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The Winter Soldier dreams in black and white, in snatches of Siberian landscape blurred with snow.
When he is on missions he doesn't dream, because he does not sleep. There is no need for sleep, not for a weapon. Weapons get put away, stored, where they wait patiently to be used again. Sleep—if it can be called that—happens in the chamber where he goes after; cold, because he knows nothing else. Just the cold, the feeling of a gun in his hands, metal-and-oil, the smooth grooves of combat knives and the heavy handles of assault rifles. The pain when he goes into the chair (fear fear so much fear because he knows pain but he does not want it) because something has started to shine through that cold Siberian winter, something golden and warm and—home? But the Soldier does not have a home. He does not know what this means. He only knows the cold.
“You are going to do so much good for the world,” he is told, though that does not matter to him now. It did, once, he thinks, though that part of him has been haphazardly erased. He does what he is told. He is a weapon. It does not matter what he thinks because he does not. He cannot. He is programmed for his missions and his missions only. He is the asset.
There is still some part of him, albeit tiny, that still wants to know that he did the right thing, that he succeeded in his mission. That he is doing what they are telling him, sharing the future to make the world a better place. That part always hopes that he won't get the chair again, or the chamber, because though it is what he knows it is not what he wants.
When he says that instead of his mission report, he gets slapped.
He screams at the voltage and then everything is cold again.
Black-and-white, the howling snow returns.
——
“What is your name?”
“James Buchanan Barnes.” It rolls off his tongue before he can stop it, a tether that holds steadfast even though the pain of the chair has become frequent now: he can hear it echoing off rough-hewn brick and grimy alleyways, can hear it in the faraway voice of a woman as she scolds, can hear it in the deep baritone of a boy, a small, frail boy, as he scolds as well. The name of the boy eludes him, his face an oil painting smear of pale golden sunshine no matter how hard he focuses. He hears another name from the baritone, a different name, and he says it, “Bucky,” downcasts his eyes and murmurs, “He calls me Bucky.” But who is ‘he’? Things have become difficult, slippery, his mind too muddled to grasp onto anything. The oil-painting boy is drifting away, fuzzing into nothing as eyelids droop. His body is too exhausted to handle any more pain.
“Wipe him.” It is spoken in angry German. “Wipe him and try it again.”
Fear spikes up, suffocating, but he makes no move to stop them, even though the arm could easily crush them. Fear comes like breathing; he expects it when he is in this bunker.
“James Buchanan Barnes,” he is saying, over and over, though the name has begun to lose its meaning. They shove the mouthguard in as he is still repeating, “James Buchanan Barnes, James Buchanan Barnes, James B—”
——
He knows Russian. He does not remember learning Russian, or if he'd always spoken it, but he knows it. That is enough. He does not question things anymore. The men poking and prodding and testing out the arm speak it. The men checking clipboards speak German. So therefore he must speak it. He must do what they want him to do, because the arm is still clumsy and too powerful, the skin around it still tender and sore. He must be what they want.
“You are going to help shape the future,” they say when he is still lying in a hospital bed.
The future. An echo.
Where are we going?
The future.
Him and—and another boy, fragile but sure-minded, strong in ways that he is not. But who is he? And why is he not here? He does not know, but he is sure that he does not want a future where that boy isn’t.
“You will change the way that history takes place.”
He does not want to.
Where is the pale golden boy?
He manages to choke two of them into unconsciousness before he is sedated.
——
The man on the bridge is skilled, but the Winter Soldier is better, faster. He is focused in the way that only a weapon can be, mechanical and efficient in his movements. The man is clumsy in the way that humans are, one eye on the small knife in the Soldier’s hand and the other on their surroundings. Though he is a formidable opponent, he still is no match. He is the mission, and the Soldier never fails.
And then, mask rolling off across the concrete, the breeze cool on his face, and he turns around, ready, because he cannot fail. He is not programmed for that. There is no room allowed for failures.
What he does not expect is for the man to stop. He does not expect him to say “Bucky?” like the Soldier is supposed to know what that means.
And yet, somehow, the Soldier stops, too, and looks at the man. Says, “Who the hell is Bucky?” like someone else is speaking his words for him. For some reason, he feels compelled to respond even though his knives are at his belt and his target is unarmed. Something is trying to get through, gnawing at the corners of his mind. His fingers twitch like they want to go for one of the handles but the rest of his body remains still. Perhaps it is the way that the man had said it, heavy and sad and shocked, but also with a whispered sort of reverence that belies a casual encounter, that hints at something deeper, something hidden beneath the surface and buried under decades of disuse.
The Soldier flees before he can make sense of it; an ache had begun to build, somewhere deep in his chest, and it had frightened him, because he did not know what it meant.
——
The Soldier does not measure by time. It is not necessary, for they will do it for him. He does not remember the order of his kills, or when they happened, just that they did. He must be doing good because they tell him so, one handler after another—they praise him, say that the world thanks him for his contributions. He chooses to believe them, because it is easier than thinking for himself.
In and out of the chamber, in and out of missions, he is only ever conscious enough to complete what he is assigned and report back. All he knows is that there have been many different faces since he first woke up with the arm.
One ones where he is out of the chamber for longer than normal, it remains harder to stay focused. His attention strays, he becomes self-aware; he remembers, he thinks, warm summers, a stick and a ball; bloody knuckles and panting breath, someone lying huddled and prone on the gleaming rainbows of oil-and-rain puddles, glowing as warm as the sunshine on the street—
——
“What is your name?”
“I—I remember someone—”
Pain and ice, swallowing him up…
——
In the deserted main street of a small village not far from Lausanne he manages to catch the date in a newspaper left on an outside table, detritus floating along and street and catching the updrafts of wind to dance along the sidewalk. Glass from a broken window crunches under his boot with a delicate tinkling sound. There is food leftover from someone's breakfast, cold eggs and toast and coffee. It is on that table that he finds the newspaper, spread open with the corners fluttering in the breeze. He flips it closed with two gloved fingers.
March 7, 1950.
They find him when he misses the rendezvous point, and Bucky, fleeting and trembling and fighting the long-clawed chilly clutches of the Soldier, is saying, “Where is Steve? What happened to Steve? The train—I—the train…”
——
In the Smithsonian. He does not recognize the man that masquerades as him—as who he was. Who the man on the bridge (Steve, his mind supplies, he still does not know for sure who Steve is, or why he saved him, just that, like any other mission, he had to) saw him as. He has seen himself in the mirror since he escaped and this man, this so-called James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, does not have the haunted eyes that he has, ringed dark and sallow with age; he does not have the clouded film of ghosts that shadow him, unshakable, settled onto his very soul. The man portrayed as a hero, as a soldier who sacrificed himself for his country and his friends, including the Captain, is not the man trembling here now underneath ratty street clothes. They may share looks, but they are not—and never will be—the same person.
He thinks that he may have loved someone once.
Blond hair and blue eyes and the biggest goddamn heart on the smallest goddamn little punk in Brooklyn, god, how could Bucky Barnes not love Steve Rogers?
——
“One more time, nutzlos hund.”
In the chair, he trembles, fading in and out of consciousness. The images he’s tried to hold onto for so long are sliding away, stretching, stretching into thin shadows of nothingness even as he grasps at them with his flesh hand and the metal one. Something else is taking its place, something terrifying and looming, and he wants to fight, please let him fight. But he’s tired. So tired. Closes his eyes, lets the electricity course through him one more time, and this time he does not scream.
“What is your name?”
And he knows.
“ценное качество.”