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“I remember all of them.”
Some nights are worse than others. The memories come in waves, waves that push him under the surf and pummel him until his lungs ache and his eyes burn.
Memories of their faces. Memories of their choked pleas. Memories of tears that snaked paths down their faces as they begged for mercy.
Memories of himself, pulling the trigger despite everything, unable to find the line between ‘this is wrong’ and ‘this is what they told me to do’.
He wakes up in the middle of the night gasping for breath, the room collapsing and head spinning. Another dream, another nightmare has come and gone, leaving the faint echoes of their screams lingering in his ears. Their last screams. The ones that fell upon his unhearing and uncaring ears.
He shoves the palms of his hands into his eye sockets and repeats his mantra, quietly, to himself.
“My name is Bucky. I am my own person. It’s not my fault. My name is Bucky. I am my own person. It’s not my fault.”
He never knows how many times he repeats it, just that his heart isn’t pounding as hard when he’s done. Even after Shuri reprogrammed his brain, these kinds of memories can’t just be forgotten like they didn't happen, like they didn't matter.
The cries of the innocent still haunt him. The cries of Howard and Maria Stark still haunt him.
He didn’t know their names until much, much later. For 25 years, they were Targets 407 and 408, respectively. Without names, things were easier. He didn’t have to think about them any more than he already had while mapping the path of least resistance to their deaths.
But when they had names, that was a different story. Once they had names, they had lives. They had families.
So he made a point of never learning names. It made things easier in the long run. No names, no worries.
But when it comes to his own name…
He remembers bits and pieces from Before. Him and Steve going to Coney Island to pick up girls (it was mostly him doing the ‘picking up’ because, well, Steve was Steve and he was him), Steve wincing as he cleaned out a cut above his eye from a fight he never should have been fighting, the curve of Steve’s smile when he told him that.
Funny, he thinks, that all of his memories from Before are of Steve.
Funnier still that Steve is the one who gave him his name.
Bucky.
He was born James Buchanon Barnes. But that’s not who he is, at least not anymore. He is Bucky. Just Bucky. Not James Buchanon Barnes. Not Subject 8. Not The Winter Soldier. He may have been all of those names in the past, but that’s not who he is now.
Bucky.
“Who the hell is Bucky?”
He’d heard others speak of ‘the mortifying ordeal of being known’, but never understood. How could something so inherently comforting be mortifying? How could the thing that he unknowingly longed for be something that others avoided.
To him, being known was nothing and everything.
He’d gone 73 years being both known and unknown at the same time. Known as The Winter Soldier. Unknown as literally any other part of him. The Winter Soldier was a monster. A monster made out of the shell of James Buchanon Barnes. A beast that Hydra had spent years meticulously crafting and perfecting, chiseling away at every last bit of James Buchanon Barnes until all that was left was a hollow skeleton of his old self with a blind compliance to the enemy of everything he’d ever believed in life.
But when Steve said his name, something sparked again. For the first time that he could remember, he felt something. Familiarity. Comfort?
He didn’t know it at the time, but he knows now that that feeling was home.
His name in Steve’s voice conjured memories of humid days in Brooklyn, vanilla ice cream, and running down alleyways playing ‘war’ with his classmates after it had just rained, the pavement still wet.
Bucky.
Home.
“My name is Bucky. I am my own person. It’s not my fault.”