The word echoed in the Soldier's ears. The word the man on the bridge spoke to him. It was so foreign, but familiar, as if the Soldier heard it in a dream long ago.
Bucky.
That's what the man with kind blue eyes called him. But that wasn't the Soldier's name. He had no name.
"Who the hell is Bucky?" The Soldier asked the man who he was assigned to kill. Instead of taking the shot, the Soldier passed the opportunity and lowered his weapon. Bucky. The blue eyes man continued to look at the Soldier, in shook and in familiarity. The man knew the Soldier, but the Soldier did not know the man. Or did he?
The Soldier now sat in a chair, surrounded by scientists in a small, windowless room that resembled a bank bolt. The man with blue eyes had left with the red haired woman. She too seemed familiar. But the man called the Soldier something.
Bucky.
The Soldier looked at the men around him. Some of them he had met before, the last time they had thawed him out. But they were a few years old, five or six perhaps. The Soldier had no way of knowing. But there was something he did know, a memory almost forgotten.
The Soldier remembered seeing the blue eyed man a long time ago in an inhospitable place. The Soldier remembered being in the 107th and being captured. The man who experimented on him, what was his name? Zola?, had done horrible, painful things to him. But then the man came and rescued him. They tried to escaped. The Soldier could have run, but the man was trapped, telling him to go on.
"Not without you!" The Soldier cried to the man, to his friend, to his best friend.
Then the Soldier remembered falling, the man holding out his hand and screaming as the Soldier fell and fell and fell...He woke up, his left arm a bloody and mangled mess. The men found him. They cut off his damaged arm and replaced it with the metal one. The one that the scientists were fixing now.
Then the Soldier remembered being frozen, the sharp points of pain stabbing every inch of his body and then feeling nothing at all. Enraged by what they had done to him, the Soldier flung the scientist across the room, hard.
Bucky.
The man on the bridge had a name. Steve. Steven Rogers. The Soldier knew him.
The heavy doors opened and a man walked in. The Soldier knew the man. His name was Alexander Pierce. The Soldier first saw the man as a young man, then every time the Soldier woke up, Pierce aged and aged. And know he was an old man.
The Soldier looked up at Pierce through strands of long dark hair.
"I know him." The Soldier said and repeated in his mind over and over.
"He's been out of cryo for too long." The Soldier heard someone say.
Before the Soldier knew what was happening, he mechanically opened his mouth for the scientist to place in the mouthpiece. Then the chair lowered back. He knew what was coming next. He had undergone it many times before.
I know him. The Soldier thought to himself once more. The man's name was Steven Rogers, Captain America, the Soldier's best friend before the Soldier was turned into a monster, a ghost that brought Death wherever he went.
Bucky.
That was the Soldier's name. He was Bucky. James Buchanan Barnes, called Bucky.
The switch was flipped and the machine sent volts of electricity surging throughout the Soldier's body. His agonizing screaming were muffled by the mouthpiece. His thoughts, the blue eyed man on the bridge, the woman with red hair, his name, became blurred and unrecognizable. As the machine ran longer, the less he remembered.
Bucky.
Soon even that one word faded.
He was the Soldier. And nothing more.