Bucky woke himself up with a yell. Sweat beaded down his back and he was panting. Another nightmare. Or another memory. He didn't know which it was and he wondered if that might not be better. Still, he forced himself to grab his backpack out from under his bed. He glanced through it and then pulled out a notebook and started writing down his dream. Once he figured out if it were fact or fiction, he would tear out the page and place it one of the other notebooks. He was trying to keep things organized, trying to build a picture of his past.

There was a white notebook for any memories that contained Steve before the war. A yellow notebook for the old memories without Steve: there weren't many of those. A blue notebook for everything during the war. A purple notebook for the things he'd decided were only nightmares. A black notebook for the pain. Red notebooks for…the deaths. There were a lot of red notebooks.

And then, at the very bottom of the backpack, buried under all the others as if he were trying to forget it was there: a green notebook. Sometimes he thought about burning it. But it was part of his past and his grasp on his past was so fragile already that he didn't think he could afford to throw any more bits of it away. Even the bits that didn't fit.

The green notebook was mostly about Brock Rumlow. Because it was the memories with him in them that didn't fit anywhere else. They weren't before the war and they weren't during it. They weren't dreams. He was sure of that, as surreal as they seemed next to the rest of his time as the Winter Soldier. Sometimes there was death, but never like in the other memories. And there was never pain.

He read over the notebooks quite frequently. Sometimes to try to jog his memories. Sometimes when he felt liking he was drowning. Sometimes to punish himself. But the green one was only taken out when he had another one to add to it. He didn't like looking over it. It confused him.

HYDRA. Just thinking the name made him want to bite, break, tear, claw, hurt. But tied to those memories, bound so close that they couldn't be separated, were those little bits that didn't fit. They weren't right. They had…something in them. Kindness?

The word had lost all meaning to him a long time ago. It was a concept so remote he had forgotten it existed. And it shouldn't be in there with HYDRA, and yet it was.

Brock swore and hit the wall with the butt of his gun in frustration.

The mission had gone…less than ideally. And the Soldier knew why. It was his fault. He hadn't been where he was supposed to be. Which was, to say the least, unusual. There would be questions. The Soldier failing a mission was practically unheard of.

And yet, it wasn't his fault. He would have been on the hill. He would have taken the shot. He would have killed the kid. Only Brock had ordered him to stand down.

"Someone else will take the shot."

"The orders-"

"I don't care about the orders. This is the way we're doing it."

But things had gone wrong. The shot had missed. The driver had been injured but managed to make off with the boy. It was going to be a mess to clean up. The local government had gotten involved already.

As the Soldier watched Brock, he realized that the man was afraid. He was scared of what HYDRA would do. Maybe it was because it had been a busy month and the Soldier hadn't been wiped for a while or been in the chair, but whatever it was, he knew he didn't like the idea of Brock taking the blame.

Which is why once they had finally managed to complete the assignment and return to base, the Soldier made sure he got to talk first.

"Mission report," someone had said. Brock was in the room. The man opened his mouth to say something, but the Soldier cut him off.

"I failed on the shot." It was the truth. And it was a lie.

"Why?" One of the scientists demanded.

"My arm." He gestured to the metal one which, an hour ago, he had tinkered with so that when the scientists looked, they would find something. "Something went wrong with it."

It was all the truth. He didn't think he had the power to lie to them. Hopefully they wouldn't ask too many more questions. He could only strain the truth so far. If it hadn't been so long since he'd been put in the chair, he doubt he could go this far either.

He was glad that they took his explanation at face value. They fixed his arm, but then he was sent to the chair. They decided he should have alerted his handlers earlier that something was malfunctioning, and a wipe would help sort out any problems.

The last thing he saw before the cold metal locked onto his head, and the pain drove out any other thoughts, was Brock's face. The man looked nauseous. The next time the two would meet, the Soldier would have no memory of the encounter. Brock would. He would be extra nice to them on the airplane as they flew out to Cuba.

But Bucky remembered the encounter now. Suddenly and out of nowhere. He buried his head in his hands, stuck somewhere between rage and grief and unable to find a way out.

Why had he done it? He'd protected Rumlow. But Rumlow was just like the others: HYDRA. That was all that mattered. It didn't matter how you did it. You served HYDRA, you deserved whatever fate dealt out to you. But the Soldier had fought his programming to help him. Just like he'd fought his programming on the helicraft when he'd heard Steve say, "I'm with you 'til the end of the line."

Almost violently, thinking it was better than following this train of thought any further, Bucky pulled out the green book to write this new memory down.