, Captain America is the most overwhelming thing.
A lot of the time he'll look at Steve's face and sees nothing. Feels nothing. There's a weighted expectation in Captain America's gaze that's well-hidden - but sometimes, on the bad days, when he searches the kind blue of Steve's eyes looking for something cruel to say, he sees it. Sees the disappointment, sees the failure he's become - because he's not James Buchanan Barnes any more. He's still a bit of the Winter Soldier. But mostly he's nothing. Empty. He knows it and Steve knows it -
And the horrible thing is that it hurts. Every time he says something cruel, jeers at Steve, lashes out with him, and the man's soft faze stills with agony, it wrecks through him like a knife to flesh. It shouldn't hurt, because Steve's nothing to him, just another lost face in the crowd, just another mission - but the man's wrapped around his tendons, the pluck of his heart strings, somehow, and he finds himself aching.
He ignores the ache.
But then there's one morning, four weeks in, when he's holed up in the kitchen, wrapped up in a sweater two sizes too big for him. It's a Bad Day - he's started capitalising them in his mind now. They deserve a title - and the food he's forcing himself to eat tastes like ash. It's days like this where he feels like he's forgetting English, where his thoughts are in Russian and words are heavy in his mouth. He had nightmares last night - but that's not new.
'Morning Buck,' Steve tells him and, before Bucky can think about it, he's shooting back;
'Morning pal.'
Steve freezes. Bucky's eyes flicker shut. In the darkness of his own head he can see Coney Island, feels ice dribbling down his fingers, his lips, sweet and sticky. Sees a strange, small man who looks a little like Steve bobbing up and down at his elbow. He's got a skinny chest and when Bucky backs him up against a wall underneath the pier his skin tastes like sea salt.
The memory warps, flickers, turns warm and bright with the glare of sunshine and the grit of sand between his toes. Desperately, he reaches for it, hungry for anything now, something to hold onto in this strange, vague future.
The strange, small man is Steve, he thinks. He's got bright blue eyes and a pretty smile and he looks up at Bucky like he's the only thing in the world.
When his eyes open his chest is quaking and there's a hand curved over his shoulder. He resists the urge to tear away, leans into the touch. Bows his head, steadies his breathing.
'Bucky?' Steve forces out, voice cracking over the name.
He knows what he's being asked.
Are you there, Bucky? Is it really you?
Steve? Is that you?
'Are you okay?'
I thought you were dead.
I thought you were smaller.
(Just a whisper now)
I'm with you 'till the end of the line, pal.
'Buck?'
You're my mission.
Then finish it.
'Yeah,' he breaths out, voice a strained whisper in the warmth of the kitchen. 'Yeah, somethin' like that.'