Chapter Text
The first memory crashes through amidst a storm of explosions. I’m with you ‘til the end of the line, he says. And someone else is saying it too.
(No one has said those words to him. This is not part of his mission. The man is his mission.)
He stands over him. (He stood over him before). And he looks up at him, Bucky, echoing in his mind. (The eyes are the same. Everything is out of focus. But the eyes are the same).
He remembers reaching down to pull him up.
When everything stops, and the man falls away, he reaches down down down into the water, and pulls him up.
--
He doesn’t go back.
--
He reads that the man with familiar eyes is Captain America. Steve, he thinks, just before the paper clarifies.
--
He stays in DC, hiding, not ready to move on, not willing to go back.
He sleeps in short bursts, falling into unconsciousness when he can no longer stand, only to be pulled screaming from his dreams by ghosts that he can’t quite make out.
Something in him is defective. He’s not sure he wants to be fixed, but he knows he should be.
--
It takes him three days to remember food. He remembers that he no longer has handlers and doctors and technicians ensuring that he has an adequate number of calories to carry him through to the mission’s completion, but that he has to seek out fuel for himself.
There's a place he can go. A stash. With cash, extra weapons. Supplies. They told him about it. Back before.
It could be cleared out. It could be forgotten.
It could be a trap.
(He hopes it's a trap. If they try and take him, he'll kill them all.)
--
It's not a trap.
There's one man, uncertain and unsure. Clinging to all the shattered pieces he can find.
He tries to give him an order.
He considers ignoring him.
He kills him.
--
(If you don't kill them, they'll kill you.
If you don't kill them, they'll take you.
If you can't win, make them kill you.
Make sure they kill you dead.)
--
He sleeps and when he wakes he remembers fighting him on the bridge. I knew him, he’d said, and it was important, and he repeated it over and over again until his handler wiped it away.
--
On the sixth day, he goes to the Captain America exhibit.
He looks for the man, the mission, the person he couldn't kill. He looks for the man he knew.
The man he finds is pious and polished. He is commanding, with a straight back, and handsome smile.
He is -
He is not what he was expecting.
He didn't know he had expectations.
There is a picture of the man, small and skinny, and he can’t bring himself to turn away.
Fire, he thinks. Fire. And determination. Stubborn and righteous.
A man that looks at a world that doesn't want him, and forces them to take him anyway.
A man that thinks he can stare down an assassin with decades of experience and a near perfect record.
A man that can.
This is it. This is Steve.
--
(I knew him.)
--
He finds a picture of a man with his face.
Bucky, it says. Bucky, Steve had said. Bucky, Steve had begged.
At the bridge. On the helicarrier.
(As he found his feet, dazed and confused. As he lurched awake. As he fell. A thousand times over. A million different ways.)
James Buchanan Barnes, it says.
325575, he finishes
A childhood friend from Brooklyn, it says.
And he waits for something else to surface.
Nothing does.
But there's something familiar about way the words sit, heavy on his tongue, heavy on his heart.
--
He goes back to Captain America.
A childhood friend from Brooklyn.
He tries. He. The words are running together. And there's a weariness like he's never known.
He's been trained to analyse physical exhaustion, to be aware of when his deterioration threatens his capacity to see a mission through to completion.
This is not that, but he feels just as compromised.
His head is a mess of images. Half formed and inconsistent. Impossible to grasp, impossible to ignore.
A childhood friend from Brooklyn.
You know me, he says. I knew him, he says.
--
If he was reporting in, he'd say.
No. If he was reporting in, he'd be assessed and found to be in peak physical condition.
But.
Rest. He needs rest.
If they found him right now. If they took him, and freed his mind from this. From all this. He's not sure that he'd fight them.
--
(He would fight them. He would kill them.
It doesn't understand this, and christ, he'd kill for a moment of peace.
But he's not giving it up. He won't give any of it up.)
--
There's a section on The Howling Commandos.
The one with his picture said they were His.
His team. His men. His friends.
He doesn't read it. Doesn't wander towards it. Doesn't.
His head is still swimming.
--
He leaves.
--
He sleeps.
--
He dreams. He dreams.
He dreams of formless shadows. He dreams of warmth.
(He dreams of bitter cold.)
He dreams of something soft. A gentle touch.
(He dreams of something hard. An unforgiving hand.)
He dreams of sunshine.
(He dreams of blood.)
--
When he wakes, the day is bright and new.