Chapter Text
Had anyone told James Buchanan Barnes when he was a child that he would die and come back from the dead not once but twice, well, he wouldn't have believed you. A well-meaning time-traveller could have gone back to 1925, taken that hard-headed kid from Brooklyn to the future to show him the exact hell he would be put through, and the dumbass would have just said cool with a cheeky smile and way more swagger than any eight-year-old should have. They could have warned him all they wanted, raised every red flag, or pestered him every second of the day, but in the end, the boy would have made all the same choices that led him to where he was today, with one arm and a head full of terrible shit that he didn’t like to talk about.
As luck would have it, the eight-year-old version of James, or Bucky as his friends liked to call him, was never visited by an interloper from the future, and the damn knucklehead decided to live his life however he damn well pleased. He met his best friend, Steve Rogers, the same year the time traveler never arrived to intervene, which is coincidental considering that intervening is exactly how the two boys crossed paths. The skinny little Rogers boy who just transferred schools was getting his ass kicked by Borough Hall when Bucky stepped in to fight off his bullies, and the rest was history. They stuck together all through grade school, played baseball on the same neighborhood teams, fought each other's fights, terrorized Bucky’s sisters together, worked the same menial jobs, and liked the same girls, though Bucky was luckier on that front than his stick-figured friend.
He was luckier in a lot of ways; he slid through their school years like it was nothing, while Stevie always needed help with one thing or another. Bucky usually helped Stevie with their arithmetic and science homework, but at the very least, Stevie excelled in focus, far more than Bucky could have ever managed. Stevie happened to be a practical, realistic person, but Bucky was a dreamer, his head always stuck in pulp magazines and comic books, which his father would occasionally take away whenever he half-assed an assignment. Both boys got great grades, but Bucky’s could have been better, and upon their high school graduation, no one was surprised by the scholarships Stevie got for art school, which he managed to tackle along with the paper route that Bucky had dropped in exchange for a job down at the docks.
Bucky, on the other hand, well, he didn’t have the grades for a full ride to any of the colleges he got accepted to. His parents insisted that they’d find a way to cover the cost, but he didn’t want them wasting their hard-earned savings on him when his sisters were far more clever and deserving. He was sure they hated the idea of him living the blue-collar life; he never planned on it himself. Hell, he never planned much of anything, but the docks were honest work, and at the very least, it was unionized. Despite the many obstacles of coming into adulthood, like paychecks, bills, tuition, and such, Bucky and Stevie remained close, even as their paths started to diverge.
They would meet up every day after work or school at the corner of Smith Street and 2nd Place, walk on over to The Social, slam back a few beers, or club sodas in Stevie’s case, and toss away part of their paychecks on games of billiards. It was a nice routine up until Stevie’s mom died, his best friend practically withdrew into himself, and Bucky knew there was only one thing to do to make sure that Stevie got out of bed every day, so the boys became roommates. They had to convince Bucky’s mom, of course, she wasn’t ready to let her boy leave the nest, but somehow they convinced her that they could make their own way in the world. Nothing could have been better than hanging out with your best friend after work every day, drinking beers, picking up girls at the bar, and partaking in illegal boxing matches, not that Stevie actually ever partook in any of those things.
Stevie was too pure of heart for that kind of stuff, though the lightweight seemed to love getting his ass handed to him; his fights were always to uphold his convictions rather than showing off. Bucky never lost a fight— his grandpa had been a real tough guy, he taught the Barnes boy to throw a mean right hook, and also how to swindle people out of a few dollars playing cards. Stevie never approved of the hustles, though he never exactly stopped Bucky from them either, but who could blame him? Bucky was in the prime of life; twenty-something, good-looking, and smooth-talking, not that it actually helped. He was the kind of playboy who always got played because he was all talk and pure mush when it came down to it.
Bucky would get a girl home, ravage her senseless, and then wallow in his heartbreak when it turned out that they were the kind of girl who was more like the guy they thought he was. He cried into a lot of the cookie tins Stevie got every week from the old Greek lady on his paper route. They were damn good cookies, which they usually had with coffee in place of breakfast, while the skinny blonde lectured him about saving himself for someone worth dying for. Bucky thought most dames were worth dying for, and when the war started overseas, he thought it a damn shame his country had chosen not to get involved. He had no doubt he could beat the sense, or at least the snot out of, a few Germans with no problem and prove to a few of the girls who dumped him that he was the kind of man they needed in their lives.
Then Pearl Harbor happened. Bucky was working when the news came in, standing around the small radio smoking a cigarette out on the wharf with the other dockhands, when their foreman came running up to change the station to a news broadcast.
‘... including the USS Battleship Oklahoma were reported attacked in Pearl Harbor. Two were said to have been sunk, but this was not immediately confirmed. Officially, several of the attacking Japanese planes were shot down as anti-aircraft batteries retaliated, and at a late hour, word was received that an attack had begun on Guam. Washington. Governor Pointdexter of Hawaii has just finished talking by telephone with President Roosevelt, and the Hawaiian governor says there is heavy damage to property and heavy loss of life in Honolulu. As the governor of-a, of Hawaii talked to President Roosevelt, a second wave of Japanese planes began flying over Hawaii.’
To say it came as a shock to everyone would have been an understatement. The disbelief was palpable, and even though the base at Pearl Harbor was almost five thousand miles away, it was also somehow way too close to home that day. One of the girls who worked in the shacklike office, filling out time cards, burst into tears every time a news update came in; the world felt even smaller to Bucky when he found out her brother was stationed on one of the cruisers that had been hit. It seemed impossible for one act to reverberate so loudly, and yet it did, and the sound only got louder and louder; it rang across the world in a matter of hours. The war in Europe has come to American shores.
The following day, Bucky and Stevie sat in the stairwell between the third and fourth floors of their apartment building with several of their neighbors, all of them silent as they listened to the president address the nation from the radio that belonged to the old Polish man who lived underneath them. The geezer barely understood English, but he still rolled the damn radio out into the hallway on a dolly so everyone could listen with him. Back in those days, a good radio was a damn expensive thing, and the Pol spent all of the money he had escaped Europe with on his; from what Bucky understood, it was the only thing that made the old man happy after war came to his own country.
Home and comfort seemed to be on all of their neighbors' minds. Misses Bulykin on the first floor made a pot of borscht for her family and the Polish man, while the Sokovian couple on the second sat with their chicken paprikash. Even their dear neighbor Agnes, who had never lived more than twenty miles from her hometown of Newark, New Jersey, seemed to want a taste of better days as she handed Bucky and Stevie dinner plates. She cooked for them sometimes, convinced they weren’t getting the healthy vegetables they needed, and probably out of a longing to care for something other than the pigeons in the pens on the building's roof.
In those days, familiar foods to an American woman meant that Agnes usually fed Bucky and Steve macaroni and cheese, the powdered shit that came out of the box, but which only cost nineteen cents. The boys usually paid her back by buying some ground beef or frankfurters for her to throw in a meal along with whatever frozen vegetables Bucky’s mom had shoved into their freezer when she visited. Bucky’s mom was always like that; she couldn’t help herself from worrying about them being all on their own, working day in and day out, never asking for help, and in retrospect, she probably never worried more about the boys than she did that night after the attack.
Bucky and Stevie sat in that stairwell with all their neighbors, a world of flavors filling the air and their plates piled high with macaroni salad, home fries, and beef chili topped with white onions, mustard, and ketchup. Agnes’ idea of healthy food was never actually healthy, but they ate it anyway at her insistence and in silence while they all listened to the president’s speech. Bucky’s mom, well, she was probably at home with his dad and sisters, the five of them in the living room, undoubtedly with a bunch of their neighbors listening to the same broadcast. His sweet mother was probably crying because she knew Bucky and Stevie weren't going to be the type to sit idly by.
Yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor, looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific… I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation. As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory… With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.’
Neither of the boys hesitated when their commander-in-chief declared war; Bucky and Stevie went down to the recruiting center first thing the next morning. Poor Stevie, they rejected him on the spot, always too little and feeble, but he told Bucky to go on without him and that he’d see him later back at their apartment. Bucky made it through all the tests and exams easily, and he signed on the dotted line with no questions asked about where he was going, what he’d be doing, or how long he’d be gone. He enlisted in the army along with a hundred and thirty-four thousand other boys within those first few weeks, and they were all damn proud of it. Stevie was proud of him too, even though his face said Wish I was going with you, brother.
Bucky’s family on the other hand, well, when he went to see his parents and sisters after signing up thinking they’d be happy his life had finally found some direction, his dad nodded with a sense of pride, one of sisters broke an heirloom plate, the other cried, and the third one just shoved more pancakes into her face to stop herself from feeling anything. And then there was his mother, Bucky’s sweet, adoring mother… She fainted right there in the middle of breakfast because her baby boy was a soldier, and now she was never going to stop worrying about him. It didn’t matter if he was four or twenty-four; Bucky’s mother’s love knew no limits.
He tried to reassure her, explained that he wasn’t shipping out into the middle of the conflict right away. He was just training, and those thirteen weeks out in Wisconsin during the middle of winter were brutal to say the least, but they shaped him into a better man. His mother, despite all her worrying, was so pleased when he showed exceptional skills in marksmanship. She raved to all of her friends about how Bucky was getting shipped from one camp to another for special training, crowing about his quick climb through the ranks, and showing off all the postcards he sent from parts of the United States that most Brooklynites had never heard of. His dad may have even humblebragged once or twice, but mainly when Bucky made Sergeant and was assigned to the 107th Infantry Regiment.
In retrospect, joining the army was the worst decision Bucky could have ever made.
Maybe if he hadn’t been such a rambunctious child, if he had been less cocky, or cared more about his grades, he would have gotten a scholarship instead of having to work down at the docks. Maybe if he didn’t enjoy a good beer or fight now and then, or if he cared more about his own ass than staring at those of all the pretty girls he met or defending the little guys from gangsters and bullies, he would have listened more in church, been a pacificts or joined the International Peace Society or pretty much anything that would have kept his boneheaded self from enlisting in the army. However, Bucky was never one for thinking things through, and to be honest, in those days, enlisting was the most respectable thing a young man could do.
He finally had the chance to prove his worth, to show his family that he could be a provider and not just a smelly, chain-smoking dockhand with nothing but a high school education under his belt. In his mind, he’d go off to war, return a hero, and dance with a few dames while finishing school before finally settling down with some cute brunette from the neighborhood with rosy cheeks and a nice chest. They’d stay in Brooklyn for a while before finally getting hitched and moving out to the suburbs, where they’d pop out a few kids, three max. Eventually, they’d get a dog and a station wagon. Bucky would spend his days working easy hours at some stuffy office job, only to come home and find dinner waiting for him on the table with the kids all greedy for his attention and fighting over who would be the first to tell him about their day. At the end of the night, his old lady would help him unwind before bed with a glass of whiskey and a dance.
On the weekends, they’d go to the zoo, or Coney Island, visit with his parents, and do all that nice domestic shit adults do. They’d fight about bills, worry about how they’d afford college for three kids, and debate when they should buy a new car after their station wagon finally broke down. He’d teach his sons to play baseball and fix cars, scare off all his daughters' boyfriends, and show them how to throw a mean right hook to protect themselves from unwanted advances. He and his old lady would go out to the local diner every Friday night, just the two of them and sit in the same booth, order the same thing, and he’d make her laugh and blush like they were still newlyweds. They’d grow old together, watch the seasons change, see their children get married and spoil their grandkids rotten, and then he’d die sometime in his eighties, and his widow would joke that it was hamburgers, beer, and boxing that kept him alive for so long.
Alas, that never actually happened, and the promotion to Sergeant only came with a ticket back home to Brooklyn with his duty orders in hand, and a future that Bucky could have never prepared for.
His parents and sisters threw him a party when he got home. The unruly Barnes boy was now the poster child of discipline and American pride, and even though his mom spent the next few days in the kitchen with her arms crossed and tears in her eyes, she had never been so proud of him. Bucky spent a few days at home with them, waking up on the last one to a big breakfast his mom had made him before he was off to see Stevie. He had one last night out with his best friend before shipping off to England, and as usual, he found the punk getting his ass handed to him in an alley behind the movie theater, and as usual, Bucky found himself fighting Stevie’s bullies for him. Still, they had a great night once the scuffle was over, or at least Bucky did, because Stevie was once again trying to enlist with no success.
Stark Expo 1943 was the last time Bucky would recall having any real fun for a very long time, and maybe it was because he made out with both Bonnie and Connie that night, or maybe it was because of all the high-tech gizmos and gadgets on display… No, it was definitely because of Bonnie and Connie, and sure, he couldn't remember which name belonged to which girl or which one of them had taken off her underwear and stuffed it into his uniform pocket, but damn what a night! It was a memory he held onto tightly in the weeks to come, not because it was exceptionally special but because it was the last time he would recall ever really feeling like himself.
The day after the Expo, Bucky and the rest of the 107th shipped out for Europe, and not long after that, he was fighting the Wehrmacht on the Italian Front. It was exhausting work, physically and mentally, so many pitched battles against the Germans in an attempt to slowly push the line north, towards Austria. Bucky learned quickly not to make friends in the army, not because you don’t meet a lot of great people, but because by lunchtime, half of them would be dead. Bucky had never seen a man die before; for the most part, none of the boys in his unit had, and you never forget the face of the first man you watch die.
His name was Marvin Breese, he was twenty, and had lived with his grandmother up in Lenox Hill just a few blocks from where a memorial to the 107th would be erected decades later. Bucky watched him choke on his own blood when a bullet pierced his neck. It was the kind of wound you don’t come back from, and yet Bucky still tried in vain to stop the bleeding, holding a palm to Marvin’s neck and repeatedly telling him it was going to be okay until the kid finally stopped moving, dying with eyes wide open. Bucky had never been the same since, and he never let his family know that in the letters he wrote home to them whenever he got the chance. He told them that every day was a victory even bigger than the last, even if it was bullshit because he couldn’t bear to tell them the truth, that he missed them, that he cried silently every night, that he sometimes wished for an injury so bad that it’d send him home.
He couldn’t let them know that war was hell, and that it would always be that way, though he was sure they knew.
At the Battle of Azzano in Italy, Bucky thought his life was actually going to end. He and his unit were pinned down by the Germans, most of his men were injured, and it would have been so easy for the enemy to wipe them out, but instead, they were captured and handed off to a group called HYDRA. They made the captured soldiers work at one of their weapons facilities, but Bucky wasn’t about to give in and make instruments of destruction for the enemy, instruments that would kill his fellow Americans and countless innocent civilians. He fought back in any way he could, usually antagonizing them by making a scene, disrupting production with a song or dance, or just flat out throwing a few punches whenever he could.
He didn’t seem to actually piss off his captors, though. In fact, he seemed to pique their interest, and the next thing he knew, he was hauled off to a lab, strapped to a gurney, and tripping out on whatever the hell those crazy HYDRA scientists had injected into his system. Bucky swore he was playing a round of cards with Charlie Chaplin, Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and God while arguing about the possibility of life on Mars the entire time he was lying on that slab. He was never actually sure just how long he had been in that state; it could have been days or weeks. It could have even been five minutes, but when he finally came around, Stevie was standing over him, and for a moment, Bucky was certain he was dreaming.
"I thought you were dead," Steve said with a relieved smile, all height and muscle definition.
“I-I thought you were smaller... What happened to you?" Bucky said, confused as his best friend pulled him to his feet and dragged him along, suddenly much more brawny and taller than the kid he’d left back in Brooklyn.
"I joined the army." Steve laughed like it was nothing.
Life only got weirder and harder after that because Bucky’s dumbass of a best friend let some kook turn him into a science project, and no longer was Stevie that skin-and-bones, ankle-biter he used to know. Stevie was a super soldier and exactly the kind of person Bucky had read about in all those comics and pulp fiction magazines his dad hated him reading; faster, stronger, practically unkillable, and most definitely inhuman, but he was also somehow braver. Stevie was finally the leader he had always wanted to be, and he was a damn good one at that. Even when they got back to England after freeing Bucky and the other captives, his friend had that look in his eyes, the one that said he wasn’t done fighting yet.
Queue Bucky’s inability to say no to a good fight, even though he should have. He had seen too many good men die on the front lines, too many French and Italian families torn apart by war, too many villages and towns burned down in the name of one man’s skewed view of progress. If there was fighting to still be done, Bucky would do it, and so he agreed to join the closest thing to a brother he’d ever had in taking down HYDRA, and ending the Nazi’s reign of terror over Europe. His life really was just a never-ending series of dumb decisions, and that night was up there on a long list of others Bucky had grown to regret, but not really.
Bucky spent over a year following Steve around the continent with the rest of the Howling Commandos, his brothers-in-arms. They had some great times but a lot of hard ones too, a lot of days down in the mud, getting shot at, and patching up wounds before sucking it up and moving on. There were a lot of losses along the way, allies from the French Resistance, namely crazy old Jacques’ brother, and a few Englishmen who were really close with the Major. There was Dum Dum’s right-hand man in the Fighting Sixty-Ninth who lost the use of both his legs and decided that killing himself was better than going home to live as half a man.
There were other soldiers who, like Jim, were there just to prove their allegiance to their country, even though back home, their families were living in relocation centers created by the U.S. Government. They said it was different from the Nazi camps, that it was for the safety of the country, but Bucky knew that it was not too dissimilar from the ones that kept the Jews out of Hitler's new world. And yet there they were, Japanese-Americans out on the front lines fighting half of their own identity for families they might not ever see again, for a country that called them the enemy.
Even Gabe lost half of his old unit from the 92nd Infantry Division, his fellow Buffalo Soldiers, and never did Bucky see the world's injustices so sharply as he did through their eyes. Not good enough for white neighborhoods, white bathrooms, or white diners. Not good enough to attend white schools or to work with white people, but sure as hell good enough to fight and die for a government that had kept them in bondage for over three hundred years.
It was hard on all of them, some more than others, but they all still hurt the same every day when they got news over the wires about more of their friends dying; Junior’s school chum from back in Minnesota, Pinky’s cousin who once made a nun cry, and a guy that Happy Sam considered his rival but who he still poured out some dwindling whiskey reserves for. Bucky grew to hate the radio; he hated hearing about boys from the 107th getting killed, a few of whom were from his and Stevie’s neighborhood. The war claimed that goon George Davis, with whom they used to play baseball, along with Clarence Anderson, who used to terrorize the Delany sisters back in grade school.
It even took that kid, Roland Miller, who spent all his time looking through his telescope and collecting bugs. The night Roland’s death came through the wire, Bucky couldn’t help but wonder if his mother would be at Mrs. Miller’s house when the news finally reached them. He had no doubt she would be making a futile effort to console her neighbor while worrying about her own boys because even though Stevie wasn’t hers, she had promised his mother she would always treat him like her own. Bucky thought about Roland’s mom a lot after his death. She was a sweet lady who made everyone cookies, even though they teased him all the time for it growing up. He hoped she knew her son was a hero, even if the grenade that killed him was caught entirely by mistake, and it probably was, since Roland could never even manage to catch a cold.
Stevie was much better at staying focused as usual; he kept his eyes on the mission. He kept all of them marching on, both those at home and on the frontlines. He always held his head high, his determination was always strong, and it was a mystery to all of them how Stevie led so effortlessly and so successfully. Victory came in many ways to Stevie, whether it was by getting the Commandos to blow up a weapons plant, liberating a small village, freeing POWs, or encouraging those back in the states to ration with a passion and buy up more war bonds. Bucky couldn’t understand how Stevie managed to keep his sanity because more often than not, Bucky was questioning all the choices that led him to that fateful day. The one where he died for the first time.
Grow up, they said, be a bad boy, they said.
Join the army, they said, fight Nazis, and it’ll all be fine, they said.
Well, it wasn’t fine, nor was it fun falling hundreds of feet off a moving train into the Danube River in the dead of winter. Bucky should have never picked up the shield, dumb decision #164, he noted. Everything after that was a blur; he lost his life that day. He didn’t really, but he might as well have because the man he was resurrected as was not James Buchanan Barnes, and he sure as hell wasn’t Bucky.
In fact, when he woke up, those names didn’t exist in his mind; he was nothing, no one, nameless, just Soldat, and that was about as much as he could remember. It was like that for weeks, then years, and eventually decades. Wake up, do something… Go back to sleep. Wake up, do something terrible… Go back to sleep. Wake up, comply, kill, torture, and go back to sleep.
There were times in between where all he could remember was pain and screaming, his own and others' too. Other people were screaming in his head, countless people, pleading, begging, crying, and the distinct memory of a face he couldn’t recognize but whose reemergence would send his handlers into a frenzy. That face was wiped from his head so many times he couldn’t even describe it anymore. There were no defining features; he just knew it was a face and that its memory hurt him more than most of the torture HYDRA subjected him to.
Sixty-nine years, that was how long it took for him to wake up, to break out and shake the mind control, but it wasn’t absolute freedom because the only thing on the hard drive in his head was his last mission. Nothing had seemed real since the day he encountered the blonde man on the street, the one whom he was told to kill, the one who called him Bucky. He didn’t know who that was, though; he’d been Soldat for so long, but something inside of him remembered the name, and HYDRA decided it was best to wipe his mind again to avoid any more hiccups on that assignment.
A few days later, he crossed the blonde man again, but he remembered their first meeting. They fought, it was bloody, and the blonde kept saying things that Soldat knew deep down were true but couldn’t bring himself to believe. They were best friends; they’d known each other their entire lives. Soldat’s name was James Buchanan Barnes, though everyone used to just call him Bucky. It was a lie; it had to be all lies. Soldat had never had a life before his current one. He wasn’t human, just a machine to be used and stowed away until he was needed again, but then the blonde said something, he said I'm with you to the end of the line and Soldat felt himself get very cold.
All the blood drained away from the surface of his skin and pooled in his chest. He felt constricted, his fist frozen inches from the other man's face because he knew that phrase… Soldat said that to the blonde once… A very long time ago, in another life. Until the end of the line. The next thing he knew, he was pulling the red, white, and blue-clad man out of the Potomac River. They were friends, maybe… Soldat wasn’t sure, but it seemed right, so he left the man there on the banks of the river before leaving to find out who he really was.
There was the museum, Soldat’s face in pictures alongside the blonde in the stars and stripes, but from a war that ended over fifty years earlier. His name was James Buchanan Barnes, and he was memorialized alongside others like Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter, Gabe Jones, Jim Morita… The Howling Commandos. They all sounded so familiar, but also felt so very far away. It was overwhelming; he’d been asleep for so long, someone else for so long, but it had also felt like no time at all. It felt like his first life had ever belonged to him. Soldat couldn’t recall anything that happened before meeting the blonde man for the first time, or was it really even the first time?
Then suddenly Soldat was in Europe, hiding, how he’d gotten there, he wasn’t really sure, there were so many gaps in his memory. He kept losing time, one minute he was shoving hot dogs in his face at a cart outside of the museum, and the next he was on a cargo ship in the North Atlantic. One moment, he was paying someone for a gun, and the next, he was sitting in an empty warehouse eating right out of a soup can. It got better after the first few weeks; he stopped waking up in strange places, things seemed linear again, and eventually he settled on two unshakable truths…
His name was James Buchanan Barnes, and he was a man who had almost completely lost his mind. For some reason, after criss-crossing the European continent at least twice, his feet took him to the city of Drevna, where he finally decided to rest. He wasn’t sure what led him to the torn city, to the crumbling buildings filled with shattered families, lost souls, or the streets that were stalked by soldiers and state police. Nor did he care much about the war he had walked into; he was more concerned about the one raging within him, the one playing with his faculties.
He thought perhaps the solutions to his memory problems were buried somewhere within the rubble that seemed to exist everywhere he looked. His subconscious was trying to tell him something, maybe that this place he’d found himself in was safe despite the conflict consuming the city. Whatever it was, it was buried too deep in some unreachable crevice of his mind, and every time he scratched at it, he would hear a blood-curdling scream, his mind would go blank, and he would suddenly remember being strapped down while his handlers probed at his brain.
His handlers… HYDRA, he had almost forgotten them. James was a weapon for HYDRA, of that he was certain now, and he spent the following months hiding in crumbling buildings, blending in with the devastated sea of people while trying to regain the knowledge of exactly who and what he was. He began keeping notes, thousands of scribbles in a once-empty book he’d found in an attempt to piece his life back together, if he ever even had a life of his own to begin with. It still felt like someone else's.
Most of his writings didn’t make sense either, names he couldn’t remember, places he wasn’t sure he’d ever been to. Where the fuck was Shelbyville, Indiana? Who the hell was Aunt Ida, and why the hell did he remember hating her meatloaf? The blonde man was the only thing he could seem to actually grab hold of, memories of them as kids, teenagers, and adults. They were friends, they were definitely friends, and his name was Steve, that much he was sure of now.
James was safe in Drevna for a long time, collecting memories in his notebooks and eating all the food he could steal from the military's supplies to avoid the guilt of taking food from the foreign aid canteens, working hard to feed a starving population. He mainly stole coffee. Oh, how did he forget about coffee? How did he forget about coffee, cigarettes, and beer? He drank beer like it was water, several in an hour, and though he wasn’t exactly certain, he was pretty sure that it wasn’t normal, like maybe his body should have been reacting to it more harshly than it did.
Cigarettes didn’t make sense. He was sure he enjoyed them once upon a time, but he gave up on trying to use them to make something in his brain click. Coffee was a winner at least, he remembered the taste and the warmth, he remembered he liked his milk steamed. A quarter cup of milk, to be exact, with three sugars, although Steve preferred his with two creams and two sugars. How weird that of all the things James had locked away in his head, that was one of the things he recalled best.
Somehow, James had forgotten about food; it seemed weird in retrospect, but he had never remembered actually eating before his awakening. The first time he felt hunger after coming to, he just stared in sheer terror at his own stomach for the sound it had made. Hot dogs were the nearest thing to him at the time; he shoved several in his face outside the museum in D.C., and the vendor looked at him like he was some freak of nature, but was also too frightened to make him pay for them. When James got to Europe, most places had some version of hotdogs available in carts on the street but eventually, he got sick of them and switched to canned goods, things he could stockpile so he wouldn’t have to go out so often because the places he’d been staying in were precarious and the kind of dwellings where those with ill-intentions liked to hide.
More than once, he found himself without a place to sleep because he had come back to find someone else had moved in, someone with a gun, or a strung-out look that told him they were much crazier than he was. Packaged food meant he didn’t have to risk losing his spot, his corner of some dark, damp hallway, or a hole under the stairs. It was a depressing landscape admittedly, most of the urban sprawl looked forgotten, old Soviet-era apartment blocks that were ravaged by the war, grand architectural facades plastered with the face of the regime, piles of trash lining the streets, no heat, no water, and very little electricity yet the city was packed full of people covered in a layer of dirt and grime, living every day like their city, like their country wasn’t in ruins. So many of them looked hungry, others looked high as kites, or sick beyond remedy, while the occupying military struck a fear so great that it sent citizens cowering.
Why did his feet bring him there, of all places? That sad hellscape of a city called Drevna.
There was something there, there had to be, and it must have been more than his own identity, which had begun to come back to him in bits and pieces. He was James Buchanan Barnes, an American soldier enlisted with the 107th Infantry Regiment. He fought alongside Steve Rogers and the Howling Commandos during the 1940s, and he died in the process. Most of what he could remember was things about the war, his comrades, and various bloody, hard-fought battles that gave him nightmares, but nothing before that or after. Mostly, he remembered falling, and often when he thought about that, he would stare at his hands, one flesh and bone, the other metal and wires. James wasn’t clear on a lot of things, but he was pretty damn sure he wasn’t born with a metal arm, and he was positive he didn’t have it during the war, so it must have come afterward.
It was a frightening thing to look at, the shiny metal with a red star painted on it. He kept it hidden under long-sleeved shirts and gloves, afraid that someone would recognize it even though he himself didn’t. The first time James remembered where his arm had come from, he threw up. He recalled waking up on a frozen riverbank and dragging himself away from the water with one hand before rolling onto his back in blinding pain, his blood spilling across a blanket of white, and his left arm broken. He passed out for a while, but when he woke again, there was a shadow looming over him. It grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and pulled him through the snow, leaving a bright red trail behind them. James passed out again before finding himself in a cell with his left arm completely gone, nothing but a stump, and over the following weeks or months, maybe even years, he was kept as a prisoner by some unseen enemy. He was beaten and starved in an attempt to break his will.
Then came the experiments, the psychotic little man with the glasses.
"Sergeant Barnes... The procedure has already started. You are to be the new fist of HYDRA." He recalled the man saying.
When James sat up, his left arm had returned, but instead of skin, it was titanium, and he screamed out in horror, attacking anyone he could get his hands on before being forcefully sedated. They started strapping him into the machine after that, probing his mind, taking away everything that he was starting with his name. He became Soldat. Somehow HYDRA had made him who he was: memory-free, emotionless, unfeeling, uncaring. The memories of this made James physically ill; he spent days vomiting as if his body was trying to purge the truth because it was so unbearable. The truth. What was the truth?
James walked through the shattered remains of Drevna all night after his purge. He walked for minutes, then hours, out into the countryside looking for fresh air and the truth. He walked for days along cracked highways and desolate roads up into the mountains until at last he reached the river that divided part of a small town from the rest of the world. He entered an encampment with two dozen other lost souls; the barbed-wire fence surrounding it had been built up high and seemed to be meant to keep the beggared in rather than some greater horror out. There was even a faded mural on a makeshift shed, one which asked onlookers to pray for peace in the name of a community leader who had been dead for over a decade. James’s head began to hurt as he tried to make out the face memorialized on the wall in the darkness of the night until at last he turned away, as many others had before him.
He chose to leave the camp, guilt sinking into his bones at each nun hovering around in the darkness, offering him food and blankets. He walked along the river, following the bank under a train bridge and past a cemetery that looked abandoned, though to be fair, most of the country looked abandoned, except for the living dead who were still trying to survive in it. The area of the cemetery, though, was truly desolate, not a soul in sight of the gravestones or the small, crumbling church that sat on the edge of the lot, and while James had no memory of ever being very religious, curiosity got the better of him, and he found himself seeking a way inside.
Unfortunately, much of it had collapsed from a fire that swept through it long ago; the wooden roof caved in, the windows had all been blown out, and what were once ornately painted exterior walls were now charred and covered in a thick layer of soot and lifeless vines. The whole thing looked ready to buckle, but that didn’t stop him from trying to find his way, which he eventually did through a broken basement window hidden behind a dead bush.
The first thing he landed on was a perfectly placed chest of drawers that time had not yet rotted away, and it was obvious to James that he had not been the first person to wander into that holy place from out of the night. Two cots had been set up in the small room, which had been a kitchen in its former life. The stove took firewood, and the fridge was now a storage for abandoned items like blankets and books, many of them meant for a child. The squatters who had left them behind walked away years ago, and the books sat collecting dust along with a half-eaten jar of zacusca, an empty bag of Triti Bell, several ROM wrappers, and a collection of recycled Fanta Portocale bottles.
It was cozy in a macabre sort of way, and as James inventoried the discarded items, he came across one that seemed oddly familiar: a book about a girl whisked away in a storm to a land of adventure.
A lyricless melody played in his mind as he stared at the cover. He knew this story; he had read it several times, he had watched it acted out, or at least he thought he had. He swore… No, no, he knew he had read this tale before, and he remembered the awe he felt when he had seen the girl in the story on a movie screen for the very first time. Her ruby slippers were silver in the book, but they looked so brilliant that he didn’t care about the change; he loved it anyway. It was as real as the boys from the 107th, the Howling Commandos, and certainly as real as Steve Rogers. James’ memory of The Wizard of Oz wasn’t an illusion; it was true as the war, and HYDRA, and the metal arm they had given him.
All of those things had most certainly been real, but how were they all connected to each other and that abandoned church on the edge of oblivion? Perhaps he was some sort of monster, perhaps he and the men he remembered fighting alongside were awful people, but they couldn’t have been… The museum said they had been heroes, that he had been a hero, but if that were the case, why did they still feel like the enemy? If Steve Rogers was good and James had been fighting him in Washington D.C. as Soldat that must have meant he was nothing more than a villain. But James remembered them being friends; how could they be both friends and foes?
If Steve Rogers was a good person, that had to mean that James Barnes was too. Soldat was a villain, but James was not. James was good; he was a fighter, true, but he was also a protector. He protected Steve, he remembered that… He protected Steve from bullies, and… They used to live together. Yeah, yeah, they did live together, and Steve used to buy the groceries, and dear Agnes next door would cook for them, and James’ mom would stock their freezer with vegetables! His mom… Oh my God, his mom. James had forgotten his mother.
He had a mother, and her name was Winnifred. She was beautiful, and his sisters looked just like her and… His sisters. How could he forget about them? His sweet baby sisters, all three of them. Rebecca, Margaret, and Elizabeth. He used to read them The Wizard of Oz, and when a movie was announced, he took the three of them to see it with the money he earned down at the docks! How did he forget his sisters? Dad was always telling him to look after them and… Dad. His dad was George, and Aunt Ida was his dad’s sister; she lived in Shelbyville, Indiana. James never liked her meatloaf because it was too dry, and she would pack it full of olives, and he hated olives! James had a family, he had a family, and he loved them, and that meant he was good. He wasn’t a bad guy; he couldn’t be because bad guys can’t love, and good people aren’t capable of hurting the innocent.
It seemed entirely rational! He was going to be okay. He was still missing so much of his life, but he was going to be okay, and that derelict church became his sanctuary; it became his truth. He dusted off the moldy blankets, gathered wood for the stove to warm up his canned goods, tossed the half-eaten expired jar of eggplant spread, and used the empty Fanta bottles to store rainwater. He found a place no one would take from him, as the other residents of the town refused to go near the cemetery or church; perhaps they thought it haunted, or maybe they thought it hallowed. Whichever it was, he did not mind being the resident ghost or harmonious hermit.
The illusion of peace and non-violence faded quickly, though, that hellish country of Solcavia he’d taken refuge in was a tough place to live, and more often than not, he had to defend himself. Another hothead displaced person trying to let James know to stay off his turf, a soldier who didn’t like the way he looked at them, or some straight-up idiot trying to rob him of his shoes. It wasn’t like James wanted to hurt anyone; he tried to restrain himself as best as he could, but something would bubble up inside him, and he‘d react instinctively, and to be fair… Those guys weren’t exactly innocent. He didn’t kill any of them, just gave them a good ass-kicking so they’d know not to mess with him again. He was good after all; he didn’t kill anymore. He was no longer the monster that HYDRA had made him.
James spent a year in that hellish place; he never did figure out what drew him there. Maybe he had been there as Soldat, maybe HYDRA had a safehouse nearby that he used to go to, after all, there is no better place to hide than in a sea of forgotten people. Except that seemed unlikely the longer he stayed there. He never ran into HYDRA or anyone he could even remotely recognize. Mirna was nicer than Drevna, though, at least aesthetically.
Sure, there were plenty of other places to hide in, but the military presence in the small nation was heavy, except for Mirna. There were soldiers around, but not as many as in the city, and this place he had found sanctuary in was at least partly on the grid, though there was no government, no police, or even a post office. Fires were fought by the community, one that was weak and starving, carrying buckets of water from the river. There were some street lights, fewer stores, but the mountain air was nice, and the trees brought him peace in the basement home on the edge of what must have once been a normal town before the war came.
Sometimes it felt like where he had started in Drevna wasn’t a real place; it seemed like a dystopian nightmare compared to the shininess of Washington D.C. and the other European cities James had gone before settling. In Drevna, there was trash covering every inch of the streets, several inches thick and piled a few feet high on others. Most cars were broken and burnt out, but occasionally one roared by, though most people dove for cover when it did. There were drugs everywhere, prostitution out in the open, and tons of crime that no one tried to hide since there was no one who would do anything about it other than the military police. They would haul people away, no questions asked, and Bucky got the sense that life would be better in Drevna without them. It was just thousands of people cramped in the city, living off the record, away from the prying eyes of the world, and in absolute destitution.
Mirna was better, though. The nuns took care of the people in the fenced encampment, and the soldiers came by now and then with supplies, though they still caused scenes that left a lot to be desired. It was always the kids who broke his heart, though. Mirna had so many children. James had never seen so many pathetic-looking children with faces harder than stone, like they had seen ten lifetimes full of bloodshed, but still so many laughed and played like children do, except barefoot on garbage-covered streets lit by numerous trash can fires and generators.
The kids were just as sneaky as the adults. More than once, some sticky-fingered kid tried to pick his pockets, or some brazen teen would attempt to rip his bag off his back. They never got away with it, but usually, he offered them some food for trying. He knew they must have been desperate and hungry; he couldn’t stand to see them like that. They always made him think of his sisters, how he would have done anything to keep them from such a hard life, and every day he was grateful that none of them ever went through childhood the way those pitiful street kids of Mirna did.
Perhaps it was their naivety or that James had become known as the scary guy who gives you canned soup if you try to rob him, but those street rats ended up gravitating towards him, though none of them ever followed him through the cemetery to the church. A few of the younger ones would tail closely behind him as he walked through the town gathering things to replenish his supplies; they’d always scramble when he’d turn around to glare at them. There was one boy, who could have been no more than twelve, but who would talk at a million miles a minute about everything and nothing. He always caught James whenever he went down to the market by the decommissioned rail crossing out of town.
James tried, in general, not to talk to any of the kids too often, just a friendly hello, a well-meaning stay out of trouble, and a lot of no when they fired silly questions at him like are you a pirate, are you a rock’n roller, are you secretly an owl inside a human-robot and his personal favorite do you ever narrate your life inside your head as if you were in a movie. Honestly, it was hard to keep a straight face around them half the time cause they were just so damn funny, and eventually he found himself familiar with a few of their names. He kept track of the usual places they liked to hang out so he could bring them food and blankets he had stolen from the soldiers when he knew that bad weather or cold temperatures were going to roll into the city.
The boy Adri, who followed him to the market all the time, got the best deals. He once talked James’ ear off on a day when he had gotten a hold of candy, a rare thing in a place where joy didn’t seem to exist, and Adri, who had never had candy before, delighted in the gift but gave it all away to his friends. James had a pack of kids with green candy-stained tongues following him for a week in hopes of getting their hands on more sweets, and Adri apologized unnecessarily for doing something kind.
Another time, James had been tailed by Adri, and he had been looking at some worn-out fishing gear when the kid mentioned he had always wanted to learn how to fish, so he could be a sailor and live on a boat in the ocean. Adri talked about the ocean often; he had found an old book of various atlases and committed every body of water in it to memory. He could name all the oceans and major rivers of the world, and he often wondered why some lakes were called lakes, but others were called seas. The Sea of Azov is a sea, but Lake Superior is bigger and deeper; it’s just a lake. Why is that? Adri once asked, even though James never spoke more than two words to him at a time.
James should have never let the boy worm his way into his heart, because the more Adri talked about the water, the more James wanted to give him his dream of living on it. He should have stopped himself, but James couldn’t help it; he bought the kid a fishing rod at the market and promised him he’d teach him to use it sometime. Adri’s face had lit up when James handed it over before awkwardly hugging James and running off to go practice in the river, even though the rod was broken and there wasn’t even a line or hook on the damn thing yet.
That weekend, when James went looking for the boy to start showing him the basics, the kid had a black eye, a busted lip, and his gift had been stolen. Apparently, some soldiers caught him out past sundown with the fishing rod and beat him for it. At least five of them had come up behind Adri, shoved him to the ground, and kicked the crap out of him until he surrendered the highly prized item. James didn’t hesitate; he had Adri to show him where his attackers liked to hang out and tried to negotiate with them to return what they had stolen.
They didn’t like that, and in an instant, they were on him, kicking, punching, and hitting him with what felt like the but of a rifle and a club. It was instinct, survival mode, his HYDRA programming kicked in, and he started to fight back; maximum force with no survivors. All he saw was red, all he could feel was a raging bloodlust, and he lost himself. Soldat was back, and he had no mercy, not even when Adri screamed for him to stop or grabbed his arm to keep him from throwing another punch.
James didn’t know how to stop the beast, though; all he could do was watch from some distant corner of his mind as Soldat unleashed carnage, and he only regained control because he forced himself back to the surface only moments after that angry beast tossed the kid aside like he was trash. Not the kid, don’t hurt the kid, he screamed at himself, but the damage was done. James had a heap of lifeless bodies around him, and Adri was on the ground with bloody elbows. He flinched when James reached out to help him.
Monster Adri had screamed at him before fleeing, and James just stood there, his body going cold at the realization of what he’d done. James ran, he ran back to the abandoned church, grabbed all his things, and fled. He was a monster, he killed those soldiers over a fishing rod, and that kid… Oh God, he hurt that damn kid. He ran for hours through the countryside on edge, hiding in the shadow of every crumbling building from some enemy that didn’t even exist until he finally collapsed in an alley and cried like a baby.
How could he ever think that he was a good man?
He was naive, delusional.
HYDRA had made him the perfect monster, the kind that killed people over petty things and had no qualms about hurting a child if they got in the way.
Unable to breathe, unable to move, he lay there in that alley for days, hoping that death would come, but it never did. Somehow, he managed to pull himself to his feet and leave that dreadfulness of Mirna behind; he left Solcavia altogether for something better in Romania, but the memory went with him. Eventually, he found an apartment in Bucharest, which was much better than the shambles he had been living in before, and he didn’t squat this time; he paid for his apartment by doing odd jobs for people. Fixing cars, lifting heavy things, painting someone’s room, repairing a hole in their wall, or unclogging their sinks. James wasn’t even sure where those skills had come from, but he dove into refining them, anything to keep his mind off of the truth, off of the reality of who and what he was, but he didn’t actually bother trying to make his own apartment look nice.
He didn’t think he deserved nice things; he just gathered whatever he could find, a broken couch, some chairs, and a table left on the side of the road, along with miscellaneous mugs and kitchenware, and let them occupy the space. One night, he admittedly got a little manic, and by manic, he meant absolutely fucking insane. He felt like he was being watched, so he covered all the windows in newspapers and started pulling up the floorboards so he could hide his backpack and notebooks along with a shit ton of cash. He flew back and forth between the floorboards and windows.
Maybe another layer of newspapers, maybe stash a little more cash. Why is that mug there? Do I have enough soup ladles? Do I have too many lights? I should put my bed here so that I can easily use it as a shield if someone shoots at me through the window. If I put my table in exactly this spot, I can easily push it into the hallway to stop anyone from coming in through the front door.
He looped like that for days before the madness finally drained him, and he passed out on the thin mattress he obsessively cleaned after he found it. It was funny in a way; he spent so much time sanitizing that stupid thing and lying on it, but he rarely slept anymore. He couldn’t sleep because when he did, he saw the faces of his victims, the ones he had murdered over a silly fishing rod. Oftentimes, life would begin to feel too real, the paint on the wall was too loud, the lights too bright, his skin felt fake, the room seemed oddly disproportionate, his heart would start to race uncontrollably, and he’d find himself gasping for air as he stood over the kitchen sink with a knife in his hand. He’d grip the blade tight until his palm was bleeding and tell himself that he should just end things, put himself out of the misery, but that would be the easy way out; he needed to suffer, to suffer, and live with the things he had done.
James punished himself by living.
That second year after waking up felt like fifty, he’d get up in the morning, make himself coffee and eggs, pack a lunch, head out to whatever job he had that day, and then come back to the stark, lonely apartment by sundown. He’d make whatever canned shit he had in the cabinet, shower, hand-wash his clothes, and set them out to dry before frantically pacing in circles while writing in his notebooks things he had remembered throughout the day. When he was done vomiting words onto paper, he’d throw himself on the mattress and stare up at the ceiling until sleep finally took him.
Three or four hours at best, but the exhaustion never hurt him physically. The pain was all in his head, and because of that, he made sure to keep himself on a strict routine since it was the only thing keeping him from going off the deep end. Oh yeah, there was a deep end now; it was a little voice in the back of his head telling him to lash out. A remnant of Soldat, whom he had managed to wrangle into a cage which he locked and pushed deep into some vacant part of his mind. It was a fragile setup, though; the beast began showing up whenever he looked at himself in the mirror, which is exactly when James decided to stop shaving.
How he'd gotten by for so long living like that was a feat that no one would ever be able to understand. Always on edge, ready to flip, ready to run, and haunted by memories of the monster he used to be, the one that still dwelled inside him. It was why he stopped referring to himself as James; that guy was dead, he fell off a train in Austria seventy years ago. James was the guy from Brooklyn, the one with the family, the good man, Steve’s best friend. But he wasn’t Soldat either, that guy rattling his chains deep in his psyche definitely wasn’t dead, but he was forcefully ousted by who he chose to be now... Bucky. A man with nothing to lose, a prisoner of his own past and mind who lived a solitary life because it was the only way to be sure that he’d never hurt anyone ever again, but that tedious, repetitive life eventually came crumbling down, too.
Plums, he had gone out to get plums. All he wanted was some stupid fucking plums, but in the market, a man was looking at him funny, and then he saw it, his face plastered across every newspaper with accusations that he had bombed some conference in Vienna, which took the lives of several people, including the king of an African nation. Bucky’s mind raced at a million miles a minute. Shit, did I do that? Did I black out and lose time again? No, no wait, I haven’t been to Austria in decades. It’s not me, it’s not me. Oh fuck, what if it was me and I don’t remember? No, it definitely wasn’t me. He ran back to his apartment as fast as he could to get his backpack, the one hidden in the floorboards, but Steve was already there, and even though he said he didn’t want to fight, Bucky knew that everything always ended in a fight.
It wasn’t fair. He was fine on his own; he wasn’t a killer anymore. That last time was an accident, but the world was pushing him into a position where he needed to defend himself again. If he were shoved hard enough, that other guy would gain control. Soldat would come back if he wasn’t careful, so he did everything he could to get away. Bucky really tried not to hurt anyone, but he was so much stronger than he realized, and the next thing he knew, a guy in a damn catsuit was attacking him along with some asshat with a pair of wings. He got away, though, started running, and stole a bike. He was almost free when another man in a clunky metal suit cornered him. Steve had caught up with them, trying to keep the peace as always, while telling Bucky to stand down, and he did. Bucky backed down; he didn’t want to fight, and so the authorities shoved him in a box and carted him off to some facility where they tried to get him to talk to a shrink.
That funny-looking dude wanted to ask him questions, but he refused to answer to the name he had abandoned.
James is dead, he thought.
“My name is Bucky.” He hissed.
The shrink began asking him about the things he did for HYDRA back when he was Soldat, but Bucky never responded. Something felt off about the man, and then the lights went out. The shrink began using the words, the ones that his old HYDRA handlers used to rein him in whenever he’d start to get out of control. Longing, rusted, seventeen… Bucky panicked; he tore himself from the restraints, desperate to get out of that place before the shrink could send him back under. Before that madman let Soldat free, but Bucky failed, his mind went blank, and when he woke up again, his metal arm was trapped in some machine with Steve nearby, looking disappointed. Bucky knew that he had hurt people again; he hadn’t meant to, and he wasn’t in control.
Steve’s friend didn’t seem to believe him; he wanted proof that Bucky was in his own mind and not Soldat’s. He needed Bucky to say something that no one but he and Steve would know to be true. Bucky felt the corner of his lip twitch at a memory; he told Steve and his friend that the blonde used to stuff newspapers in his shoes. The man with the wings hated that answer; he didn’t think it was sufficient, but Steve accepted it because only he and Bucky knew the truth, that stuffing newspapers in his shoes was code for Bucky knowing that Steve used to pad his briefs to make his junk look bigger before the serum. It was something Steve would never admit, and something only Bucky, not Soldat, could have known because he’d been Steve’s best friend and he promised to never tell, even now when his fealty was in question.
The wingman complained endlessly; he didn’t trust Bucky, and he didn’t exactly blame him, but the three of them worked together to stop the shrink. Bucky told them he remembered the glasses-wearing man asking Soldat about the super-soldier serum, about a HYDRA base in Siberia, and… Fuck, oh fuck… He suddenly remembered he wasn’t the only one. It rushed back into his brain all at once like a tidal wave. There were more like him, more Winter Soldiers as Steve had called them, but they were hidden away in an abandoned base. They were wild, uncontrollable; they were put on ice, but still very much alive and waiting to be reactivated. How could he have forgotten that?
Steve offered him the chance to make things right, but that was easier said than done; his old friend had surrounded himself with strange people in all kinds of costumes and with crazy abilities. They fought each other, friends fighting friends, and none of it made sense. Eventually, they got to Siberia, where Bucky walked the familiar halls, entering one room at a time cautiously. Steve was looking for the shrink, but Bucky… He got distracted. That base had the answers he was looking for, and he found a few of them in the records room. Shelves stacked with boxes and boxes of information, although a few seemed to be missing as he scanned their labels, looking for one relating to him.
There was a crunch under his foot, and when he looked at what he stepped on, all he saw was some kind of blue-hued glass that had shattered when he stepped on it. For a moment, it also seemed familiar, but he couldn't put his finger on it, so he turned his attention back to the boxes. There were mission files, the names of people he killed, presidents, generals, humanitarians, scientists, and so many innocent bystanders. There were audio tapes, recordings of the procedures HYDRA subjected him to, and videos of a type of abuse Bucky hadn’t even remembered until he popped the first cassette into the VCR. His chest hurt; the realization of the hell he’d gone through made him furious, and he pulled all the tapes from the shelves and smashed them, causing Steve to run into the room to stop him, but Bucky couldn’t be stopped.
He was done with being hurt, with being used and tortured, and no one ever needed to see just how badly they had broken him. Still, there were so many files, even with the videos destroyed, there were notes about how much he cried for his mom when they replaced his arm, how loudly he screamed the first time they scrubbed his mind, and how good he was once he started to comply. A report about how he successfully assassinated the parents of one of Steve’s new friends, another about how the new soldiers had broken four of his ribs and dislocated his shoulder, and how he needed to be moved from the base to a more advanced facility since that one could no longer provide the energy needed to run the memory machine.
Two-hundred and fifty-two… That was how many times they fucked with his brain before abandoning the base and a singular footnote indicating that twenty-seven of those times were for one particular assignment called Deochi, which he kept remembering but whose files were missing and which he couldn’t recall for anything. It made Bucky’s head spin. HYDRA had stolen so much from him, and all he wanted to do was destroy everything they had made, including himself. Steve had to shake him out of his frenzy, remind him of why they were there, but his other friend showed up; the one in the red metal suit, the one whose parents Bucky had murdered in cold blood.
Bucky only acted out of defense. The robot man attacked first, and he did everything possible to keep him at bay, but somehow Bucky only ended up blowing his own metal arm clean off, and the pain was so bad he passed out almost immediately. The following days were hazy, mostly because Bucky couldn’t cope with everything that had happened and all that he had learned. Steve offered him help, a chance to get rid of his HYDRA programming once and for all, and Bucky accepted because he had no idea what was real.
His life had been interrupted, and he had only a fraction of a clue as to who he was. Steve took him to Wakanda, the nation whose King’s death he had been framed for, and while Steve said they could help, the first thing they did was put him on ice. Just until they can figure out how to help you, Steve said, and Bucky agreed, although part of him felt like they should have closed the pod, locked it tight, thrown away the key, and dropped him into the deepest part of the ocean where he couldn’t hurt anyone. He didn’t say that, though, because a small part of him still had hope that it really would get better, that there was something worth it waiting for him on the other side of it all.
The Wakandans were a welcome respite from the multitude of strange and awful individuals Bucky had come across since setting foot in his latest reality. The new King’s sister, Shuri, was a brilliant scientist, and each time she took him off the ice to ask him questions and run tests, she had been nothing but sweet and playful with Bucky. It wasn’t something he was used to; he hadn’t had a friend in decades, and Shuri was adamant that the two of them were friends. Bucky was certain she just said that so he’d turn a blind eye to the amount of radiation she had exposed his brain to with all the scans she took in her lab, but he also believed it.
Every time Shuri thawed him out, she gave Bucky a big smile while saying Good morning, white boy! in her usual cheerful tone, and every time she put him back under, she smiled weakly but with determination as she squeezed his hand tight and said I’ve almost got it, Sergeant Barnes. Eventually, the day came when Shuri was certain without a doubt that she knew exactly where in his head the problem lay. As much as she hated the idea of having to subject Bucky to more pain, she had to, restraining him in the most durable metal he’d ever seen with several of the Dora Milaje on hand to keep guard while she probed his brain.
When Shuri finally found the spot, she smiled tearfully and told Bucky that he didn’t have to go back to sleep. He slept in perhaps the nicest, incredibly futuristic prison cell he’d ever been in, although King T’Challa was adamant that it was not a prison cell, despite the floors and ceiling being able to taze a rhinoceros and a forcefield replacing traditional walls. It was better than a test tube in a freezer, so Bucky never complained, even when they put him through numerous trials with a warrior named Ayo, who would repeat the words that activated Soldat.
Longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak… and so on.
Every day, Bucky failed to keep a hold of himself. That heartless, cold monster would stand ready and because of that they usually kept him in his cell when they tried to break him because even with one arm and a pair of fuzzy hospital slippers, he was too much of a threat to everyone’s safety. T’Challa said they would replace Bucky’s old arm after he got better but for the time being he had to live with a stump, he did however give him a pair of slip-on sneakers because the slippers just made him look pathetic and Shuri did not want anyone walking around her lab barefoot.
It honestly seemed to Bucky like he would never get better. He’d scream, shout, curse, and threaten to kill everyone whenever they tried to deprogram him. Once, he even hurt Shuri, and he would never forgive himself for that. Ayo never made it through all the words that day, but Soldat snuck out of him in a rage, knowing they were trying to get rid of him. Soldat managed to mimic Bucky, and Shuri thought it was safe to approach, only for him to grab her arm and twist her wrist before Ayo knocked him out. When Bucky came to, he sobbed uncontrollably, but Shuri did something that others never did: she forgave him, which only made him cry harder.
It was a lot to handle and process, but every day his old life came more and more into focus, like when the cold air starts to erase the steam on a bathroom mirror. He knew he was born James Buchanan Barnes on March 10th, 1917. His parents were George and Winnifred Barnes. He had three sisters: Rebecca, Margaret, and Elizabeth. He and Steve Rogers were best friends, they had grown up together in Brooklyn but all of that was over seventy years ago and since then he had gone off to fight Nazis, become a prisoner of war, been injected with some half-assed version of the super-soldier serum, was rescued and taken on HYDRA before falling off a train and turned into a shelf-stable, brainwashed assassin known as The Winter Soldier by his enemies.
Eventually, Shuri and T’Challa felt safe moving him outside the lab. Ayo would take him into the countryside with the other Dora Milaje, and she’d test his ability to stop himself from becoming a screaming lunatic whenever he heard the words; if he couldn’t, they would knock him out. He was learning, taking it one day at a time. He developed some odd side effects, though. Instead of the triggers sending him into a panic, his brain would shut off completely, he’d go catatonic, and it freaked Ayo out. She said it was like his soul had left his body; both Soldat and Bucky had vacated the premises, and all that was left was an empty shell in the middle of the field.
They backtracked after that, instead of trying to deprogram him, Ayo and the other Dora Milaje would force him into a fight to see if he could stop Soldat from coming out on his own, because aside from the fact that literally, anyone could turn him into a weapon, his survival instincts were the real problem. Strangely, he liked it when they roughed him up; all the sweat, bruises, and aches felt like progress because, for once, no one was trying to actually hurt him. They didn’t hate him; they were beating him, yes, but it all came from a place of good intention.
There was one time he actually made Ayo laugh. She was kicking his ass like it was nobody’s business when he managed to snatch her spear, holding the blunt end up before saying a firm no like he was a parent reprimanding a toddler. She burst out laughing like it was the funniest thing she had ever seen, and she had to give herself a few minutes to wipe the tears from her eyes. It was a very silly and unexpected reaction, but apparently, what made it so funny to her was that Bucky was wearing traditional Wakanda clothes, and his hair had fallen out of the bun he’d put it in. According to Ayo, she felt like she was being yelled at by white Jesus.
The Wakandans were so good to him, they healed his broken body, fed him, and clothed him; they were doing everything they could to help him win back his mind, even after he was framed for the murder of their previous king, and even though he had killed so many people during the life he could still barely remember. They seemed to understand, though, that he was not what HYDRA had made him be; he was still the guy from Brooklyn, albeit with super strength and severe mental trauma. It was a long road, but they were taking it with him, and then it finally happened, there, by the campfire with Ayo, she recited all the words, and he fought so hard to keep it together, and he did. He remained himself; he remained Bucky, and when he buried his face in his one hand and started to cry, she knelt down in front of him and lifted his chin up with a single finger.
“You are free, James Barnes.” She said, and it was the gentlest anyone had been with him in years.
It was like a weight had been lifted off of him, and he could breathe for the first time in decades, yet the road to recovery still wasn’t over. T'Challa gave him land to work and a place to live. Yes, the programming was gone, and he could control the beast, but as Shuri explained to him, it was time to recover emotionally, time to come to terms with everything he had done in his past life. That was when the nightmares got worse; the Wakandan doctors told him they were most likely repressed memories bubbling up to the surface. Part of him had suspected it even before they confirmed it. Even in Romania, he knew the only way to move forward was to remember his past as both James and well… That other guy, which is why he tried recording everything he remembered in the first place.
The nightmares were different, though; nothing he recalled from the war was as terrible as the shit he saw in his dreams, and since T’Challa knew he wouldn’t want to talk about them, the king gave Bucky back the bag with his notebooks that were confiscated when he arrived. T’Challa also provides him with new ones to continue writing it all down. Bucky was much more meticulous this time around. He needed to actually try piecing his life back together and not just the decent bits, so when the nightmares woke him up, he recorded them all with shaky hands.
It was much easier being deprogrammed than sorting out his memories; his wires were still very crossed, and he’d tell Steve a whole story about something they did together, only for the blonde to smile sadly and say that never happened, Buck, or that was the plot of the last movie we saw together. It was frustrating because while Steve could help him confirm or deny anything that happened before 1943, he could not help with what came after. Had Bucky really assassinated one of the most beloved American presidents in history? In front of his own wife and on national television!?
It wasn’t like anyone had even told him; it came to him in a nightmare, and when he woke up in the middle of the night, he left his hut and walked to Shuri’s lab, knowing she’d still be there working on some gadget. She was surprised to see him and had no idea how to respond when he shouted I SHOT JFK! at the top of his lungs. He had nightmares of being in Vietnam and Korea, of taking out squadrons of soldiers, of having his arm ripped off by what he swore was another super-soldier. Bucky dreamt of blood, rivers of blood, and carnage, sneaking through windows in the middle of the night and slitting throats. The nightmares were hard, but alongside the nightmares came other, more positive things.
During the day he’d zone out and remember something from when he and Steve were kids, the name of a girl they both liked in high school, the time Steve’s mom caught them with a nudie magazine, or the greatest baseball game ever played in the lot behind the malt shop old man O'Neill owned and just the other day he managed to remember something that didn’t include Steve at all. It was all Bucky’s, a memory that belonged just to him. It was July 24th, 1924, his dad took him to his first professional boxing match, Gene Tunney vs. Georges Carpentier, and no one in the world could tell him it wasn’t real or that it had happened to someone else because he could still smell the box of Cracker Jacks he devoured and feel the stickiness on his fingers from the caramel.
He mentioned it to Ayo when she came to visit as part of a regular check-in. It was real progress, and that was everything, and he thought perhaps when the king arrived at his hut no more than two days later that it was to say he was impressed with Bucky’s rehabilitation, but instead, T’Challa arrived with his usual friendly smile missing from his face. Bucky knew instantly that something was wrong; the recovery period was over. Had he known that morning he would be fighting creatures from outer space for the fate of the entire universe, he may have decided to play sick, but one doesn’t exactly say no to a king, nor could Bucky deny a request for help from said king when he had taken him in and helped him get his life back. It was a debt he needed to repay, and he would do it, whatever the cost.
“Where’s the fight?” Bucky asked, staring at the sleek black prosthetic arm the king had fashioned to replace the one he had lost two years prior.
A battle was the last thing Bucky wanted to get thrust into; he had finally found peace in Wakanda, in his little hut surrounded by the lake with his goats and the children who liked to come by to see the country's token white guy. Why was he so surprised? He should have known this day was going to come. The day when he’d have to be a soldier again, where he’d have to suit up and fight for what was right, to protect the places he had grown to love, the people who he called neighbors, and the friends who had taken care of him. It was bad; he could see it in General Okoye’s face that she was worried about him breaking again. She knew the toll of war; she was a soldier too, after all.
He should have known that everything always ended in a fight.
“On its way,” T’Challa said.
At the armory outside the Wakandan capital, he saw Steve for the first time in months, and though his old friend tried to smile, there was that familiar look of fear etched into the lines on his face. The fight wasn't just bad; it was earth-shatteringly awful. It was going to be the kind of fight that a lot of people weren’t going to make it back from, the kind that defined people's lives, the kind that separated ordinary men from heroes. Bucky tried to exude confidence and force himself to smile, too. Fake it until you make it, that’s how that saying goes, right? he thought to himself as the king spoke to his friend about their defenses.
“You will have my Kingsguard, the Border Tribe, the Dora Milaje, and…” T’Challa started.
“A semi-stable 100-year-old man.” Bucky finished as he hugged his friend, who was being trailed by several other people who appeared much more ready for a fight than Bucky was.
It was the actual end of the world as he came to learn.
Truthfully, the whole thing seemed pretty insane when it was explained to him: magical rocks from the dawn of time, wizards, aliens, and a genocidal purple giant who was going to use the aforementioned magical rocks to wipe out half of all life in the universe. It sounded like the plot of one of the many pulp fiction magazines he had read growing up, but then again he had once met a man with a red skull, both he and his best friend had their DNA altered by mad scientists and he had been outfitted with an indestructible metal arm given to him by a king who ran around in a cat costume. Hell, he once fought alongside a dude who turned into a giant at an airport. Insane had become pretty normal for Bucky.
That didn’t make any of it less terrifying or confusing, though. Bucky had been in many battles, that was the life of a soldier, but nothing could have compared to this; force fields that protected the whole city, spaceships and monsters, an alien chick with horns, machines that were bigger than buildings and clawed the earth. Halfway through the fight, they were joined by a literal walking tree, a guy shooting lightning from an ax, and a sociopathic raccoon who really wanted to buy Bucky’s gun and brand new prosthetic arm. It was chaotic, as all battles are, but it had been a very long time since Bucky had fought this kind of fight. To be honest, even though he’d fought the Dora Milaje often during his recovery, he didn’t really know his own strength or abilities anymore.
The speed with which he could move was surprising to him, the force with which he could throw a punch was lethal, and when he ran out of bullets, his brain went into autopilot, finding twenty different ways to utilize the spent rifle as a bludgeoning tool, something he was sure had been left over from his broken programming. The fight was ruthless and never waned. For a while there, it felt like they were going to lose, but a flash of red light caught his eye, and suddenly, a woman was flying and using some kind of magic to move literal mountains against their enemies.
Wanda, if he remembered correctly from the briefing. He almost forgot Steve had mentioned wizards. Why did they wait to unleash the wizards!? Another flash of white light and a giant purple guy who looked like he had fallen asleep with his face on a radiator appeared. That guy Bruce called out for help because the android with the magic rock in his head, Vision, needed backup, and everyone all went racing to get to him, including Bucky. Sure, he didn’t understand much of anything, but he knew Vision needed to be protected at all costs, even if it meant Bucky had to go toe to toe with an intergalactic being three times his size.
A flash of purple sent him flying backward, and he watched as one by one the freak in the golden glove took his team down. That was when Wanda used her powers to destroy the rock and Vision in one violent blast. A victory with a cost, or at least it had appeared so because yet another light, this one green, brought Vision back, and the giant seized the stone, killing the android once again. There was an energy surge, and Bucky was flying back to the ground for a second time. There was some confusion, ringing in his ears, and when he climbed back to his feet, he saw the lightning guy with his ax buried in the chest of the radiator-faced alien, who just smiled before snapping his fingers.
There was an eerie silence as Bucky stumbled toward Steve. He felt funny, and the last thing he remembered seeing was his friend's frightened face. It was like falling asleep, at least that was the closest thing he could compare it to. One minute he was awake, and the next he wasn’t, then, in an instant, it was morning. Except he hadn’t fallen asleep, and it wasn’t morning. Actually, it was much more like blacking out after a night of heavy drinking. One moment, Bucky was surrounded by warriors and fighters, and the next, he was alone. Steve was gone, so was the purple alien and the lightning guy. In fact, half of the group was gone, and the shredded battleground had been replaced with lush green fields. Even the sun was sitting in a different position, and Bucky felt woozy.
“Hey! Where is everyone?” He heard a voice call out, and when Bucky turned around, a guy with metal wings, looking just as confused as he felt, landed next to him.
“Sam?” Bucky asked.
Sam, yeah, that was his name. Steve’s friend, who had refused to move up his chair that one time.
“General! Where are you?” He heard T’Challa call out.
“What happened?” Wanda asked, running up to them with tears in her eyes and barely holding herself together.
“I am Groot.” The tree chimed in.
There were dozens of people gathering, mostly Wakandans, but all of them talking over each other, trying to figure out exactly what the hell was going on when a circle of sparks began to form out of thin air. A portal opened up, bringing forth an Asian man in monk's robes who called himself their ally. Wong, as his name turned out to be, was also a wizard, and the news he had for them was awful. He told them all that they had lost; the madman Thanos had succeeded and wiped out half of all life in the universe. Bucky, Sam, T’Challa, and the others had been turned to dust, erased from existence, and five long years had passed without them. Bucky refused to believe it; he had just seen Steve less than a second ago. He couldn’t have lost more time. This wasn’t fair. He had died for a second time and been brought back, and none of it was fair!
“We lost,” Wanda said with a strain in her voice.
“Where are Steve and Nat?” Sam asked as Bucky’s head reeled from trying to process yet another new reality.
“The fight is not over. Your friends who remained have seen that you were brought back; they’ve lost people along the way, but they still stand together. My people are prepared to fight alongside them, and we are gathering forces from across the planet. From across the whole galaxy, in fact. We need everyone we can get. Thanos is back for the stones, and this time, he means to end everything. Goodbye, universe.” Wong informed them.
“So what’s the plan?” T’Challa asked without hesitation.
His confidence soothed Bucky; it gave him the heart he needed to stay strong and see this thing through. Those who had disappeared wasted no time marching back into the city, where the King’s sister appeared to have also just returned from a five-year absence because the Queen Mother held her tightly with tears in her eyes and collapsed at the sight of her son. T’Challa just brought her back to her feet and told her they’d be together again soon, but there was a war to be fought, and just like that, they had the full might of the Wakandan forces that had remained, along with those who had returned and many new recruits.
Even Wanda was ready to take on Thanos, ready to make him pay for hurting Vision, and Groot was ready to do whatever the hell it was that he did. Bucky and Sam gave each other a knowing look, one that said Let’s put aside the past and get the job done, and with that, Wong opened another portal.
“Cap, can you hear me?” Sam asked over the comms before they stepped through.
“Cap, can you hear me? It’s Sam.” He repeated.
“On your left.” Sam smiled to himself, some joke only they understood before taking to the sky.
It was a spine-tingling moment as the new frontline appeared before them. There was no sunlight, just dark clouds, giant ships, all manner of hellish creatures, and scorched earth. T’Challa led his people in their battle cry, and though before Steve and his few friends stood alone, this time the universe stood behind them, even that crazy raccoon. There were all manner of heroes and armies from across space. Guardians, Ravagers, Asgardians, Nova Corps, Wakandans, Masters of the Mystic Arts, and a squadron of very ordinary-looking people wearing various S.H.I.E.L.D. uniforms led by a bald man in an eye patch. Steve looked like he had taken a beating, but the sight of them made him stand tall and stare down Thanos.
“Avengers!” Steve shouted as he held out a hand and summoned an oversized hammer.
“Assemble.” He added, and with that, everyone took off to fight and face their destiny.
If the Battle of Wakanda was bad, then this one… Well, there was no comparison. It was literally like traversing through hell because everywhere Bucky stepped, there was twisted metal, piles of concrete, and broken glass as if there had once been a building beneath his feet. There was gunfire, the sound of clashing swords, magic, and all kinds of weaponry he had never seen before. His ears kept ringing with the sounds of several conversations going on simultaneously over the comm lines. Requests for cover, more ammo, or a lift. Calls to get down, shouts for aid, and a demand for everyone to stand clear before the ground began to shake, but only one really had Bucky’s attention as he fought through the hordes of enemy combatants. It was the one Steve was on.
“Barton, is everyone out of the building?” Steve asked.
“Negative, I need help. Constantin is still buried, and the water is rising fast.” Barton called out over the comms.
“Hang in there. I’m coming to get you.” Another said.
“No! Scott, you have to return the stones!” The trapped woman shouted.
“Constantin, we don’t even know where they are," Steve told her.
“I do…” She sighed with some exasperation.
“Ah, crap... You always have to make my job harder, don’t you, kid?” Barton said.
“It’s what I live for.” She tried to laugh.
“What?” Scott asked confusedly.
“Constantin has the glove. Lang, we’ve got to rendezvous.” Barton informed him.
That was when Bucky saw a man with a bow and arrow strapped to his back running across the battlefield with a metal mitten that matched Tony Stark’s suit of armor. The Nano-Gauntlet, they called it, and the damn thing was inlaid with the same magic stones as the previous one. The one Bucky had seen the purple giant wielding before everything went blank. A weapon. A planet destroyer. The fate of the universe, the endgame.
“Somebody cover Barton! We need to get those stones to Lang." Steve shouted over the comm.
“We can’t just let Constantin drown down there! ” Scott insisted.
“Nat, I need you to get your shit together. Constantin needs you.” Barton barked at her as he ran.
“I’m fine… I’m going to be fine.” Another woman said with a shaky voice.
“I’ll get her; she’s my responsibility.” A strong, authoritative man called out.
“Fury, we need to have a talk. I’ve had five years to think about this, and I’ve decided that I don’t like you anymore.” The trapped woman joked through pained grunts.
“I missed you, too, kiddo.” Fury laughed.
“Barton. Status? ” Steve asked.
“Shit shit shit. They’re hot on my tail!” Barton yelled into the comms.
“Give it to me," T’Challa called out, and the archer did so.
Bucky watched as the glove was tossed to the Wakandan King, who leaped out of sight. The next thing he knew, Sam was falling out of the sky when he was struck by something that threw him off balance. Bucky instinctively ran to catch him, but was instead knocked down by the impact of their collision. Sam mumbled a quick apology before scrambling back to his feet, pulling Bucky along before something exploded where they had been lying. As if things couldn’t get any worse, there was a sudden loud rumble that caused everyone to look up as a nearby river began to pour into the battlefield.
“Shit,” Sam said, turning his head to the sky to see that they were under fire on all sides.
They both quickly ducked for cover from the fire raining down from the ships overhead. The blasts sent them flying again, and Bucky struggled to get back up. He could feel the blood running down the side of his face and knew he must have broken at least three ribs. Sam was just as dazed, his wings broken, keeping him from taking off. Just then, Barton quickly ran up behind them, yelling at them both to run towards the wizards. The sky turned orange with symbols as they did, a protective shield conjured by Wong, who now had dozens of battle-weary soldiers surrounding him for some cover.
“Has anyone seen the kid!?” Someone asked frantically.
“I’m pinned!!” Screamed someone else.
“She’s losing a lot of blood!”
“I’m out of ammo!”
End of the world, this is the end of the world, Bucky thought to himself.
In the distance, there was a vortex keeping the floodwaters at bay, and the ground quaked as piles of rocks floated up to try to plug the gap. The people closest to the impending disaster were disappearing in the blink of an eye, only to show up in a safer place a mere second later. Above them, high in the sky, bombs dropped haphazardly, and the largest of the alien ships came crashing down, while on the ground, bodies were strewn about lifeless, and the living continued fighting or huddling around each other for protection. There was fire and smoke everywhere, the smell of death, flesh burning, a constant ringing in Bucky’s ears, and a throbbing in his head.
“He’s got the stones!”
“Cap is down!”
“He just took out Thor!”
The updates echoed in Bucky’s head as the world seemed to slow down.
“We need a medic!”
“Banner, I need you! ”
“I lost sight of Danvers!”
Bucky looked at all the faces surrounding him, some helpless and defeated, yet others still determined to fight a battle that was clearly already lost.
“I can’t get her out!”
“Does anyone…”
“Somebody stop him!!”
Bucky’s focus quickly shifted to the sky as Wong’s enchantment failed, and a giant space whale came barrelling towards the group that had gathered around them, but the talking raccoon stepped out in front of them with his ridiculous gun, refusing to give up.
“TONY!” A woman screamed.
A million cries, a million calls for help, and so much screaming. All that screaming, and Bucky began to shake; he felt himself begin to fracture. A flash here, another there, memories of another time and another place, people he had killed, lives he had ripped apart… What was he doing? Bucky wasn’t a hero; he couldn’t help save the world. He was a murderer, and suddenly, he was spiraling. A nauseating descent into madness as the leviathan drew closer, and just before it reached the group he was in, it turned to dust and washed over them all in a cloud of black.
Silence descended over the battlefield as, in the distance, their enemies collapsed into puffs of smoke and piles of ash that blew away in the wind. There was a collective confusion, and then the sudden realization that it was over, they had won, and just like that, the Battle of Earth was over, but Bucky had already spiraled too far out.
He was wide-eyed, breathing rapidly through his nose, and wishing that he would have disappeared too. Sam was the first to notice. He approached Bucky cautiously before asking if he was alright, and when Bucky didn’t respond, Sam called for help. The raccoon didn’t seem to understand what was wrong. To him, it just looked like Bucky was hyperventilating, and when he prodded Bucky with his gun, Bucky finally snapped and attacked.
Soldat wasn’t ready to let go, and Bucky wasn’t ready to live.