They'd only ever really woken him up to show him the new arm. Otherwise, during all those procedures and mind-wipes and grueling experiments, the Winter Soldier had been asleep. Even Nazis had compassion, it seemed.
That time they'd let his drugs wear off, he blinked his eyes open for the first time in what felt like years. It might've actually been years, but there was no way to tell. He didn't have any prior memories to base the passing of time off of, anyway. No, that was a lie. His first and last memory; being dragged through the snow, a river of red in his wake. Now, he started his second memory.
His vision was fuzzy and his head ached, like waking up from a bad hangover. It was bright, too bright, and it took a while for his eyes to adjust. First, it was just shapes. White shapes and green shapes. Then the shapes had arms, heads, masks, glasses. He could pick out individual forms, holding clipboards and tools. Checking machines.
The Soldier soon realized that he, too, had a body. Sensation slowly returned to him and he felt the firm mattress beneath him, the thin sheet covering his naked form, and a cold object laying next to his body. He tried moving. He tested his arms to try and grab the metal thing to his left… only to find the metal thing move with him.
His arms came up from under the sheet. His right felt as it should; fleshy, warm, still tingling from the drugs. But the left hardly felt at all. He didn't feel the dry fabric as it brushed his skin, because he didn't have skin. Once his arms were in view, the Soldier saw a metal arm. Moving as he told it to, obeying his neural commands. Acting like it was a part of him.
The machine extended up to his collar bone and deep into his flesh. When he moved he felt it grate on his bones.
Panic began to set in. He realized that he was in a strange facility, with no memories or recollection of who he was. He had a metal arm and he was about ninety percent sure he shouldn't. He turned to his first impulsory reaction; violence.
The doctors nearest to him had chosen a poor place to stand. He grabbed them and started beating them; he found the metal arm to be a lot stronger than he thought. They tried to sedate him, but anyone that got too close was fair game for swinging.
Eventually, of course, they brought out the guns. He didn't have a whole lot of memories, but he knew what those were. He knew how to use one. He knew what they could do to you. He dropped the bleeding man in his grip and lowered his hands: the new and the old.
The Soldier leveled his gaze as a new man entered the room; another doctor. Small, with glasses and no hair. Something about him seemed familiar. Images of this man's silhouette against bright lights, the clinking and cuffs and the hiss of syringes, flashed into his mind.
"So, you are awake!" the doctor said, raising his hands in a warm welcome. Was he a friend? "We were waiting for you, you know. Although, I suppose we did give you an awful lot of drugs." The doctor reached the table. His voice sounded… odd. The voice inside the Soldier's head had a different accent than his. Was that right?
"You have been our guinea pig for quite some time, now. We ran a lot of tests. Did many things to you. Some of them for the better. Some of them with no consequence, merely for… scientific purposes." The doctor chuckled. The Soldier felt like he should be fighting. But fighting who? How do you know who's friend or foe when you can't even remember who you are?
The doctor was now within punching distance. But there were still too many guns. The doctor knew, and took advantage of this to get into the Soldier's personal space.
"I don't expect you to remember who I am," he said. "I am Arnim Zola." A grin spread across Zola's face. "I am your creator."
From the moment he woke up, the Winter Soldier was mentally a virgin. He had no memory of any sexual endeavors from whatever came before the ravine. His entire mental file cabinet started at being dragged through the snow. All he knew now was that he was employed, whether he liked it or not, to kill.
His work was remarkably easy. Even easier when he found out that his body knew what it was doing with a gun. His first day on his feet, they handed him a rifle and told him to hit a target from a hundred yards away. He hit the bullseye.
As soon as his missions commenced, it was up to the Soldier to maintain a completely professional attitude towards them. Locate the target, do the job, get out and report back to HYDRA for cryo. In the blink of an eye, there was a new group of scientists waking him up for a new job in a new decade.
Bucky traveled all over the world and throughout time. He saw glimpses of what the world was becoming, how it transformed, while he was asleep in a cold box. It made him curious, and while he may not have had any memory of ever actually having sex, that didn't mean the urge wasn't there. Even brainwashed assassins had labito.
There was one assignment in the seventies where said labito actually helped to get the job done quicker. A young man, a politician, with ambitions and an agenda that HYDRA didn't quite agree with was getting too popular for their liking. A politician notorious for his escapades with members of the same sex. They sent in their best man to do it quietly.
Ask the Winter Soldier and he'll say that that night in the hotel was anything but quiet.
After the Soldier had sated his needs, he finished the job and went right back into cryo. He was still glowing the next time they pulled him out.
HYDRA never found out. All they knew was that the young politician was found tangled in soiled sheets the next morning by room service with a bullet in his brain.
The Soldier had no reason to think this would have any sort of bearing on his future. He had no reason to suspect that that one event in the seventies would have any affect on his life in 2014.
He'd had hard targets before. Targets who thought they could fight back. He let them, sometimes, just to get in a good fight to make sure he wasn't getting soft. He'd toy with an assignment for a while before letting them know he'd had them under his thumb the whole time.
But not this time. When they woke him up in the early 21st century, he was, in a word, cranky. This had never happened before, but as he was recovering from the ice, he remembered they'd put him down just as he was getting over a bout of food poisoning in the nineties. The Soldier chocked it up to that and prepared to be shipped off to Washington, D.C.
The target's name was Nick Fury, and he would not be getting any special treatment. The Winter Soldier wanted this over with; no playing with his food this time. Get in, get it done, get out, go back to sleep.
Now, everytime HYDRA woke him up, they tried their best in the short amount of time they had to catch him up on new technological advances. There were a few things he didn't need to know about, like VCR's or coffee makers. What he needed most was advances in weaponry.
As he stalked away from a burning SUV, he seethed at HYDRA's failing to mention handheld car/asphalt cutters. The 21st century was a little too impressive for the Soldier's tastes.
After the target's disappearance, he didn't want to return to HYDRA for debriefing. He needed to finish the hunt.
Unfortunately, his body had other ideas.
Almost as soon as he was off-stage, the vomiting started. The bile rose in his throat and he only just had enough time to get his mask off before he was retching behind a dumpster in a dark alleyway. Still sick with food poisoning, he reasoned. Never trust French diners again.
The tired Soldier leaned against the brick wall and slid down. His gun fell into his lap and he waited until the nausea had passed to even think about moving.
It was another hour of retching and resting at intervals before he picked up the chase.
Nick Fury was a hard man to find. It was times when he was out of cryo this long that he began to wonder what his targets did to deserve their harsh sentence. Not just to die, but to die at the hands of an invisible man. Fury seemed like an incredibly capable man with a lot of resources. It could be for those reasons alone that HYDRA wanted him dead.
After some collaboration from HYDRA's techies, triangulating street camera sightings and triple-tracing any and every bug in the area, Fury was found in an obscure apartment just outside the inner city.
He aimed. He fired. His job was done.
A minor slip-up on a rooftop made him late for his meeting with Pierce, but Pierce could afford to wait. Especially when there had been something about that man… The man on the roof. He'd felt this same way before, this sort of vague recognition, when he caused a car crash a couple decades back. But this was ten times stronger. This was outward familiarity.
He didn't like it.
"Who the hell is Bucky," he murmured, "who the hell is Bucky. Who the hell is Bucky."
In the depths of a HYDRA facility, the Winter Soldier lay on a cot in a dark room. He was expected to get some sleep, but he couldn't remember how to fall asleep on his own. He needed the ice to do it for him.
"Who the hell is Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky…"
Soon an agent would come to wake him up so they could fix his arm and get the mission report. They didn't need to go to the trouble; the Soldier was already awake in his cot, his stomach roiling with nausea and nostalgia.
That man on the bridge. He knew him.
Swimming with a metal arm was hard. Swimming with a metal arm, and a broken arm, while dragging a man twice your size behind you, was really hard. Swimming with a metal arm, and a broken arm, while dragging a man twice your size, and battling the urge to vomit or pass out or both, was the hardest. He'd also been punched, crushed, stabbed, suffocated, and mentally augmented. It wasn't his day. He needed to get back to HYDRA. Go back into cryo.
"Winter Soldier to base," he sputtered into his com. No reply. The com was either fried by the explosions and the water, or something was horribly wrong.
Upon further inspection, everything was horribly wrong.
HYDRA was exposed. SHIELD was shut down. There was no one to run to or from.
The Winter Soldier was, for the first time in his memory, alone.
He stood in the woods at the edge of the Potomac for a long time, pacing, sitting, puking. He realized after some time that he was bleeding from several spots on his body and there was probable bruising on the entirety of his legs and upper torso from where the beam crushed him. His midsection was feeling a bit tender, as well. He needed a place to hide and patch himself up. He needed clothes. He needed food, shelter, water. He needed a name.
He had to latch on to the only thing anyone had ever called him other than "the Winter Soldier" or "the Asset".
It had been a few hours and the explosions had died down from the direction of the Triskelion. He decided it was time to go before the authorities started combing the woods.
"Bucky," he said to himself as he made his way through the thicket. "Bucky it is."
Bucky puked into another trash can. It smelled like rotten lettuce and cigarettes in there and that made him more nauseous so he puked again. Someone bumped into him and yelled at him to get a job. Someone throwing away their coffee told him to lay off the drinks. What he would give for a few guns and diplomatic immunity.
Unfortunately, he was no longer invisible. There was no corrupt government agency to cover his tracks anymore. Everything he did had consequence.
He hadn't been able to find a job. He didn't know what he was good at, other than shooting people, and he doubted anyone in D.C. was looking to hire an assassin. A homeless, sickly one at that.
He'd been living off of shelters, soup kitchens, and stolen goods for weeks. Sleeping on park benches and huddling around burning oil drums with the best of them. The constant sickness that plagued him hadn't gone away, and it hadn't gotten any better or any worse. But now he was sensitive to things like smell, rough textures, hot temperatures, and the lack of fighting and general activity was making him gain weight. Bucky knew he should go in search of a doctor, and money to pay for one. But how do you earn money if you have no talent or trade? How do you get a job if you still have no idea who you are?
He'd just swiped a few tens out of a passing man's loose pocket when he realized that there were ways he could find out who he was. Who he used to be.
In one of his debriefings, he'd learned his target was in similar nature to himself, in that he was a sort of time traveler. Captain America was what he went by. The man on the bridge. The man who'd told him his name. When they were in the Helicarrier, the man who insisted they'd grown up together. That they were friends. Best friends.
He used those tens to buy himself a ticket into the Smithsonian, and into an exhibit where he hoped to find out a little about himself.
He realized, as he walked invisible in the crowd of people, that it might be a little vain to assume his past self was important enough to get a place amongst all the grand paraphernalia and inspirational propaganda. Captain America only knew him. That didn't mean he got his own placard in a museum.
As it turned out, Bucky was fortunately and gratefully wrong. The man known as James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes got a whole wall to himself. He even had an outfit of dark blue hanging with the others.
Bucky approached the glass wall. His own face looked right back at him; a face seen in reflections of car windows before a bullet shatters them, or in a pool of water before he dives in- or, lately, in gas station restrooms, in dirty mirrors, or in passing shop windows. The same eyes, mouth, cheeks, and chin. But that face printed in large on the glass was also very different. It was a face full of concern and sadness, neither of which the Winter Soldier had experienced in great quantities. There was determination in those eyes, in the eyes of the childhood friend of Steve Rogers, where Bucky saw none in his own.
He shook his head free of cloudy thoughts and read the passage next to his picture. The more he read, the more he admired this man; James Buchanan Barnes, holding his own in the mean streets of Brooklyn, getting good grades, being drafted for the war. Defending his friend, Steve, until the very end.
Or, what they thought was the end. The end of Bucky Barnes heralded the beginning of the Winter Soldier, and instead of defending Steve Rogers, he was trying to kill him instead. But that era had also come to an end. There was no more HYDRA. No more scientists programming him into a killing machine, no more generals telling him who to kill. The only evidence that he'd ever been that man was his arm. It was quite a reminder, but not one he couldn't get around.
He could get a job. An apartment. Finally scrape up some money to go to a doctor. He could start a new life. He could start living as Bucky Barnes.
Bucky Barnes decidedly did not have a good life.
After his visit to the museum, things started to come back. Memories. At first, they felt fake. Fabricated. Like they belonged to someone else. But slowly, everything started to fit into place; flashes of fights behind movie theatres, sitting in a diner with a pretty blonde girl, listening to jazz music while cooking dinner. Steve. He was starting to piece together his life from the forties.
Unfortunately, this did nothing to help his life in the 21st century. He'd never needed money before, when HYDRA took care of all his expenses, so he had to go on what he could put together from his old life.
He didn't count on inflation.
An apartment was double what he remembered paying, and when he tried to get a coffee with a dime, he was laughed out of the store. Thankfully, minimum wage had gone up a good seven bucks, but it was still barely enough.
He was still getting sick. And gaining weight, despite his hardly ever eating anything. A side effect of being out of cryo for so long, he told himself. It'll get better once I'm adjusted, he told himself. In the meantime, he needed a new home.
New York seemed like the likeliest candidate. Get back to Brooklyn, back to his roots. So he hitchhiked it up there with five weeks worth of savings from washing dishes and a few articles of stolen clothing.
Flop houses and hostels were to be his refuge until he could get the cheapest apartment money could buy. It seemed housing in New York was cheaper than he anticipated, though- much more expensive than the last time he rented an apartment, but cheaper than anything in D.C.
Due to a rash of alien attacks, super-powered maniacs, and evil-genius hacks, rent had gone down and insurance rates had gone up. Good news for former super-villains in need of an apartment.
So, while Bucky Barnes didn't live a good life, working minimum wage and stealing for food and living in a too-small apartment in a dangerous city, he didn't live a completely horrible one. Everytime he looked in the mirror and saw his arm, he was reminded of how it could be much worse.
Most memories he got back, he was grateful to have. His SSN, for instance. He was glad to have remembered that; even if it was invalid now that he was officially dead, it meant that he was beginning to gain access into his most personal thoughts. The crush he had on a girl named Doris in high school- she was probably either dead or close to it by now, though. The time he played baseball in the street during college and hit the ball clean through somebody's window. Taking care of Steve when he got sick, which seemed to happen on a regular basis.
Bucky's memories of pre-serum Steve were his favorites. Fighting alongside his skinny, sickly friend in back alleys and parking lots, coming home and patching up. Going to bars and having to drag a very drunk and very opinionated Steve away from a potential bar fight. Getting in between Steve and a man twice his size and avoiding a trip to the hospital.
Steve got in a lot of fights, when Bucky reflected on it. It seemed half his memories of his friend consisted of brawls or squabbles. But Steve always seemed to be the better man in the fights. He only ever fought for something he believed in; if a guy was being rude to a girl, or if there was a kid being picked on, or if there was a mugger on the street. Steve would stand up to them all, independent of size or weapon.
Bucky supposed that was what made him worthy of being Captain America.
He wondered what he'd done to be worthy of being the Winter Soldier.
Thoughts like this would come to him, sometimes. Mostly late at night, when he would look out the window at a broken city still recovering from a massive disaster that'd happened not two years ago. It made him think of all the wreckage, all the damage he'd caused in the fifty-or-so years he'd been the Soldier. All the bombs he'd set off and guns he'd fired. Property damage, vehicle damage, and human collateral damage.
And that brought back memories of the war.
The first one came in the middle of the night, as he tried to find sleep. His neighborhood wasn't in the nicest or the safest part of the city; gunshots were seldom rare. A gun was fired down the road and as Bucky heard it through an open window, it sent him reeling back sixty years to the battlefield. He lay, crouched in a dugout, clutching his rifle like it was life support. All around him, men were firing, throwing grenades, or dropping like sacks of flour. His boots sank ankle-deep into the mud and it took all his remaining stamina just to walk. The air smelled like gunpowder and rotting flesh.
The memory was so vivid it chased away any hopes of sleep and sent him back to the bathroom, vomiting and crying until the sun rose.
He didn't want these flashbacks. War wasn't what shaped James Buchanan Barnes- it's what killed him. But he supposed, if he didn't get everything back, there would still remain a little bit of the Winter Soldier. He needed to flush that all out, even if it meant reliving the second world war.
The flashbacks got worse. They invaded his dreams most of the time, and he often awoke, curled around his stomach, almost… protectively. But soon the war began to creep into his waking life. Walking down the street, he'd see HYDRA troops instead of pedestrians. A tank instead of a garbage truck.
One unlucky soul tried to mug him on his way home one night. Bucky broke both his wrists and stole his gun. He almost killed him. What others saw as a mugger pleading for his life, he saw Nazi scum kneeling before him, spouting off his manifest destiny bullshit routine. About to pop a cyanide pill. He almost killed him.
But something stopped him. A sensation, low in his belly; almost like butterflies. It brought him back- grounded him. Bucky lowered the gun and took his finger off the trigger. He didn't, however, give it back. The gun was stuffed in his waistband and the mugger was knocked unconscious.
As soon as he was home, Bucky searched for that feeling again; he searched his body, mentally and physically, for any sign of the butterflies. Tearing off his jacket and shirt, he went into the bathroom and looked himself up and down in the mirror. His hands hesitated at his belt, where the gun was wedged between his pants and his lower belly, an area that'd been the subject of significant weight gain ever since the Helicarriers.
Bucky's rough, weapon-hewn hands- one skin and bone, the other cold metal- closed on top of the odd bump in his flesh. It could no longer be mistaken for fat; it was too round and felt too firm, and now it was making movements inside him.
So what was it?
A thought crossed his mind that almost made him gag; what if this was one of HYDRA's experiments? Zola had said something to him, that first day, what was it… that they'd done things to him, purely for scientific purposes. This had to be one of them.
In that case, it was part of the Winter Soldier's life, and he had to get rid of it.
Bucky grabbed the gun from his waistband and with shaky hands, pressed the muzzle to his skin. Whatever was in his belly, it was put there by HYDRA, and that meant it was dangerous. If Bucky died trying to kill it, then so be it. He was just collateral damage.
But something stopped him. His finger was on the trigger, but his hands were getting shakier and shakier by the second. Tears welled up in his eyes and his breath hitched. He kept telling himself that he had to do this, that if he was going to do any good in this world, it was to kill that thing inside of him. He had to make up for all the assassinations, all those people he'd blindly killed. It was better if he died with it.
But he couldn't. He just couldn't.
There was a force greater than moral obligation keeping Bucky from shooting himself in the stomach. Something deeper than fear and more powerful than hatred of the thing. It was what he felt when he remembered all those times he stood up for Steve in an alley or behind a diner. It was what he felt when he made his friend chicken soup in the dead of night because Steve was too weak to do it for himself.
It was love and it was protectiveness. He loved that lump of skin, and he just couldn't bring himself to shoot it- to shoot himself. The gun fell the the floor with a loud thud, and Bucky followed soon after. He slid down the wall and cried frustrated tears until he passed out.