THE WORDS
A/N: I just saw Civil War yesterday, I've been in love with Sebastian Stan for years, Bucky is my son, and the words intrigued me, especially given they weren't in the comic books, from what I understand. So this happened. All of these except the final one are based on actual historical events. With creative liberties taken, of course.
WARNING: Very dark, with profanity and a lot of death and blood. Also mentions of torture.
Snow white ice cold speeding train and then—and then breaking, every bone in his body shattering upon impact, smashing into frozen ice hard as a rock, and then rolling over into the snow and his arm half hanging off his body and the blood blossoming and seeping out into the snow—
His first mission was that cold.
It was in the northernmost reaches of Russia. Ice floes bobbed in the sea, which was flecked with ice anyway. He kept looking down at his left hand and flexing his fingers because they were shiny silver metal now and he was sort of groggy and couldn't quite understand why but he also didn't actually care that much, though he felt he probably should have.
It was all slow, too slow, and yet it was too goddamn quick at the same time, because he splashed through the shallows and reached the bank and then suddenly he was breaking into what he had been told was a compromised base. Then people were running and screaming but there were only like six of them and it was easy to choke one with his metal arm and kick another until he stopped moving and shoot someone in the face.
But then, at the last second, at the end of a hallway, he slowed down, and halted. There was nothing beyond this hallway. It was dark and there was mildew on the walls and the smell of it filled his nostrils and suddenly he was awake again, he was alive, he was Bucky and he couldn't be here, he'd been in so much pain for so long, and he stared at the last intended victim, who stared back up at him with round terrified eyes, and Bucky pointed aggressively and shouted "GO!" and then the person had scrambled to their feet and was sprinting past him.
Then he collapsed to his knees and buried his face in his hands because what the actual living fuck was he doing, where even was he, who even was he, he was supposed to be—where was he supposed to be again? Wasn't he supposed to help train other soldiers, or go on secret missions to rescue people, or…something?
A gunshot echoed through the hallway. Bucky flinched. Then he slowly straightened up and stood. "Soldier!" shouted his immediate superior, he knew that voice, knew that man. "Mission report!"
Bucky rotated. The bodies were strewn across the floor and blood splattered the walls. "They're dead," he said. He looked down and noticed the person he'd tried to let live had been shot by his superior.
"Well-spotted, soldier," said his superior acidly. For good measure he shot the last victim again and Bucky ground his teeth together. "But they weren't dead enough." He turned a little and put his hand to his ear. "The Winter Soldier isn't ready."
Bucky was startled by the name. "The—" he stopped. He worked his jaw. "Winter Soldier," he said, trying it out. "The Winter…" He shook his head and stepped back. "I'm not, I'm not—Bucky, Bucky, I'm Bucky—"
Next thing he knew something pricked his neck, and his superior was lowering him to the ground and grumbling to himself in irritation, and it was all black—
When he woke up again it was to unendurable pain.
"Welcome back, soldier," said his superior loudly, when the electrocution had stopped and he was just laying there trying to breathe. "Can you give me a mission report for September 8, 1945?"
His eyes were watering. "Fuck you."
"Wrong answer."
Then it started again and it stopped again and when he stopped screaming his superior cleared his throat and said, "Mission report, September 8, 1945. Cape Zhelaniya. Failure to eliminate all intended targets."
And then it was all gone, it was all gone, and it had all disappeared and all he could understand was that one word because his superior kept repeating it, Cape Zhelaniya, Zhelaniya, and then it slurred and all he could understand was longing because they sounded almost the same and that word, that word—
It was hot and dry and his hands were dripping blood. His superior was talking in his ear but he was ignoring it. He was looking down and around at the bodies he'd been ordered to bring out and leave on the side of a street somewhere, or anywhere they'd be found.
One of them was wearing a khaki windbreaker.
He had taken a step over to heft up the first body; now he stopped, suddenly weirdly startled and unsteady, and stared. Something was dragging its claws down the back of his brain, trying to force itself back in, but for the absolute life of him he couldn't—
Steve.
There was nothing else. That was all he knew. Out of nowhere he was breathing way too quickly and he could feel a sob building up in his chest, and he couldn't do this, couldn't parade the bodies around in this town, couldn't let their friends and family see this.
So instead of dragging them out to be seen by any passersby he dragged them away in another direction entirely. He went to the nearest possible place of disposal, which was a cliff situated over a rushing river, and swung every single body right over the edge.
He left the man in the khaki windbreaker for last. When he dragged the body over to the edge of the cliff all he could think was SteveSteveSteve but he didn't know who the hell Steve was so he did his best not to think about it, instead he tried to think of how he was going to explain this to his superior, because his superior would surely—
It was as the body was falling, arcing through the still summer air, that he remembered.
But before he could do anything, before he could do any more than take a couple of stumbling steps backward and look in horror at his own hands, that were coated in drying blackening blood that was rusting his metal one, they were there, his superior was there and he could half-hear him explaining to someone else something about the Winter Soldier protocol and something about—triggers—
This time they held him underwater, and they kept saying rusted. Rusted. Rustedrustedrustedrusted. Rusted like red, filthy blood, rusted like his metal arm, rusted like—rusted like—
He didn't fuck up again until '57.
Now it was cold and wet and he was cold and he couldn't feel anything. He very calmly went about his business. He broke into a house and went walking through, holding a machine gun in his hands, dark eyes flicking around and searching for the intended target.
He kicked down the doors to some rooms and kept going. The house looked empty but intel had told him that the target was here. There was nowhere else for the target to be. Maybe he was hiding somewhere. Probably, he thought, because the human race was full of cowards and it was disgusting.
He was down to the last two rooms when he happened to glance toward a china cabinet. It was by no means an unusual object in such an important man's house, but for some reason the design gave him pause. He stopped walking and stared at the cabinet. Then he slowly turned and walked off his path to investigate it.
As he approached he could feel his chest tightening and he couldn't tell why. All he could tell was that for some reason he…he knew…
No. Nonono. He backed away from the china cabinet and turned to take two running steps into the next room, where he almost immediately found the target trying to hide. He stormed over, his footsteps savage now, and yanked him up, only to then shoot his brains out. It was only then that he slowly realized that that was wrong, he hadn't been supposed to do that, he'd been supposed to go back out and do it publicly—
Fucking shit, fuckfuckfuck, he dropped the body and stepped back, his hands already shaking violently. "Soldier," said his superior's voice in his ear, "what was that?" From his tone he already knew the answer.
"I'm sorry," he said, and dropped the gun.
When the gun hit the ground and went off, briefly peppering the opposite wall with bullets, it was like the sound burst through the fog in his brain and brought it all back, because he knew why he knew about that china cabinet, it was because his mom used to have china justlikethat
He was James Buchanan Barnes and he was born in 1917. 1917. March of 1917. March and he had three siblings. March of 1917. 191719171917
Other Hydra operatives had to take over and salvage the mission. He was taken from the site by his superior, who sat him down and asked him what the hell had happened to him. "1917," was all he said. "March 1917." Then he started crying.
It should have come as no surprise that they used seventeen this time. They beat him close to death and then kept stepping on his broken ribs while they said it, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, seventeen
He was on the edges of a parade, in one of the upper floors of his chosen building, and waiting for the target to come into his sights. He had the man that he was going to frame for this with him; he'd wake him soon enough and send him to start running and hiding. That would look suspicious and the man would be arrested and the mission would be over and it would be back to the cryo freeze again, which was really all he wanted at this point because he was so goddamn tired.
He was waiting. He was accustomed to waiting, this was not unusual. His human arm was falling asleep and he shifted ever so slightly to wake it up. Then he turned to check that the man he was meant to frame was still unconscious, and then he turned back to peer down at the street through his sights.
There was a lot of people out here on the streets today and all of them were way too loud. He wished they would shut up. He adjusted the focus on his sniper rifle, though he was supposed to use a different one when he did the actual shooting, and moved it around a little, kind of looking around the plaza where he was meant to assassinate someone.
This was when he saw something that made his blood run cold.
He refused to think about that stupid shield, absolutely refused, because he was already starting to hyperventilate a little upon even considering screwing up this mission, and he couldn't do that he just couldn't do it couldn't. He glared down at the street and waited while his breath continued to catch in his throat. He did his best to ignore this.
When the target came into his sights and whipped up the other rifle and shot, one, two, three times. Then he turned and reached for the other victim—not victim target what was he oh wait shit yes he had to—he had to—
He arranged the scene properly and woke up the other man and then he was gone. He was gone, he was out of there, he was running down the stairs and escaping out the back door, he was out of sight of anyone and then he had vaulted over a fence into someone's yard and he just kept running—
He didn't know what the fuck he was doing, he just knew that this was wrong, this was all sososo wrong, and if they caught him after he ran then he'd surely regret it for the rest of his life if that was what this could even be called at this point anyway, so he just kind of kept running and did his best to escape, running through the entire night—
They caught him at daybreak.
Six years later he was ordered to massacre a group of squatters.
This was not unusual. He was dispatched for assassinations and massacres and nothing else. Usually he was meant to make it look like someone else had done it in order to provoke a revolt of some sort.
When he arrived on the site he saw them immediately; it was difficult to miss. But as he approached he slowed down, and then even as he kept walking his mind raced, because for some bizarre reason one of their faces had struck him as somehow…familiar?
He slowed until he was at a halt. Then he just stood there on the grassy ridge, staring, mind working so hard to place that man's face.
Then he shook his head and took another step, but he just—he couldn't do this without knowing why he knew that man, because what if he was supposed to know that man, what if that man was a colleague or another agent or—or a friend—
Almost immediately the thought struck him as hilarious, because he had no friends, but he didn't laugh. Instead he listened to his superior tell him to get his ass into gear, and he took another very slow step, and then as the grass bent beneath his boots he suddenly realized, and there was no fucking way he could kill these people because that man was—or looked exactly like he supposed—his father—
Because his superior was shouting in his ear now and one of the squatters had noticed him, he found tear gas and threw that at the camp instead. And then, even as he backed away, he realized dully that he couldn't run: with the thought of his father came the memory of those other times he'd fucked up, and he already knew what was going to happen. He already knew he, whoever he was because he couldn't for the life of him remember his own name, was about to forget everything again in a haze of pain. There was no point in running.
This time they put him in a freezer and kept saying furnace because they thought they were funny. His teeth chattered so much he bit off a piece of his tongue. He choked on his own blood and couldn't stop thinkingaboutfurnaces
He stopped the bus in the middle of the street.
Then he walked around to the driver's side and pried open the doors with his metal hand. He climbed up the few stairs and ordered everyone to get out and line up alongside the bus. They were all terrified and they did what he told them to do.
He walked back down and out of the bus and then walked back down the line of people. Quite calmly he turned around, pointed his rifle, and shot each one of them, though not in the head quite yet. He was under orders to shoot them multiple times to make it look worse, so he did. Until he was finished with everyone else and he had reached the last person.
Then he stood there over him and watched for a minute, because for some insane reason the guy was still breathing, despite having been shot so many times. He stared down at this man and watched him struggle to breathe despite everything. Then he realized that the man was saying something.
He decided after a second that he could satisfy his curiosity because the mission was essentially already over—other Hydra agents were going to spread the news and report who had done this—and he crouched down. "What?" he said, voice almost flat.
He fully expected the man to say something like "You're going to hell" or "Fuck you." Instead he said, mouth bubbling with blood and saliva, eyes unfocused, "For—give him. He knows—not what—he does."
A chill crept down his spine because he knew those words. He'd heard those words before. Jesus. Right, right, right, Jesus, Jesus was a person he'd learned about—when had he learned about him? He straightened up and took a step back, panicky, because he couldn't for the life of him figure out where he'd learned about Jesus—
His superior said something in his ear. But he ignored this. Instead of shooting the guy again and finishing him off, he turned and started to run back up the road, in the direction of the nearest house or town or part of civilization, ripping off his face mask as he went, because he'd learned about Jesus once and he needed to know when, he needed to know if there was anything else he'd forgotten—
As he ran and as he reported finding the bus to the people in the next house he found, he managed to remember more. He remembered Jesus, then Sunday school, then a chapel, then a bowl of water, then a screaming baby, then two other kids younger than him, then a pair of scuffed-up brown loafers, and then neatly-trimmed grass
He remembered nine things. Nine. He savored them while he waited for Hydra to come back and pick him up. He knew after they found him again that he'd never be able to remember these things. He wished he could remember the nine but he knew they'd stop him.
"Well, soldier?" demanded his superior. "What was it this time?"
"Nine," he said, and sighed. "Only nine."
The next year they sent him on another mission, almost like they were giving him an opportunity to make up for the last one. He went to South Africa to find a member of the National Party. This was all well and good. He'd been told there were only four targets. They were all supposed to be in the same house.
The house was big. He wandered through it with the greatest of ease, body taut, quite aware that he was capable of murdering anything that tried to hurt him. "Mr. and Mrs. Smit," he called in a low, sing-songy voice as he walked, swinging his gun around in his hand. "Come out, come out, wherever you are."
"Shut up and do your job, soldier," snapped his superior in his ear.
"Yes sir," he half-whispered, and he lapsed into silence. He kept walking around the house, pacing like a big cat, his footsteps and his breathing the only sounds he could hear.
He found Mr. and Mrs. Smit soon enough. He shot them and stabbed them as well for good measure, maybe to prove to himself that he was worthy of being the Winter Soldier, because his superior had seemed really pissy about him. Then he set off to find the last two targets, who were sure to be hiding somewhere in the house.
He walked back down and stationed himself by the door in the entryway. Then he waited and listened.
At long last he heard a faint shuffling, scraping sound from somewhere overhead. He kept walking again, this time slowly ascending the stairs. He adjusted his grip on the bloody knife in his hand as he went. He wondered if the last two targets thought they could hide for long.
But when he found them, it was in a little boy's room. There were two little kids hiding under the bed and he was sure at least one of them was already crying. "I'm not going to hurt you," he said, even as he crouched down and waited for them to emerge. "Come out."
One of the kids, the boy, crawled out first. His sister screamed and tried to pull him back. "Let me go!" the boy shouted at her. "He killed them!" Then the boy turned toward him, face tear-streaked, and rocketed at him, throwing himself to try and tackle him at the knees.
He straightened up and looked down. "Fight me!" the little boy yelled, hysterical. "You killed them!"
"Stop!" his sister shouted, crawling out from under the bed too.
Both of them were clearly going to double-team him. He looked at the knife in his hand and realized that his knuckles had whitened from how tightly he was holding it. Then, because for some reason he could feel a lump in his throat, he threw the knife aside, and it clattered to the ground. "Let me help you," he said to the kids, and his superior started yelling in his ear.
He helped the kids escape. He sent them to their other house in another city and paid the cab driver. Then he walked back over and reentered the house. He cleaned up his fingerprints and any hint of Hydra he'd left behind, and then he spray-painted what Hydra had told him to on the cabinets downstairs.
Then he sat down on the bottom step and waited.
Once they'd gotten him and brought him back, his superior asked, his voice shaking with barely controlled fury, "What the fuck stopped you this time, soldier?"
"They were no threat," he said, looking his superior straight in the face. "They were benign."
"Benign?!" shouted his superior. He kicked a chair over and it banged against the wall. "Do they sound benign now?!"
His superior said this because the kids had come out and said that there was some kind of conspiracy and their parents had been assassinated. But he didn't care. "They were benign," he repeated. "They were benign."
The sky was dark and gray overhead and preparing to storm when he killed thirteen men. It was probably because his new superior had been told about his past mistakes that he'd been order to torture them before killing them. But it wasn't like he really had any feelings about it; he was completely numb, he couldn't feel anything. It was just a job.
Oh, they screamed and they fought, but there was no point, because he killed them all anyway. Once they were all dead he was supposed to arrange their bodies in a specific way on the side of a street so the country could fall into an uproar and maybe a war would start between this country and another one.
But when he had suffocated the last one, and stood back and surveyed his work, he just stopped. He stopped and he stared at them. It dawned on him far too late that that last person—that last one—he had tortured him in the same way that he had been tortured once before…but when?
He stood there for a long time, fighting his thoughts to try and reach the conclusion. It started to drizzle while he puzzled through it, and then it began to pour; and he decided for no reason he could really name that he didn't want to leave these people here. Instead, while he continued to try and think of how that had happened to him and who had left him alive, he dragged the bodies over and jammed them down into the sewers.
It was just after he'd disposed of the last body that he remembered. He stumbled backward, slipped in the mud, and landed hard, eyes widening in a combination of horror and fear and revulsion. Then he choked and then he was sobbing because he remembered all of them
His superior found him laying in the mud, staring at nothing, completely motionless and silent. He was dragged to his feet and removed from active duty for a long time. But before they put him back under in cryo, they did it again, they punished him with a new word, because his superior just knew what had happened to him and was mocking his memories.
He decided, somewhere in between being injected with various toxins and being saved from death at the last possible second, that he never wanted to remember again. No more homecomings. No more. No more.
He had one job.
Shoot down the plane when it was close enough to hit Long Island. It shouldn't have been hard; in fact it was quite simple, especially given that all he had to do was point and shoot at the correct moment. All he had to do was sit there and wait, tensed up, for the plane to enter the correct spot. His superior was in his ear counting down.
He wasn't sure how he felt about Long Island, but he shouldn't have felt anything about it. All he should have known was that this was his mission and therefore he had to complete it. There was nothing else for him, after all. It was all he'd ever had to do, the mission, and he would be serving his company, and that was all he wanted to do.
The plane was a passenger plane. There were two hundred and thirty people onboard. He didn't know why they needed to be dead but he just knew they did, and the plane needed to crash into some buildings when it went down, to maximize damage.
But he thought about New York while he waited for his superior to reach one. And it was because he was thinking about New York that he was distracted enough—there was just something about it—that he totally missed his superior saying one until he was screaming ONEONEONEYOUFUCKINGIDIOT, and it was then that he sent the missile and boom, the plane was exploding and crashing into the Atlantic Ocean
Oneoneoneyoufuckingidiot, they kept saying. Oneoneone.
Freight car.
He was meant to blow up a train on its tracks as it traveled somewhere. It had SHIELD intel and was carrying SHIELD agents. SHIELD was Hydra's biggest enemy because it tried to keep everything together. He was supposed to prefer anarchy, he knew that, but really he didn't prefer anything, just being in cryo as opposed to being awake.
He jumped onto the train and started to make his way down it, attaching tiny explosives to the walls. He was discreet and he managed to create distractions while he moved through the cars. Nobody noticed him, and when somebody did, he stuck a needle in her neck and was gone faster than anyone could realize he'd just killed her. He kept going. He kept sticking explosives to walls and under tables and chairs in passing until he reached the last car. He had to pry open the door to let himself in because it was a freight car.
Once he had reached it, he knew he was supposed to get out, he was supposed to escape. But when he reached the freight car he just stopped. He just stopped because he was so goddamn tired, and he put his last explosive on the wall here and then he sat down right beneath it. Then he pulled out the trigger button he was supposed to push to make all of this explode and he thought about the button and that SHIELD agent and the other agents onboard and the driver and the sleeping car and the people serving dinner, and he realized that he had absolutely no idea why he was supposed to prefer chaos.
Why should he prefer chaos? Why should he? Why should he? What was so great about it? Wouldn't the world have been a much easier place if people did their jobs and served food or drove trains or did whatever the fuck they were supposed to do? How could anarchy have possibly ever been the better idea?
He was still sitting there, and his superior was asking what was taking so long, when someone came on over the intercom. "We've almost reached our destination, folks," said the man, all cheerful, totally unaware of what was about to happen. "This will be our last stop."
It would be the end of the line.
The end of the line.
The end of the line.
The end of the line.
He didn't push the button.