Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

C.G. Jung

The Soldier rinsed the soiled tarp in the river and cut it into several squares of different sizes, one as long as he was tall and five smaller ones. He dug four holes about two feet deep and lined them with mulch. He cut the tops off the left over water bottles and stuck them on the bottom, laying strips of rubber piping so one end rested in the bottle and the other stuck out five inches from the soil.

The Soldier loosely covered the hole with the tarp, packed the edges with dirt. The larger piece of tarp he hung from a tree layered sand, rocks and charcoal to make a water filter.

While digging the holes the Soldier turned the fevered memories over in his head. The fever had stolen everything but the most vivid recollections. The feel of cool hands on his jaw. A woman's perfume. He remembered hearing voices but he couldn't recall the depth of the octave or the meaning of the words.

However, even though the words were gone, the Soldier remembered feeling… human. Like there had once been people, real people, who saw the Soldier as one of them. Maybe, once, he'd even had a family. Sentiment, strange and impalpable sank into his bones.

He had a lot of time to think about it.

He thought about it while laying a trap line, carefully balancing stones and rocks to snap the necks of smaller prey. He thought about it while waiting for the summer rain to pass. He thought about it while stalking a deer into a meadow, handmade bow and arrow held loosely between his fingers. He thought about it while skinning and drying another pelt for his growing bed of skins or when the leaves budded and he gathered edible plants to string up across the cave wall to dry.

The man said he knew him.

The man said he had a name.

The man called him Bucky.

If he had a name… did that mean he was a person? Did that mean he had a mom, a dad. A sister. He thought he'd like to have a sister. She'd be younger than him with big brown eyes and a crooked, gap toothed smile.

Bucky. The Soldier rolled the sounds and syllables over his tongue. Buck-kee. Buh-kee. "My name is James Buchannan Barnes," he said one day while gathering fallen acorns, just to try it out. It didn't sink into his chest or settle on his shoulders the way a name should.

The Soldier pondered that while he worked.

Later, while turning rabbit hide into strips of leather for traps he tried it again. "Bucky," he said under his breath as he drew a rough stone across the stretched out skin to scrape off sinew and muscle. "I'm your friend." He salted the skin rubbed it in to the pelt. "You're name is James Buchanan Barnes."

As the days past, his consideration of personhood turned less theoretical. He considered what it meant to be a person. The only persons he'd interacted with had been soldiers and technicians.

If he thought about them at all, he supposed his targets were people but they felt divorced from him like a cup or a broken chair, or more accurately, a dusty mannequin. The only facts he truly knew about them was how they died.

Crying. Screaming. Bargaining.

Some stood silent and still while others prayed for God to save them.

They didn't feel like people but snapshots of a photo in his mission report. Surreal, something meant to replicate life but not encompass it.

So, the Soldier – or should he call himself Bucky, just to try it out? – contemplated the technicians. There were, he remembered, kind technicians, gruff technicians, cruel technicians, and some gruff kind technicians and kind but cruel technicians. Some were abrupt – they grabbed his arm or shoulder and shoved him into location. Some touched him timidly, which in turn made the Soldier – maybe he was a James. He didn't feel like a James – feel uncertain and anxious.

There were some he liked.

Technician Greg had been part of the defrosting and rehabilitation crew since the early sixties. He began as a stocky short college intern with dark black curls and uncertain hands and slowly devolved into a stocky man in his fifties with gunmetal grey hair and a sure firm grip.

Greg was the one who pulled newbies aside when they exhibited emotional distress and reminded them of their missions. He put an arm around their shoulder (or if he couldn't reach being only five feet two inches tall, around their waist) and reminded them of their mission to prepare the Soldier for his assignments. Their duty was essential for the health and proficiency of the weapon, that emotional compromises and infractions harmed the Soldier more than they helped.

"Keep your eyes on the greater good," Greg always said, solemn and sincere. "We are doing first-rate work here, saving the world." Then he took them by the shoulder and pointed out the lines of data pulled from the Soldier's arm. "Look at this," he'd say. "Isn't it fascinating?"

Crises of conscience, the Soldier remembered Greg telling a crying new technician after he witnessed his first wipe, helped no one. All it did was cripple the efficiency of the team.

Greg never stood for the games the Strike Teams tried to play with the Soldier. He always interrupted and shooed them away before they could damage and compromise its mission integrity. Greg cleaned it off, bandaged wounded limbs, and set broken bones with a firm and impersonal touch.

However, the longer the Soldier thought about Greg the less he liked him. If the Soldier was a person, if the Soldier was James Buchannan Barnes, then Greg had actively discouraged other Technicians and Staff from treating him like a person.

In fact, the more the Soldier thought about how Greg taught generations of technicians to never touch the Soldier except to move him, clean him, or repair him; how he told them the Soldier preferred being treated like a tool, the more his bone hand shook.

Greg never treated the other people like he treated the Soldier. Greg fought hard for the women on his staff and rebuked any office bullying. Greg argued for the little people, and ranted about social injustice. But Greg never fought for the Soldier, or rebuked the Strike Teams for being cruel. Greg was the forerunner of the campaign to call the Winter Soldier 'it' even though the Soldier felt more like a "he."

A sensation like burning acid and stuffed pressure swept over him. Rage.

Of course, this only mattered if James Barnes was a person.

If he was a person then Greg had wronged him.

If he was not a person then Greg was within his rights to protect the Soldier's mission parameters by stripping it of a false identity.

Before the Soldier could make any conclusions about Greg and the rest of the technicians he had to make conclusions about himself. The Soldier decided to table the name issue until he reached a reasonable conclusion.

Persons, the Soldier decided, made choices.

They made choices on what to eat, what to wear, who they liked or didn't like. Technician Greg did not like Lt. Ross Rodriguez. Lt. Ross Rodriguez always wore a rainbow ribbon somewhere on his person despite Hydra regulations. Technician Anne Barton chose a tuna salad over a chicken sandwich every Tuesday lunch.

The Soldier chose to take the gummy bears. The Soldier chose to leave Hydra. Therefore, the Soldier made a choice. Therefore, the Soldier was a person.

Well, thought the Soldier, pleased. That was easy.

He continued to delight in his conclusions until the next day when he saw a squirrel choose between chasing one of its friends and taking a nap. If animals could make choices too then the ability to choose was not inherently part of being a person. The soldier frowned and returned to the mission board.

People made choices and animals made choices, but persons were clearly not animals so what made their choices different than animals? Was it as simple as being human? But clearly not, or else Greg would never have told the new technicians what he said. Maybe personhood was something you earned. Maybe it was a privilege the Soldier lost.

Maybe he had been a person once but didn't deserve to be one anymore.

This thought sank into the Soldier's mind like a parasite. He didn't bother lighting a fire that night and when he tried to eat some dried jerky he couldn't keep it down. His fingers shook. He his stomach was tight and ueasy.

That was it.

This must be why the Soldier could track a snow rabbit at 160 yards without a scope but didn't know where he came from. People knew where they came from. Even Sergeant Everett Snodgrass knew even though he was an orphan and foster care child. Though he'd never known his parents – a fact he brought up constantly during squad poker night – Snodgrass often spoke about growing up in a little town in Nebraska and moving to Detroit at seventeen.

The Soldier must have been a person. The Soldier must have been James Buchannan Barnes and known the man who stopped fighting but he wasn't any more. For some reason he lost the ability or maybe the right to be a person. Maybe that's why Greg called him an it and refused to let him eat with the others. Maybe its because Greg knew the Soldier didn't deserve to be anything but a weapon.

He must have done something truly horrible to lose the right of being called a person. The Soldier thought about the missions he fulfilled and wondered if they were the reason or the punishment.

The thought was so horrible the Soldier keened and curled in on himself for a long time. Resentfully, he bet animals didn't feel this distressed about whether or not they were persons or animals.

He paused.

The Soldier sat back on his haunches and considered this. And when he was done, he considered it some more. Maybe he was making this too complicated. Maybe being a person was as simple of thinking of yourself as a person. Maybe all he had to do was act like a person and eventually… maybe… those attributes would sink into his skin like the metal of his arm sank into his bones. His thoughts returned to the technicians. He decided to wait to be mad at Greg or using the name James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes until he earned his personhood back.

So, what attributes were those?

He began with Barton and Rodriguez. He recalled how Rodriguez always kept his hair cropped short in accordance with regulation and always took the time to straighten and iron his uniform. Occasionally he shaved delicate designs into his hair.

Barton did not spend time inspecting her hair or touching up her makeup like Private Michaela Carson but she was always clean and smelled nice. She kept a bottle of scented oil on her desk.

Real humans, the Soldier concluded, knew how to self maintenance.

Self-maintenance required a person to be clean and healthy with hair, nails and skin maintained at a socially acceptable level of care. Too much care provoked scorn and distain or invited lewd attention. Such was the case of Private Carson. Too little created social barriers and isolation like Technician Mike Calloway who smelled like old sweat, hair oil, and a lack of dental hygiene. The Soldier picked at the edge of a tooth and scraped away a nail-full of yellow gunk.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in charge of his own personal hygiene. He knew the tools used: metal spikes to scrape around his gums and a brush like a drill; but Soldier hadn't bothered to get the tools required for hygiene.

He found a good oak tree and cut off a small twig. He frayed the end and used it to wipe off the buildup of scum and yellow on his teeth. He didn't have soap but he boiled the animal fat from his kills with ashes of his campfire to make lye.

The second part of proper self-maintenance was clothing. He bundled up the soiled, foul stack of clothes and headed to the river, where he spent half a day wringing them clean of months old dried vomit and several weeks worth of sweat. As he slapped shirts and pants against a boulder he felt an odd wave sweep over him, as if he were in two places at once.

The staccato movement of scrubbing cloth, dunking and redunking a shirt until the water ran clear reminded him of something… He'd done this before, though as hard as he tried he couldn't recall a mission requiring him to wash clothes.

The Soldier strung a line across two budding birch trees and began to thread it with clothes. The certainty washed over him. He suddenly knew that if he looked to the left he'd see a tall, hawk nosed woman with an apron around her waist pinning a long white sheet to the line. His head turned but all he saw was the empty meadow, grass bending in the wind.

At the end of the week the Soldier sat back and looked at all he had accomplished: he had soap and a toothbrush, and clean clothes drying in the sun. He felt very person like. He took a moment to try and identify the warm fluttering in his chest. He'd never felt it outside of a mission before so it took him a moment to identify it as pride. He was proud of what he had accomplished.

It was the first time he felt proud of something that didn't end in bloodshed. He liked it. It was lighter than the usual aching stomach and burning eyes.

"How about that." the Soldier looked around the campsite and let himself enjoy the feeling of guilt-free accomplishment. "How about that."

He rubbed his chin and cheek and contemplated the bristle on his face.

Generally, the Hygiene and Physical Maintenance Technicians left his beard alone. It was risky to approach the Winter Soldier with a razor before a wipe him. When he was high on adrenaline, all sharp items were a threat. After wiping the Soldier was pliant and confused and, he was beginning to understand, far too guilt-inducing. Or maybe the Hygiene and Physical Maintenance Technicians were just lazy. The Soldier thought about the time Snodgrass ordered a four-man team to search the room for some files because he didn't want to get out of his recliner. That was, he conceded, probably the best explanation.

He knew soldiers were supposed to maintain a neatly trimmed jaw line and short hair. He didn't have trimming scissors, and knives didn't have the delicate precision necessary to shape and maintain a beard. The Soldier grabbed a chunk of hair and sawed through it. His blade caught and pulled. Sharp pain arched through his scalp. The Soldier kept sawing, his hair falling in uneven chunks.

He ran his hand across the uneven mat of oily, sweat sticky hair left behind. The new cut ripped out the still fragile roots, leaving chunks. The Soldier cringed from the broken reflection in the water. He grabbed the new bar of soap and viciously rubbed it across his scalp, scrapping the nails of his right hand through flakes of dandruff and caked dirt.

Eventually, the Soldier growled in frustration and threw the soap away. In terms of hair maintenance, he resigned himself to being more like Calloway than Rodriguez. The Soldier pulled what remained of his hair into a knot and left it.

That night the Soldier rolled the syllables of The Name over his tongue again, just to chew on them a bit. "James. James Buchanan Barnes. James Barnes." Then, in a whisper as he hunched over a rabbit leg, "Bucky." He glanced around, and when the world didn't fall apart he said it again, a little louder. "Bucky Barnes."

He contemplated the vowels and consonants. It was an odd name. Certainly not one he had heard before. He thought he was growing to like it.

...

The Blue Bear army was in all out war against the Reds.

Captain Yellow Bear lead his men on a raid against the Red Bear camp. A few days ago, the Red Bears had kidnapped Asset Bear and were holding him captive. They had several bouncing big rock traps around the perimeter but Captain Bear and his men weren't afraid of the danger. Captain Bear spoke to Agent Blue Bear and told her he was going in with or without her pebble support.

Agent Blue Bear and Munitions Commander Blue Bear agreed that it was vital to the safety and security of the cave that they save Asset Bear. The Soldier – the real soldier – always faltered a bit when he tried to come up with a reason, but Captain Bear didn't seem to need one.

Captain Bear led the charge against the Red Bear fortress. The Red Bears fought them off ferociously, determined to keep Bear Soldier behind the rubber ball walls. Captain Bear was being pushed back. His men were failing. Agent Blue Bear said they had to fall back.

"No!" said Captain Yellow Bear. "I won't leave Bucky!"

The Soldier stopped, two bears still pinched between his fingers and suspended over the rubber bouncy ball fort. He cleared his throat and started again.

"I reject that order," said Captain Yellow Bear. "The Asset Bear is too valuable to the efforts of the Blue Bear corps! I refuse to waste such a valued resource."

"But," said Agent Blue Bear. "If he's so capable and valuable why didn't he rescue himself? It's not that hard."

The Soldier stopped again and glared at Agent Blue Bear. She wasn't supposed to say that. She was supposed to say – "We don't need a Soldier too weak to rescue himself. That's why we didn't' save him before."

She wasn't supposed to say that either.

The Soldier scowled and swept all the Gummy Bears back into the small pouch he'd made for them. All Soldiers had to be returned to storage until they learned to cooperate. It was better for the Gummy Bears to learn that now.

A few minutes later he peeked into the pouch to see if they were feeling more cooperative.

Persons, the Soldier argued to his rational side when it told him he behaving in a manner unbecoming to a deadly weapon, knew how to play. Greg and Saunders and Rodriguez and Carson played regular poker games. Barton had her WoW and MMoRG games running in the background between ops. Even Agent Rumlow and his men liked to play games.

He dumped the Gummy Bear army out again. He set the stage and picked up Agent Blue Bear (her left ear was missing) and Captain Yellow Bear. The Soldier cleared his throat and started again.

"I never leave a man behind," said Captain Yellow Bear. "And even if I did I wouldn't leave Asset Bear." The Soldier stuttered over the name but continued. "Either you're with me or you're against me."

Agent Cart— no, no no – Agent Blue Bear looked at Captain Bear and said, "One Soldier isn't worth the whole mission."

"He is to me," said Captain Bear.

The Soldier's voice broke.

He gently returned the other bears to the pouch but rested the yellow candy in the center of his palm. He cupped his fingers over the tiny yellow Captain and repeated, "He is to me."

...

The Soldier dreamed he stood in a field of tall grass stretching out as far as his eye could see. The sky was blue with roiling purple clouds. He didn't know how he got there but he knew it was too empty. Too overgrown. He couldn't see his feet before him or the path behind him.

It was so empty.

He woke shuddering and silent and stirred restlessly until he dropped back to sleep.

He was back in the field, but this time there was a tiny house in the distance so small he could cover it with his thumb. He took a step forward and heard the crunch of bone. The Soldier looked down through the grass and saw blood welling up from the roots. A child's face lay beneath his boots. He recognized her. She was crying. His boot was crushing her jaw and forehead.

She was crying.

The Soldier started to run but every footstep crunched on the bones and flesh of his victims. Their cries rose up and the grass turned into hands that grabbed onto his clothes and hair and tried to pull him down.

The ground split and cracked and lava poured out from the depths. He heard a horrendous howling and looked to see the demons of hell clawing their way too him. He turned and ran but the ground splintered upon each step until he was trapped on a small crumbling island melting away in the molten rock.

He teetered. His arms swung wildly trying to catch his balance. As he fell the demons turned and pursued him, screeching and clawing at each other until there were pieces of bodies flying every which way. A head passed him close enough to see; the demon shared his face.

The Soldier woke with a cry.

His face was wet with tears and his sweat-soaked clothes clung to his body. He ran his hands over his limbs in search of cuts or bruises left by the sentient grass or the red demons.

Satisfied that everything was intact he flopped back onto his ever thickening bed of animal pelts and curled into a little ball. The blackness of the cave stretched out before him and he shivered despite the September warmth.

"Who was she?" he asked the darkness. "I knew her."

If the darkness knew it wasn't answering.

...

The nightmares returned the next night, and the night after that. The Soldier bit his knuckles bloody trying to stay awake. He began to dread lying down to sleep, preferring to push it off for as long as he could before it compromised mission readiness.

In some dreams he drowned, blood pouring up from the corpse under his hands to suffocate him. In others the man who refused to fight killed him, hands slamming into his face over and over. Some were still and silent, an empty plain as terrifying as death.

The Soldier opened his dream eyes to the empty field. Instead of a house a woman stood in a blue flower dress facing away from him. The dream was totally silent like someone had stuffed the air with cotton. The field flowed under the Soldier until he stood behind the woman, one arm stretched out to grab her shoulder. The redheaded girl screamed as he turned her around.

He woke up before he could see her face.

The girl with red hair and broken face is the only constant in the nightmares.

After a night of horrors so vivid the Soldier couldn't get up the next day the Soldier resolved to delve deep. He sat on his bed of furs and pushed at the forced boundaries in his mind planted by first by Department X and reinforced by Hydra, the solid walls of consciousness and training keeping him from inconsequential knowledge. The boundary flexed and strained under the force of his will but held.

The Soldier frowned and folded his legs. He rested his hands palm up on his knees and let his eyes slide closed. He filled his lungs slowly and breathed out. Again. Again. Again.

When he was ready he plunged into the blackness inside. He forced himself to think about the mental pain of wiping and programming, ruthlessly pressing triggers and switches to remember standing for hours naked in the cold, kneeling on nails.

He threw himself at the walls of programming and felt the pop as clearly as if his bow string snapped beside his ear.

Pain. Sharp, echoing pain. It split through his head like a whirlwind, like the ground that crumpled in his dream. He gagged and swallowed his vomit as the thoughts began to flood. It was nothing – a mission in Amsterdam. Routine. One target. One kill.

The little girl wasn't in the memory.

The Soldier pictured her in his mind and focused on the details. Red head. Green, hazel eyes. A small pointed chin. He held the memory and shoved it in his mind like a knife to cut through the nets holding his memory back.

For a moment it worked.

Then, like a vicious dog pushed too far, the wires snapped back. Memories flooded him. Memories of blood, of a little girl crushed under the wheel of a car, the memory of a man stretching out toward her to save her even as the Winter Soldier lined the barrel up with his skull. There was a pregnant woman crying.

But the worst part. The very worst. The worst part was the sentiment.

His kills were always different. Some people begged. Some accepted it with quiet dignity. He knew this. But until this moment he never knew it.

The mannequin faces of his victims fleshed out and filled with emotion. Fear, anguish, grief, hatred, despair, regret, hope turned to ash. She wanted more time.

"No," the Soldier groaned. "No, I don't want it. I don't want it!" He clutched the sides of his head, fingers sliding across the uneven of hair for purchase, twisting the brown strands around his fingers and yanking, screaming as kill after kill pounded into his brain.

The grey haired woman with wine spilled down her nightgown, the brilliant teenager too smart for his own good, and the father pushing his daughter on the swing – the daughter's face when her father collapsed silently.

Suddenly he could see their faces and identify with utter, horrible clarity what they felt when he killed them.

And suddenly he realized…all he had to do was give in. Let the net snap back and take it all away. In fact, all he had to do was go back to Hydra. Even if the net snapped back he'd still remember what he felt. He would remember understanding.

It would be better to wipe it all away.

A clean slate.

A clean start.

Just give in. It's okay. It's not your fault. The pain is just a warning, it doesn't have to stay. Relax. Let it—

"NO!" James Barnes roared. "No, you son of a bitch." He threw himself back into his mind and scratched the walls when Hydra's nets tried to drag him out. He screamed and clawed until the nets were in shreds. It hurt. Like tearing off a scab and finding a bone sticking out, but the voice was gone. The Soldier curled over his knees and keened. For the first time he reached for a memory and felt it slide into his grip without effort or pain.

It was his. He didn't want it and it hurt so bad but it was his and that made it everything.

He thought he had felt satisfaction. He thought he knew pride, and joy, and gratitude, and kindness, and love, and grace, and jealousy, and anger, and loneliness.

He'd known nothing.

The only emotion he'd truly known was fear.

Now all the emotions bled into his here and now. He looked around his cave and felt true accomplishment for escaping Hydra for so long. He touched the fur under his body and felt pleasure. He tasted the saltless, tasteless jerky stacked beside his bed and wrinkled his nose in distaste. He thought about Greg, and Barton, and Rodriguez and felt betrayal, anger, and longing.

He thought about the girl with red hair. Regret, though the memory of her was long gone.

He thought about the faces of his victims and the guilt crushed him.

The Soldier lay on his bed of pelts and let the emotion roll over him, one finger clamped between his teeth. One by one he pulled up his remembered kills and examined them with a mind sharpened by training and science. The sun rose and set. There were pelts to be dried and clothes to wash. He should shave. Shaving was very person-like.

The Soldier didn't move. He felt like his legs and arms were pinned by the weight of his sins. They ran over and over through his brain in an endless loop. Free to finally plan for itself, his mind ran a thousand scenarios of how he could have saved each one. Then it began to play games.

The second sunrise was high in the sky when his brain decided to superimpose the face of a little girl with blue-brown eyes and brown hair over the face of his other child victims. The Soldier twitched, helpless against a brain that forced him to watch his hands kill a girl he vaguely remembered helping with the dishes and tucking into bed. He killed her over and over again.

The Soldier tried to reach for memories before he was the asset but his brain twisted them all into horrors. Barnes swallowed the lump of unfair. It was wrong for his brain to twist the few memories he saved into weapons. Unfair.

This was something person-like, the Soldier realized. Maybe it was punishment for everything he'd done. Regret meant understanding his actions had consequences anchored in the realization that other people were real. If this was part of being a person, the Soldier figured he'd earned at least one of his names. It was a bitter insight following on the heels of another deeper longing.

He wanted to die.

He wanted to lay here until he wasted away from dehydration. He pictured his heart stopping. His lungs stilling and breath exhaling one last time. Barnes closed his eyes.

The second sun sank.

Barnes didn't open his eyes to watch the shadows extend. The movie playing across his eyelids felt more real that the damp chill of cave or the body warm metal hand curled against his cheek. He watched himself line up a shot. He felt his past self breath deep.

The first and second bell rang.

Blue eyes snapped open.

Barnes rolled over and scrambled on hands and knees to the line of bells nailed into the wall. He sat fixated on the line of tension in the string as the cord pulled taut. Ding. Ding. Then the bell next to it: ding.

The Soldier stood smoothly and made his way into the woods. A lesser man would have trouble navigating the thick brambles of a forest at night. The Soldier was not a lesser man.

Barnes moved quickly to the places he'd hidden the glass bombs. He unfurled the threads and carefully strung them across the animal trails and areas of thinner undergrowth. Barnes pulled out the logs stuck with nails stuck through and laid them outside the blast radius.

He returned to the cave and took the five jars held in reserve. He listened to the bells. When the fifth bell rang he threw two logs onto the fire and blew the embers into a cheerful blaze. The campfire below lit the stones with amber. The soldier kept his eyes fixed on the shadows to keep his night vision keen. Barnes stuffed a jacket with spare clothes and propped it up against the cave wall.

Finally, he put the pouch with Captain Yellow Bear and his Gummy Army (Reds included) into his inside pocket before leaving the cave and the furs and the rows of herbs without looking back.

The perfect snipers nest was about a click north and four hundred feet up. The ridge of the mountain sheltered a short outcropping and a crop of trees from the sun and moonlight and overlooked the campsite below.

Barnes set up his rifle months ago and left it covered by the longest strip of tarp. He lay down on the rocks and pressed his cheek to the end. By the time he reached the perch the moon hung overhead. The fire below was beginning to die. And there was movement in the trees.

Barnes breathed deep and let it out slow.

The first detonation tore through the troops like a shotgun blast through plastic. Barnes heard the screams of men and saw some of them begin to retreat. He kept himself relaxed, focused on the small white flags tied to the tops of the trees at equidistance.

Breathed deep. Let it out slow. Pulled the trigger.

A man in black tactical gear dropped. Barnes readjusted and the trooper next to him crumpled with half a head. Barnes shot through a third man to hit the fourth, and aimed at a small soldier hiding behind a log with the sixth shot. It caught him clean through the leg. The soldier screamed, hand wrapped tight around the wound. When his friends tried to reach him, Barnes put a bullet through their throats. More explosions. The trees caught fire and illuminated the shadows hunkering for cover. Someone tripped a swinging branch and caught a face full of nails.

The one of the fuse bombs detonated, tearing a tore a hole into the mountain and setting off a rock slide. It caught a sniper and his spotter as well as the four men creeping along below.

Barnes picked off three more men. He sighted someone who looked in command, yelling into a radio and pointing out different people and took him out by the throat. He took out the second command and the enterprising soldier scrambling for the fallen radio.

By the time he heard the echoes of the chopper before it was in range, the harmonics catching and bouncing off the mountain, four-fifths of the men were down or dying. The rest were quickly making their way up the mountain to his nest. Barnes unsheathed his knife and cut the throat of the two men creeping through the undergrowth but he knew he couldn't fight them all. Someone would get a lucky blow eventually.

The helicopter got louder, and he knew he was out of time.

The river was a ravenous monster curling from the mountain into the valley bellow. The Winter Soldier spent weeks tracking the current in its different stages of growth. He walked the edges, even waded out in the dry season to check for hidden boulders. The Soldier waited until just before the last bomb blew before rolling off the cliff into the rapids below.

He hit the water at a dive, the ground shattering ball of fire covering his splash. At this height, the impact was significantly less than hitting concrete but it was still enough to knock the air out of his lungs. The river didn't wait for him to reorient but carried him along at twenty-five miles an hour. He came up for a lungful of air then swam with the current. He breached for air six more times before he was far enough away to rise and look around.

Eight miles 'til the next waterfall.

A quarter a mile from the first drop – before the water pressure built so strong even his enhanced physique couldn't fight it – Barnes guided his momentum to the riverbank. He climbed onto the pebbled sand and collapsed gasping for air. While past four months in the mountains had given his muscles wry strength and his endurance was still recovering from years in cryo.

It was hard for an average man to keep up fat and mass living off the land. It was even harder for a soldier who burned off a day's bounty of venison by breathing and his two and a half days of self-imposed starvation didn't help.

If he was going to make it any farther he needed to eat and find a vehicle. Maybe a computer and cash if he was lucky.

Barnes picked his way over the boulders and stones pushed by the rushing water until he reached the grassy woods. It was impossible to move quickly through the dense thicket; tall, un-kept grass grew over and tangled around fallen logs or sticks and stones. He had to move carefully to not leave a trail. Occasionally he came across some animal trails and could move along the already bent grass.

The River had carried him down the mountains into the valley near where a small two-cart town had sprung up in the early 30s. Salt River revealed itself by the twinkling light of the single gas station. As he moved closer, houses and stores rose in dark hulking shapes along the flat horizon. People in this part of the country went to bed early and it didn't take long for the last lights to wink out, the vague shadows of human dwellers vanishing into the bedrooms. Barnes stayed still as one by one the lights winked out and the vague shadows of human dwellers vanished into bedrooms. The Soldier was quiet until the shadows were long enough to provide some cover.

He didn't have much time.

The troops sent to the campground were combing the woods for him. A second battalion would be scouring the towns within forty miles of the base camp in search of strangers and odd happenings. He gave it half an hour before the trucks rolled in and woke the town. He moved quickly across the open space to the shadows of the first residence. It had bay windows low on the ground but he ignored it in favor of the screen door. People in towns like this trusted each other and rarely locked up.

Barnes unhooked the spring to keep it from squeaking and closed it softly behind him. He kept his knife out incase someone had a house pet. Cash was usually kept in three places – the bedroom, the office, and the kitchen. If a married couple owned the house the man sometimes left his wallet by the door to keep track of it. Barnes moved silently through the office and the kitchen, checking the cupboards, the drawers, and jars on the shelves. He stuffed his pockets with apples and crackers from the pantry.

He found a little cash stowed in an office safe and an old Windows 98 computer but nothing particularly substantial. Barnes turned his attention to the stairs, climbing the railing to avoid stairs that sagged and creaked.

The bedroom door was open so he scooted in, careful not to move the door in case the hinges squeaked. Two figures slept peacefully unaware of the assassin standing over them. They were an older couple, probably retired and living out the rest of their days in peace and quiet. It almost made the Soldier feel guilty.

Maybe this was a person thing. Maybe persons considered the circumstances of their victims before robbing them. He was kind of a person now. Person-ish, at least, but maybe being more person-like meant leaving the grey-headed couple alone.

The soldier sighed, long and silent, and climbed out the window to the next house.

There must be rewards for person-like behavior because the next house was loaded. He must have had seven hundred dollars in his desk drawer and another thousand in the wall safe. He also had a thin, silver laptop, which the Soldier unplugged and tucked under his arm. Barnes grabbed a set of keys from the wall next to the front door and stole the truck.

It was, the Soldier concluded, good enough to get started. He would have to dump the truck in a few miles, but hopefully it would get him to a larger town where a stranger would be less remarkable.

Satisfied, the Soldier known as Barnes packed up and left Wyoming behind.

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Authors Notes:

So, Bucky's logic is a lot screwed up in this chapter. To be perfectly clear: he's gained back some of his memories, but they are very jumbled up and he is not remembering everything correctly. He's still got a long way to go, but he's getting there. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the experiences and framework to recognize when his logic is screwed up.

Just so you know, Bucky is sniping the soldiers at just over a thousand meters. While still a thousand and some meters from the current world record, he is firing at night without a spotter. It's pretty impressive shooting.

I feel like I need to explain about the Hydra techs a bit, and why I made them so relatable. I mean, Rodriguez is a gay man in a highly homophobic organization who refuses to be intimidated by his superior. Gary protected the women under his command and comforted the new interns. Michaela Carson likes to dress pretty and gets slut shammed for it. They even have names!

I gave them these names and characteristics very deliberately.

I think there's a tendency within human nature to make monsters of those who do monstrous things, forgetting that had we been born in a different time or place we could very well have been the monster instead. This chapter has some very intentional throwbacks to Ordinary Men, a biography about the ordinary workers who became the Nazi soldiers who did horrible things during the war and why, as well as a grim reminder of the Milgram Experiments.