It comes back in a trickle.
He doesn't know this man (he does) but those blue eyes seem so tantalizingly familiar (they don't). His mission is to kill the man with the blue eyes (I know him), the man from the bridge (you don't), and while the aircraft the two are on goes down with screeching metal and roaring flames, he watches in confusion as the man with the blue eyes, still moving despite three bullets the Soldier put into him, lifts up the support beam pinning him to the ground.
He is the enemy of the man with the blue eyes. He just shot the man with the blue eyes three separate times – the man should know this. He helps anyway.
The man with the blue eyes must be truly idiotic, and the moment he can, he attacks.
(I don't know you)
(Who the hell is Bucky?)
(James Buchanan Barnes)
The man with the blue eyes refuses to fight, even as his face is pounded to a bloody pulp and death is so very close at hand.
(I'm with you to the end of the line)
(There is a key hidden under a brick next to a rickety iron rail, and a boy in a suit too long in the sleeves and too wide in the shoulders.)
He falls.
The Winter Soldier has super-human strength, and his metal arm works of its own accord to keep him safely hanging above the now open floor, legs dangling over thousands of feet of space (although the water is steadily growing closer – even more so for the blue-eyed man).
The Winter Soldier watches the man with the blue eyes fall, limp, broken, like a rag doll.
(There is an alleyway in the 1940s, and a man named Bucky has to go and beat up three boys who thought it would be a smart idea to pick on his friend, a much smaller man. Steve protests that he had everything under control. Bucky thinks of how much trouble his friend is going to have breathing tonight.)
The Winter Soldier lets go of the one thing keeping him alive, and sucks in a deep breath just before he lands in the river with all the other pieces of debris falling from the sky.
He can see nothing in the water – super-human or not, visibility in the murk would be difficult even for a fish. He can only swim with one arm, his metal arm, because the man with the blue eyes broke his flesh arm in two separate places. He pushes blindly onward until he wraps his fingers around something solid, something fabric, something human, and then he needs to swim with his broken arm because he only has two arms to swim with.
...That felt sarcastic. Is he sarcastic?
He is Soldier. That is all. Emotions don't have a place.
But he is sarcastic.
(no, he isn't)
(yes, he is)
The man with the blue eyes isn't moving, and he is too pale, too cold. He's covered in blood, dirt, grime, and the Winter Soldier frowns. He heads toward the closest bank, sometimes letting the current do the work for him when he grows too tired. He remembers long winter nights sitting by his friend's bedside, watching the other, so tiny, so small, cough and shake and spit up blood, and he remembers wondering if that night was going to be the last one.
Remembering is bad.
(why is it bad?)
It just is.
(but he does remember. He does. He does.)
He drops the man with the blue eyes onto the ground when they are finally out of the water, arms too tired to do anything more gently. Bloody water leaks from the man's mouth, the only sign he is alive. Blood soaks his blue uniform an ugly crimson.
Bucky doesn't want the man to die before anyone can get to him.
(Who the hell is Bucky?)
The Winter Soldier isn't sure.
He sits down and turns the man onto his side, waiting impassively as more water comes out in wheezing, hacking coughs. His eyes look critically over the wounds (he hurt him), and when he has finally determined that the man hasn't lost enough blood to yet be critical, he lets the man with the blue eyes flop back over. He gets up and walks away, and he doesn't look back.
Bucky hopes Steve will be okay.
The Winter Soldier doesn't know who Bucky is.
(he doesn't know who Steve is either)