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There are certain things he remembers. They come to him without warning, on the back walls of his mind, shadows of the world he used to know. Larger, perhaps, than the reality was; distorted, diffuse. They waver there, awaiting interpretation, until the glare of the lamps overhead washes them away and when he awakens again, there is only white.
But they come back. In the midst of a mission, the shadows fall across his thoughts, and despite himself, they distract him. Scabby knees below brown shorts. A waterfront. The way clothes sway on a line as they're taken in, and the clean-air smell of them, crumpled in his arms.
He'll be walking down a hill towards a target; he'll be balanced on a wall, holding a gun. His mind is a simple process map of tactics and objectives and suddenly he can taste apples and forgets what he's meant to do. He tries to focus, but instead thinks of music, lights, a wheel. His radio crackles with orders and he moves numbly in response, but it is too late; the target has moved away.
The ones in charge give him more injections. Tomorrow, he will get the kill. And then the chair, the blinding lamps, the whiteness. Until the next time.
He remembers newsprint on his fingers. Broken pavement under his shoes. The hot summer sun on blond hair, pale skin, and a boy laughing. The trigger squeezed a fraction too slowly as a result and that laughter in his ears as he aims, fires, aims. There is something about the angle of the light that he can't place, something about the recoil of the gun. Blood fountains up from the target's chest but he thinks of a hand on his shoulder, and walks away.
The debriefings are puzzling. Why? How? They don't normally ask but they are worried. He sits in the chair with the rubber on his tongue and they discuss the voltage as it passes through his brain. His back arches; his body shakes. They adjust the current until he faints, and the next mission goes without a hitch.
But still he remembers. He remembers the last time, and the time before. He begins to remember remembering. Between shocks and shots and cryo-sleep, in his few waking hours, the memories become less like shadows and more like stains, seeping up through the whitewash. Uniforms. Mud. A hand in his. Boot-laces he can't untie. He's in a chair in a metal room and a voice says, it's me. It's me. and he's exhausted beyond comprehension but for that voice, he will rise.
The ones in charge use stronger drugs, deeper sleeps; they don't know what's going wrong. It will work, and then it won't, and they will have to retrieve him from the location because of a song on the radio, a certain make of car, a woman holding an orange. He gets his kills, but they are compromised. He is becoming a weapon they can't reload. When they freeze him now, instead of white, there are pictures in his mind, and in the bone-deep chill of the cryo-pod, he dreams.
Sight. Aim. Shoot. Glass explodes and his face sweats beneath the mask. Target acquired. Return to base. They place the rubber between his teeth and the buzz-saw of the current is waves that roll and sigh on a beach below. He is riding a wheel turning slowly against the night. Someone is beside him, someone warm. The lamps overhead burn his retinas, but he is far away.
Blue eyes. A kiss. A constellation. His metal fingers curl around an imagined hand. Someday we'll get out of here, he says, and then wonders who he's speaking to. The wind pulls his hair into his face and obscures the target he can't quite see through the smoke and the cars on the road. Bare feet in a puddle, mud on their toes. That voice - It's me. It's me.
That voice.
There is noise and chaos and a sense of urgency that paradoxically makes him falter. The debrief is terrible. The volts branching through his neurons crack like lightning in his head, but still in his dreams he hears that voice.
When at last he gains his target, as they're plunging from the sky, those blue eyes look into his and say I'm with you. He remembers, then, breaching the surface of the water, feeling the air forced from his lungs. Remembers speed, and snow, and a mountain in winter, and reaching for this hand he now holds. He swims towards the sunlight, pulling the weight behind him, remembering screaming: not his own.
He leaves Steve on the muddy bank and walks without looking back, his mind too full to bear another thought. He walks until the sun has dried him and the light has failed. He walks until he is cold. His mind will not stop turning and he almost longs for pain, for the chair and the injections and the white.
There are certain things he remembers, and they are all Steve; the pain of having him, and losing him, and having him again; a Ferris wheel stranded in mid-turn. Kisses and fear and a war, far away; darkness, the wind in his ears. That voice. It's me. It's me. He remembers Steve screaming his name in a winter storm, as like the snow, he falls, and falls, and falls.
He walks until his legs give out and he slumps to the ground where he stands. There is gravel on his lips, his face pressed to the dirt. He realises slowly that he is crying. He realises that he has nowhere to go.
Sleep covers him like a blanket, there on the ground, and when he wakes, he remembers everything.