Living for years in and out of a suspended state does things to you. Things that aren't pretty.

On one hand, I'm glad for those years, because lives were saved and I was spared from taking them. On the other, those years were some of the hardest, most confusing, and frustrating times in my life.

It's hard to describe being in a coma-like state, and I guess it's different for everyone. For me, it was a mixture of a complete awareness that I was alive, and a gnawing doubt that said I was actually dead. It was similar to a late-night insomniac silence, one where my mind was dulled but still going two hundred miles an hour. Questions and reasoning in my subconscious made themselves evident, paired with pieces of memory that I would receive at different times. A story at one point, a name at another, the faces and scene sometime else. My mind churned and churned, cross-examining itself constantly, swimming with questions, slowly, as memories returned, finding answers.

In reality, it must've gone on at a sluggish rate, though it felt fast and panicked. Once in awhile I'd wonder how long it'd been, but I had no concept of time other than everything was dark and painfully slow. Then there were moments of pure emptiness, where even my toddling thoughts stopped and I simply existed. The comatose version of sleep.

I had to wonder if my life was real, if time was real, if my memories were real. They were all so scattered; it took so long to piece things together again. When I did, I found three different men, different variations of the same soul.

One was a clean-cut gentleman. Or he wanted to be. A boy from Brooklyn, an older brother, friend, a flirt. He had three siblings, parents, a scrawny best friend he liked to dig up trouble with. This man was young, the little guy he was friends with called him Bucky. He had a yearning for life, to find the right girl, marry, raise a family, do it right. His own family served as inspiration, as did his best friend. I never did remember the kid's name until later, and that frustrated me beyond belief. Steve. Never could connect the name to the face until I was taken out of the tank, though. Right before it was wiped away again.

The second man I remembered being was a reserved variation on the first. A soldier in a war, fighting hard, hoping to return home and live a normal life. Worried, perpetually, about his buddies. This man was more reckless himself than he'd want people back home to believe, but he was disciplined; he didn't want to come home in a casket. At one point, this man was captured and experimented on. It changed him, made him lose hope for a stretch. But the little guy - who was somehow big now, it was still confusing - rescued him.

And then he fell. Down, down, down, screaming, losing sight of his best friend. A violent landing. Blood. Searing pain in his left arm. Waking up in the lab again. Z...Zola? Zola hovering above him, cackling.

That was the birth of the third man.

"The Winter Soldier" they called him, and they called him that so long he forgot his real name. They were terrible, the things they made him do, the things they did to him. Unrepeatable things. This was the man I desperately didn't want to remember, the man I desperately didn't want to be.

But somewhere inside me I knew I had been all these men, that all these men were me. I came to accept that. I wondered if this limbo was some kind of punishment for the last one.

I wanted to live again. Start new.

Every time they woke me up, every time a warm breath of air filled my lungs and I opened my eyes to new faces, the familiar ones aged, I knew two things. One, I had somehow stayed the same while everyone else changed. And two, they had woken me up for a sole purpose. To scratch someone off a list. Which meant all the information I had dug up and clarified was about to be buried in a scrambled mess.

My eyes always searched for Natalia, but I never saw her anymore. It didn't matter much; her memory faded as soon as I was wiped.

I fought back as much as I could, as much as I remembered how. But once they had me in the Chair, there was nothing I could do.