Author's Note: This story references stories from my "The Time Between" series: The First Pieces and Learning to Live, which cover the 2 years between CA:WS and CA:CW. And yeah, I did that in 2 short stories. It also references, very directly, the first story in this series (and the "Making the Winter Soldier" series): The Asset.

Falcon and the Winter Soldier
A Tale of Two Cats, and Other Stories
by Gabrielle Lawson

Sam found Bucky in his room reading and listening to big band music on his record player. He knocked on the door frame, and Bucky looked up from the book. "Oh, you're back. All go well?"

"Yeah, wrapped it up pretty quick," Sam told him. "Ended up in Vienna so I decided to get you something."

Bucky scoffed. "Vienna. That was not a good day."

Sam chuckled then lifted an item from the floor just outside the room. It was fairly heavy due to its contents. He tossed it to the super soldier who had no trouble catching it with one hand.

Bucky's eyes went wide in recognition.

"They did keep the bombs and guns and such," Sam admitted. He stepped into the room as Bucky opened the backpack and took out a dozen or so composition notebooks. He sat them beside himself on the futon he'd graduated to. It was presently in sofa configuration so Sam sat on the other side of the books.

Bucky picked one up, turned it upside down and opened the back cover. He closed it quickly.

"May I?" Sam asked.

Bucky fished through the other books then handed him one. "You wondered what it was like at first. That's the first one. Started that night after the hellicarriers."

Sam opened it the normal way, from the front.

James Buchanan Barnes
Steve Rogers, Captain America
"You know me. Bucky, you've known me your whole life. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes. You're my friend."
"I'm with you till the end of the line."

Then there was a paragraph about a woman at a stove and three little girls at a table.
"James, can you get the bread ready?"

After that was the chair and the machine, the words (not specified or written out), the mission. Siberia, freezer, Winter Solder, Asset.

"You did remember being called Asset," Sam pointed out. "Though maybe you didn't remember you remembered it. Walk me through that night. How'd these memories come to you?"

Bucky sighed and leaned back. "Well, the first part, Steve said those things. At first, I fought it. I didn't know him. There was no 'my whole life.' There was only the mission, nothing before. Until he said 'I'm with you till the end of the line.'"

"Why that? How'd that break you out?"

"I said it to him. I could see it in my mind. He was small and sad and I said I said it to him. His mother had just died. I asked him to come live with us. But having that memory showed me that he was telling the truth, and there was a before."

Sam could see that. That one memory would give him a reason to question everything. He did know the man who'd called him 'friend' and nearly died. "Why'd you walk away after pulling him from the river?" He knew he was potentially digging too deep for this casual conversation but he was curious.

Bucky gave him a side eye. "I was an assassin, Sam, not an idiot. After what I'd done, they would have killed me. You would have killed me."

Sam had to give him that. He probably would have. "I would have been wrong to. And Steve would never have forgiven me. Okay, so where did you go?"

"To the Ideal First Federal Bank."

That was very specific and incongruous at the same time. "You went to a bank?"

"Hydra base. I was supposed to return there. I didn't want to. I figured out that they had taken my memories. So I climbed a building to the roof, set my broken arm, and waited for dark. Then I went to the bank. Caught a dozen or so Hydra men. I—disabled—them and lined them up in the vault with the machine."

Sam felt a chill. "It was there in the bank? Wait, you disabled them? How exactly?"

Bucky turned toward him. "You gotta remember, Sam. My memory barely existed. I had no moral compass. They'd trained me to kill people. That's what I was good at. But I didn't want to kill them. I wanted answers. So yes, I attacked them and I negated their threat. But I didn't kill them. Some had broken ribs, broken legs, concussion, knife in the femoral artery, etcetera."

Sam felt uneasy but ignored it. The Winter Soldier wouldn't have gone from terrifying to I-trust-him-with-my-nephews overnight. It would have been a progression. And these were Hydra goons. Hydra goons who had hurt him and taken his memories. He nodded and Bucky went on.

"I asked questions about who I was, about the words, the order of things. Machine, words, mission, freezer. Most didn't want to answer. One figured he might as well. He told me about the museum, the Captain America exhibit. I took their phones, their weapons and one, well, I took his wallet, his keys, his cigarettes. I rigged a grenade on the seat of that damn machine to blow it up. Told the goons to clear the room if they wanted to live."

"You gave up killing cold turkey but not maiming?"

Bucky just shrugged. "I just didn't want to. They had trained me to, programmed me to. I didn't want to do what they wanted me to do. But I also didn't want them to overpower me and put me back in that machine. So I fought them in self-defense and stopped short of killing them. If they didn't get out in time, it was on them, not me."

Right. Bucky at that time barely enough memories to count on his fingers. "Where did you go then?"

"The wallet and the keys," Bucky replied. "I had his car and his address. After I'd cleared it to be sure I was alone, I tried to find something to eat. I knew the kitchen because I remembered meeting Pierce in his. So I knew the fridge, too, because he got milk out. But I didn't know what it was called. It was a cold box and it was full of stuff I didn't recognize. I didn't know what was good to eat. I found the even colder part and some microwavable meals. It had instructions and an image of one of the things in the kitchen. Beef stroganoff was my first meal free. And with that first bite, I remembered my mom."

"The woman at the stove."

Bucky nodded. "I didn't know it was my mom but it was, and the girls were my sisters. I found some notebooks and a pen, so I wrote down what I remembered."

Sam nodded, remembering what he'd said on the floor in Brooklyn. "In case you forgot."

Bucky nodded and continued the story. "I tried the bed but it was too soft. I slept sitting up beside it. I didn't exactly know how but I closed my eyes and managed about 5 hours. I bathed and dressed in the man's clothes then drove his car to the Mall. I went to the museum when it opened at ten."

Sam looked back at the notebook. Everything about Bucky Barnes from the exhibit at that time was there, copied down into the book, including the dates. There was also a folded pamphlet about the exhibit tucked into the next page.

There were more memories of his family and the realization that they were his family, and that they were now either very old or dead. There were a few memories of Steve when he was small and sickly and picking fights with bullies that Bucky had to save him from. He remembered Brooklyn and New York. There were even some memories of the war, of the Howling Commandos as well. But halfway through, the writing turned upside down. Sam remembered how Bucky had opened the other notebook from the back, so he flipped the book over and upside down. Names and dates. Missions, starting with the most recent, to ensure the success of Project Insight.

"You wrote the bad memories in the back of the book?"

Bucky bit his bottom lip as he nodded. "But they kept overtaking the books until they were only memories in the books."

Sam gingerly picked up the one Bucky had opened earlier. He opened the back cover to find a very detailed account of the fight on the hellicarriers, from the flight deck to the quinjet to the fight with him and Steve and finally the fight with Steve who was trying to change the last chip. Every blow, every shot, every detail. Sam flipped a few pages and saw the fight on the street, the destruction of his car, the shooting of Fury, all in page after page of descriptive details. What it sounded like, what it felt like, even what it smelled like at times. More pages, a witness whose hand was shaking so bad, he couldn't get into his hotel room in time. Sam flipped to the front of the book to find the crunch of Howard Stark's face as he punched him with his metal arm.

Sam closed the book. "That is a lot to carry around. The details."

Bucky leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and his face into his hands. "That was a very hard time. I couldn't get them out of my head, and even the 'good' memories, when I had them. My family? They were dead."

"Did you ever try, you know—"

"Suicide?" Bucky sat back again. "Yes, I did. It didn't take. Bled enough to pass out. Healed too quick."

That wasn't what Sam had wanted to hear. But Bucky had been all alone there in Romania with no one to help him through that trauma. He was tortured by his memories of the people he'd killed and drowning in the loss of everyone he knew. "Just the once?"

Then Bucky gave one of his barely-there smiles. "When I woke up there was a furry thing at my neck and it was vibrating."

"Vibrating?"

"Purring, Sam. She was thin and didn't have her front claws. I figured she couldn't hunt that way so I brought her food and water every night and we'd visit for a while. Keeping her alive became my way of staying alive."

"What happened to her?"

"She was in the park," Bucky replied. "The raid was in my apartment. I didn't return to either one. I just have to hope someone else looked after her or that she really could still hunt without claws."

Then it hit him. Of course! A pet! Bucky was probably very lucky a cat had found him then. But there was no reason he couldn't have one now. And pets were therapeutic!

Sam put the books back in the stack. "Get your shoes on. We gotta go somewhere."

"Where?" Bucky asked but he did start putting on his shoes. "You just got back."

"You'll see. And don't forget your wallet, Mr. Moneybags. You're paying."

It took nearly half an hour for Bucky to pick his new kitten. Or maybe it was the other way around. She was a tripod kitten. She'd lost one front leg to a birth defect that had had to be amputated. She was all white with green eyes. Her name was Alpine and she was hit at the pet store when they went to buy supplies. Sam texted a photo of the two of them at the shelter to Dr. Raynor and picked up a book about raising kittens by someone calling herself The Kitten Lady.

Even though Bucky had paid for everything, Sam was feeling magnanimous and let Bucky use his new driver's license on the way home. The boys were very likely going to freak out, so he texted Sarah a heads up. There'd be a new resident in the house.

Bucky finished setting up the cat box, cat tree, cat bed, scratching post, food and water then scattered a few toys on the floor of his room. He closed the door to give her a small space to get used to, just like the book said. Then he opened the carrier and waited for Alpine to step out. It took a good ten minutes but he didn't rush her. He sat on the floor in front of his futon and near the carrier. Then he picked up the kitten book and started reading where he'd left off.

He noticed a white paw gingerly step out followed by a nose and a little face. He could help the smile on his face. The little cat in Bucharest was just a nightly visitor really, but she had saved his life. This little one was going to live with him, and he felt he was returning the favor by rescuing her from the shelter who had rescued her from the streets. Still, he kept reading, waiting for her to come to him.

She wasn't one of the most boisterous kittens at the shelter. She had hung back while the others bounced across his legs and batted at his shoe laces. But after about fifteen minutes she'd decided he was safe to investigate. He noticed her missing leg, but it was healed over and didn't seem to hamper her movements. She'd done quite a bit of sniffing him out before deciding his lap was nice and warm. She had lounged in his lap, lazily batting at a toy he wiggled in front of her. And she purred.

He remembered waking to that vibration, disappointed but intrigued.

She was all the way out of the carrier now. She nudged his arm, so Bucky petted her and she leaned into it. Then she left him to explore the toys on the floor. She returned for some more pets then went over to the cat box and sniffed the litter there. Again, she returned, like she needed the reassurance he gave her that the area was safe. She got farther each time and finally started eating the food he'd set out. She drank some water then started batting at the toys.

She hadn't played much in the shelter with all the other kittens causing chaos, but now she seemed happier in this quieter environment. He rolled a jingling ball and she chased after it and played a little soccer with herself. After ten minutes or so of that, she grew tired and plopped herself down on his legs and started cleaning.

The laptop started chiming and he realized it was time for his appointment with Dr. Raynor. Fortunately, the laptop was under the futon so he could reach it. He set it on the floor to the side so as not to disturb Alpine.

"Well, there she is," Dr. Raynor said. "Sam sent me a text. I don't think I've seen you smile genuinely before. You look downright happy."

"I had a little cat in Romania," he told her. "Visited with her in a park every evening. She found me after I tried to commit suicide. Keeping her alive, kept me alive."

"I was going to ask at some point, but since you brought it up..." She smiled though. "But let's not lose that smile yet. What happened to that cat?"

"It happened to me, not her." Bucky stroked Alpine while he spoke. "The raid, getting arrested, activated, the fight at the airport, Siberia. I never got back there."

"Tell me about this one."

Bucky gently scratched under her chin, and Alpine purred and closed her eyes. "We're just getting to know each other really. I've never lived with a cat. The other was in the park. This is new."

"I think there are some unwritten rules about cat ownership. Such as when one is on your lap, you are not permitted to move and disturb her. You, sir, are stuck. What's her name?"

"Alpine, because she's all white."

"Is she missing a leg? I only see three."

Bucky rubbed the space where Alpine's other leg would have been. "Birth defect. Had to be amputated, but the shelter said it doesn't slow her down at all."

Raynor nodded. "I've seen three-legged cats and dogs on YouTube. It won't. Honestly, I don't know why we didn't think about you getting a pet sooner. They're good for you. The offer unconditional love and relieve stress. They make us smile. But let's open up the reason you needed that other cat in Romania. What led you to suicide?"

Bucky sighed. The notebooks were still in a stack on the futon. He had to reach awkwardly up, behind, and to the side as Alpine had fallen asleep. He was stuck after all. He managed to grab a few. "What didn't?" he asked in return. "These are memories. Sam brought them back from Vienna today. It started simple enough. Write down what I remember so I'd have it in case they took my memory again. But then I started feeling different about some of them. The earlier memories were written in the front of the books. The new things I learned went there, too. But the Winter Soldier, he went into the back. I wrote about Steve and my family, the war, the Howlies, in the front. I wrote the missions in the back."

He showed her one that he had picked up. The front memories right-side up, the back memories flipped. "First it was just lists of names and potential dates. But as I remembered more, it was details, a lot of details. It was drowning in it. The murders, of course. But even the other memories. It was too late. They were all gone. My family, my friends. Only Steve and he wasn't there."

"The loss is very understandable. I'm sorry for that. They kept you so long." And she genuinely looked sorry. "But the guilt, James. I wish you never remembered your missions. They were never your fault. You were the weapon Hydra used to murder all those people. I don't think any of them lost sleep over any of it. Certainly not over the man they kept erasing to keep you as their weapon. You lose sleep because you a good man. Do you believe me when I say that? That you are a good man?"

Bucky nodded, but it was a war he was continually fighting. "Most of the time. That's still new, ya know."

"Were you a good man when you worked three jobs during the depression? When you saved Steve from bullies, or went to war? Were a good man when you fought the Nazis and Hydra?"

Of course, but that was easy. "That was my default, I suppose. Though, as a solder, I was more concerned with not getting shot and keeping my men alive. Until I was captured anyway. Our captors were definitely not the good guys, so that meant we were. After that, we were fighting the bad guys with Steve, so yeah."

"Good." Raynor nodded. "Were you a good man when you fell? When they replaced your arm? Were you a good man when they tortured you, experimented on you?"

"Yes," Bucky whispered. It was somewhere after that that when good and bad became fuzzy.

Her voice softened. "And if you were an evil man, would they have had to torture you, brainwash you, take your memory?"

He remembered then the five. The kill squad given the serum from Howard Stark. They hadn't had to be persuaded even. They never had the machine. They were Hydra already. That made him angry. "I sometimes wish that computer Zola was still around so I could ask him why he chose me? Why not one of their own goons? Surely it was more expensive, more effort—" He couldn't finish.

"Good points. More money, more effort to convert a good man into a killing machine than a willing participant. Maybe it was simply that Zola had started getting somewhere with you in the factory. And then you figuratively fell on his doorstep. Maybe it was so experimental, he didn't want to risk his own goons."

"Why not?" Bucky argued. "It wasn't that they cared about their own men. They'd kill them or use them for cannon fodder if it furthered their plans. Or they must have trusted Howard Stark's serum because they awarded five of their best killers with it."

"Good point again. But all we have is conjecture. The unfortunate truth is that they did pick you. And because you were a good man, they had to exert more effort, spend more resources, and erase James Buchanan Barnes. And to maintain their control of you, they did it over and over."

Bucky thought of the five again, the fight he lost, and getting Karpov to safety. There was another reason. One Steve spoke of. His anger melted. "There was another reason. The serum makes you more of yourself. Good becomes better; bad becomes worse. When they gave the serum to their goons, they couldn't control them. They became a threat. They put them on ice and left them there. Zemo ended them."

"James, do you think, if they'd only replaced the arm you lost, healed you and offered you the serum, that you would have gone with them willingly?"

"Never," he answered quickly. "I tried to kill as many as I could after they gave me the serum, and I was an amnesiac at the time."

"Right, you would have fought your way out, taken Steve's place, fighting the good fight until Steve returned and you could retire, or fight alongside him. So, you were always a good man. They had to erase you, not just your memories, to get their Winter Soldier. That guilt never belonged to you. But you were drowning in that, and the loss. Take me through it."

"I wasn't sleeping, wasn't eating, wasn't being vigilant or taking care of myself. On my ninety-ninth birthday, I went to the park, under a willow tree. I placed my notebooks beside me, took a knife and slit my wrist. Deep. I passed out from blood loss and hoped that was it."

"But you didn't die," she surmised.

"I heal fast," he stated, still a little chagrined. "Maybe I should've tried a vertical slice from elbow to wrist. But yes, I didn't die. I woke up, and there was this little cat purring at my neck." On his lap, Alpine changed positions and covered her face with her paw.

"You didn't take her home."

Bucky smiled lightly. "I don't know if she ever thought of herself as my cat. But I was the one who brought food and water every evening. She was declawed so I told myself she couldn't hunt. She needed me to do that, to bring her food. So I did. Each day, I went to work, then I went to the park. I'd wait for her and she'd come, eat and drink and spend a little time with me."

"It became a ritual," Raynor pointed out. "You needed that motivation."

Bucky nodded. "I reasoned she'd starve if I didn't, so I couldn't try again."

"Did the ritual work?

Bucky nodded. "It was kind of gradual, but I'd worked my way back to living, ya know. I looked after myself. Slept, nightmares and all, ate better as well as I could with the money I managed. I talked to people." He smiled again as he remembered. "I was buying plums in the market when everything went sideways." The smile faded. "I couldn't leave my notebooks, so I went back to my apartment. Steve was there, then the GS-9, then Black Panther, then Zemo..."

"Well, I'm glad none of them managed to kill you, and that I got a chance to know you. You are a good man. And I'm glad you have that little baby to take care of. She's going to teach you joy, James, just you wait."

As if on cue, Alpine woke up, stretched and bounded up the cat tree to look out the window.

Raynor spoke again and he looked back at the laptop. "She has a good start on bonding with you. She's going to show you that you are worthy of love. And she's going to remind you how to play. Those are good things. She may also help you stay present when we talk about difficult things. Such as how you feel about getting those notebooks."

"I didn't forget what was in them, so they don't hurt more for being here, if that's what you're aiming at." He put the notebooks back in the stack. Something was nagging at him and he felt he needed to get it out. "Hydra took my memories, good and bad, all of them. Again and again and again. Those notebooks are my memories. And you're wrong about the mission memories. I want to remember them. Those victims deserve to be remembered. Hydra may have used me to kill them, but I'm the last one who can remember them. Remembering sucks sometimes, sure, but it's a privilege I don't want to lose again." There was one last notebook. The first. "Sam was interested in this one, the first, what it was like when I first started remembering. I ate microwavable beef stroganoff and had a memory of a moment with my mother and sisters, but I didn't know they were my mother and my sisters. I didn't know what to call things that hadn't been part of my mission, my last mission."

"A five thousand-piece puzzle with no picture. You had to take it piece by piece."

"It was strange," he admitted. "I had to pretend to be a person, but I wasn't even sure how. But now, I've got enough pieces in some places that I can run them together, fill good chunks of time."

"And you're still finding new pieces?"

He nodded. "I remember how sick I was after the factory. I thought I just marched in with Steve to camp. But there were days I lost. I'd gotten stronger since he found me; I thought I'd be fine. One minute Steve and I were sliding down the roof of the burning factory. The next, we were talking to Dum Dum and Frenchie and the others and my legs got weak. I felt queasy then it all went black. Everybody thought I was going to die. Steve was beside himself. I don't remember that. I remember Dum Dum telling me after. They put me in the truck with the wounded, said I was in and out. I was apparently hallucinating again."

"Again?"

"Zola and his cronies were pumping full of who-knows-what. Ya know, it wasn't terrible at first. I was all busted up and sick with pneumonia when they took me to the lab. The injections cured the pneumonia, healed my wounds. It was odd feeling my bones move around. They got excited by that. They'd cut me and inject me to see if would heal. Sometimes I just felt sick and dizzy. I might be burning up or freezing, but yeah, I saw things."

"It was probably adrenaline after Steve freed you. The stakes were high, the factory burning. You needed to get out. But once out and safe, the adrenaline wore off. You were sick again."

"Apparently I was even bleeding from my ears. I had marks all up my arms, my back. But I woke up on the third day feeling much better. Steve and the others took some convincing, but I was right beside Steve as we marched into camp."

"Did the medics check you out?"

"Yeah, because Dum Dum couldn't keep his mouth shut," Bucky said, shaking his head. "Last thing I wanted was getting poked and prodded again. And I was afraid they'd send me home. And I half-hoped they would. But they didn't find anything except the dried blood in my ears. No marks, nothing weird about my blood. They asked me what Zola did but I couldn't tell them much. He didn't exactly talk to me about what he was doing, and, when he did talk, it was in German."

"Did you feel there was something different still?"

Bucky shook his head again. "I worried about it, but no, I didn't feel any different. Until I fell off a mountain and didn't die."

"From your story, you weren't unscathed. You were broken pretty badly, lost an arm."

She'd read the stories he'd written and let Sam read. He'd allowed Sam to scan them and send them to her. "I also wrote that I was in and out. Fragments of memories anyway."

"I get that this time is hard for you, but the more you speak of it, the less painful it will be. Were you scared, once you realized you were a prisoner again?"

"If I'd been just a POW, probably not. But it was Hydra. It was Zola."

"You hoped Steve would come for you."

Bucky nodded. "I couldn't do much to save myself so it had to come from outside. And he had rescued me the first time when I thought he was still safe in Brooklyn."

"Were you angry that he didn't come?"

Bucky gave that some thought. "Angry? No. I still hoped, even when I couldn't remember my own name. When they told me he was dead, though, that's when I lost hope. And then they erased my memories so—"

Raynor raised her eyebrows. "That was two years of torture, experimentation and conditioning in about three sentences. The story was present, it was raw. Let's try something. Read me that story, but for every 'he' or 'his', use 'I' and 'my'. Bring it into first person. He was you."

Oh, he didn't want to do that. Writing it down was very different from reading it out loud. He dreaded it, but he'd made a promise to try, to really do the work. And she had kept up her side of the bargain. No more passive aggressive note writing, no "just be happy" crap. So he unfolded himself from the floor and removed the new notebook from his dresser. He put the laptop on the stack of notebooks and sat back on the futon.

He opened the notebook to the first page. "Pain pushed its way past his—my—unconscious mind." That one changed word made it so much harder. "It drowned out my other senses until I couldn't ignore it." He could remember the feeling of that pain, the cold as he lay broken on the ground. A little weight dropped onto his lap. It was warm and vibrating. He stroked the kitten with his flesh hand and held the book with his vibranium one. He kept reading. "My eyes opened and my lungs cried out for breath. There was an odd, rattling sound, and I wearily turned my eyes to find the threat. My head wouldn't turn right, and everything hurt so much I didn't want to move."

"Puts you there, doesn't it? Broken, cold, in pain, wary, afraid. All of that is to be expected for a man who fell off a mountain and didn't die. Think about that man, lying there. He—you—felt all those things. Finish the scene. Two more paragraphs."

Bucky took a breath before he continued. "I couldn't keep my eyes open. The ragged, rattling sound remained." There were tears welling in his eyes. Alpine climbed a bit and pushed into his chest. "The incredible pain remained. I couldn't feel my arms or legs or torso, just that agony. I couldn't think through it or I might have realized that rattling sound was my breath. I might have wondered how I'd survived at all.

"When he—I—opened my eyes again, I saw a mountain rising higher than I could focus on. My eyes closed again until my ears registered new sounds. Crunching sounds, one after another. I opened my eyes again. A face above me. I didn't recognize the face. I managed one thought before it all went black again: Not Steve."

Alpine licked his chin, tickling him with her rough little tongue. He petted her and she purred louder.

"How long were you lying in that snow, do you think?"

Bucky shook his head. "I couldn't think and you want me to tell time?"

Raynor ignored the sarcasm but let go of that question for another. "Do you remember falling?"

"Yes, or part of it."

"Do you remember landing?"

"That piece is gone, or I haven't found it yet. I'm not looking hard for it."

Her eyes were soft and her voice gentle. "If I'd only known you as the Winter Soldier and I read that scene, I'd still have compassion for that man in the snow. That was when you were all alone. All your friends thought you had died. No one was looking. Not even the one who found you."

Bucky wiped his eyes then resumed petting. "Then it was probably good I couldn't think that far. If I'd died, like everyone thought, none of the rest would have happened. I'd be that hero in the Smithsonian. The first exhibit anyway, the one I saw on my first full day free. All those people I killed would still be alive—"

"Would they?"

He wasn't prepared for that. "What?"

"Would they be alive? Hydra wanted them dead. If they didn't have you, would they have used someone else?"

Well, yes. "I suppose so."

"Maybe not as quick and efficient but they would still have been killed. Hydra killed them. You were the weapon," she repeated. "They took that broken man from the snow and abused him, robbed him of his memory and agency. His humanity. And they used him to kill whoever they wanted. You were an exceptional weapon, but just a weapon to them. That man, you, were a victim of Hydra. The one they kept alive.

"And that means you're not just a victim, James. You're a survivor. Perhaps you can feel compassion for that man you were in the snow and all he would suffer. What he would be forced to do. What he would remember."

He did. It was easier now. Easier that he knew someone else felt it. Several someone elses. Not just Steve. Easier now that Sam was his friend. That Sarah and the boys accepted him. That this little kitten who barely knew him was snuggling against his neck. He couldn't say all that though. He just nodded.

"She's going to be good for you, I think," Raynor said. "Try reading some more—to yourself, but still out loud. It gives it life. Use the first person. Connect with that man, who was you. Compassion was something he was very short on. Share it with him. With yourself. I'll check back with you next week. Have a good week, James."

She winked out and Bucky saw his own reflection in the laptop screen. New tears had slipped loose and run down his cheeks. He clumsily wiped them away, trying not to dislodge the cat. She batted at his fingers and gave them a little bite.

He'd gotten far enough in the kitten book to know it was good to play with your kitten. He broke the rule and placed Alpine on the floor. He reached for a wand toy and whipped it around. Soon she was jumping and he was laughing at her antics. He would try reading more because he'd promised he'd do the work of therapy, but, right now, the kitten was providing her own form of therapy. Laughter was something he'd been short on, too.

The End
©2022 Gabrielle Lawson