The soldier's brain is burning, sizzling with contradictory thoughts, memories, questions, images, anger, fear, confusion. He watches as the man in blue falls, limp and perhaps lifeless, plummeting toward the water that seems to boil in the violence of the splashdown of debris from the disintegrating helicarrier.
...end of the line…
The phrase strobes in his mind, screamingly familiar and so, so important, although he doesn't know why. The not knowing fills him with an alien rage.
...end of the line…
Without making a conscious decision to do so, he releases his grip on the groaning metal of the helicarrier's girder, lifting his armored limb to protect his head from falling detritus. He plunges and hits the water feet first, the impact rippling from heel to ankle to knee to hip to spine like a sledgehammer blow. Through a curtain of roiling, turbulent bubbles, he spots the sinking form of his foe, arms akimbo as if crucified, motionless. With two powerful strokes of his arms, one of steel and one of muscle, the soldier reaches the man, snakes his hand through a bandolier and kicks for the surface, ignoring the crushing pain in his legs.
...James Buchanan Barnes…
As his feet find purchase on the muddy bottom of the riverbed, he yanks the man's head above water, listening for a gasp, a cough, a whisper. Nothing.
...You know me…
More roughly than he intends, the soldier drops the man to the bank and stares down at him. He pores over every feature, the strong jaw, the Greek nose, the now-slack mouth that had only moments before jarred him so deeply he still feels it in his guts. He studies the battered eyes, the bloody lips...He was supposed to kill this man. He could have killed this man. This man would have let him.
...You're my friend…
The memory of the man's voice calling his name pounds in the back of his brain. This is a familiar face that the soldier has never seen, a welcome voice he has never heard. He tries to comprehend and catalog the avalanche of images from a life he never lived, people he never knew. But the memories are more real in his mind than he can stand to bear and a clutching fist seems to burn in his chest.
He watches, face impassive and hiding the tumult inside, as the man in blue begins to stir, begins to breathe.
I know you.
With a last look, burning the face into his memory, into his soul, the soldier turns and strides off, fighting off the limp that his battered body is begging for him to affect. The answers are out there. He has work to do.