The memories came in flashes, usually when he was in pain.
He'd learned to live on the run, wearing a jacket to disguise his arm. A baseball cap, low, to cover his eyes. And he'd cut his hair. That was the first thing he did, and when he saw himself in the mirror there was a white-hot jolt of recognition.
After that, he started making the connections. Memory was associated with pain. Pain was associated with memory. And he couldn't help but wonder what terrors had made it that way.
There were certain prominent faces that haunted him every time he had that good old flash of memory. One was his, and the other was Captain America's.
He figured a lot out when he got hurt. At first he never did anything deliberately, but the time he bumped into the man holding a cup of steaming coffee, he could never quite convince himself it was an accident. Either way, it was well worth it—the minor coffee-induced burns brought a series of memories that fit everything together like a puzzle.
Granted, they weren't good memories—memories of getting captured and becoming a PoW. There was nothing about that he'd want to remember, under normal circumstances. But it ended with Steve getting him out of there. He tried not to pay too much attention to the flow of emotions, but with Steve, they were awfully strong. There were rushes of affection and great surges of pride that ran deep and cut into his soul; pride for the little guy from Brooklyn with the impossibly big heart.
The emotions were the hardest to deal with, because once he rediscovered them, they kept coming back. There was no way he was ready to feel all this again, not alone, not by himself. Bucky—the Winter Soldier—was strong. Invincible. But he was completely unequipped to handle feelings.
There were a couple days on the run when he just couldn't eat, simply because there was nowhere to get food. On those days hunger had full reign on his body, and the cramps it induced brought the most unpleasant of his memories, of going days without food. With that came pangs of worry, worry that he knew had been for Steve, praying that his best friend in the world had enough to eat.
One day some memories came that burned him up inside, memories of his last day in Brooklyn. He'd been worried about Steve (wasn't that usual?), about leaving him alone, about how much Steve wanted to fight, about how much he didn't. Because if there was anything in the world that James Buchannan Barnes was afraid of, truly afraid of, it was losing Steve.
And these memories tipped it all. He caught himself thinking it—that he'd give his left arm to see Steve again.
That night he tried to sleep in an alleyway, but it was too cold to shut down his mind. He laid there for a while, thinking, remembering, until a voice called out.
"Bucky?"