Chapter 18

Fragments of glass stung my face as the impact threw me forward in my seat. My vision went black, and when I came to moments later icy water was flooding in around me as the car hit the bottom of the flooded river.

I choked and inhaled water, dazed and disorientated. I looked to the driver's seat and saw Natalia – no, Natasha – sitting slumped forward, face pressed into the deflated airbag in front of her.

What had happened?

I looked around at the smashed-up body of the vehicle as river water rapidly replaced the oxygen inside, and then the memories started to come back. Rogan, the trigger words, Clint, the mission, capturing Natasha. It wasn't all there, but it was enough.

I knew who I was and what I'd just done, and I felt a sense of dread fill me that was worse than the scream of my lungs for air.

No, no, no!

I tore away my seatbelt and gasped in a breath from the dwindling air pocket against the car roof. Then I kicked the passenger door open and pulled Natasha out of the wrecked vehicle with me. I wanted to surface for a breath of air, make sure Natasha was okay, and then curl into a ball and scream, but I couldn't do any of that. I couldn't risk surfacing when the police had been told to shoot us on sight.

I held Natasha's limp body to mine and pulled myself through the water with my free hand, fighting the swift current and forcing myself to stay under the surface until I reached the dark space where the bridge's supports met with the riverbank's retaining wall. The water wasn't very deep there and I pulled us both up to the surface, filling my aching lungs with fresh air.

My body shook as I dragged Natasha onto the gloomy strip of riverbank under the bridge and sank to my knees on the gravely stones beside her. My stomach heaved and I turned away to throw up into the dark river.

What had I done?

I tried to shut the returning images from my mind, forcing myself to take deep breaths. I needed to stay in control and look after Natasha. I couldn't afford to lose it now.

I turned back to Natasha, lying there pale and motionless. There was blood on her face from the crash. I wasn't sure she was even still alive. "Please…" I whispered, feeling for a pulse at the side of her neck. Please don't be dead because of me.

There was a pulse, but she didn't seem to be breathing. I pressed my hands to the center of her ribs and pushed once, then twice, desperate, hoping I wasn't doing more harm than good with my enhanced strength.

On the third compression Natasha drew a shallow breath and coughed, water spilling out of her mouth. I sat back as she groaned and began to move feebly, coughing and choking as she replaced the water in her lungs with air. Then she turned her head weakly to meet my gaze. "Bucky?"

"Yeah." I blinked away tears as she struggled to sit up, still shaking. I didn't know what to say or do. I had dragged her into this nightmare and now I was terrified of the consequences. I wanted to throw up again.

"What happened?" she asked, reaching up to feel the side of her head. Her hand came away bloody.

"We–" I began, but she held up a hand, cutting me off.

"We messed everything up, didn't we?" she said. "We need to get out of here."

I nodded wordlessly, standing and offering my hand to help her up. She grimaced as she stood and I put my arm around her shoulders to keep her upright as we staggered through the shallow water to the retaining wall. The police chopper was hovering over the water where our car had sunk, and the red-and-blue glow from police car lights lit up the bridge. We couldn't go back that way.

I helped Natasha scale the railing at the top of the retaining wall and we slipped through the trees to a railway line running parallel to the bridge we'd fallen from. When a freight train rumbled slowly by a few minutes later we jumped onto one of the boxcars. It was a simple thing for me to open the door, and we climbed into the empty car as the train carried us away from the police search and the city.

Natasha crawled to the corner of the car and collapsed into a ball on the floor without a word, shivering in her soaked uniform. If her returned memories were anything like the jumbled mess mine were, then I knew the pain and distress she must be feeling right now. It was hard to make sense of any of the images forcing their way back into my mind sporadically, bringing with them remembrance of pain and torture and death.

I sank to the floor at the other end of the car and lay looking up at the roof. For a minute I tried to make sense of my returning, incomplete memories – Steve was tall and strong but also small and skinny and that made no sense – but my head hurt too much and all I really wanted to do was sleep and forget today.

I glanced over at Natasha, and saw that she had uncurled from the fetal position she had been holding herself in. She lay limp and silent, asleep despite the discomfort of the cold and the train's constant shuddering.

I couldn't risk sleep. There was always the risk that the train might be stopped as part of the search for us, or that we might be discovered at a station. So I stared up at the dark roof and waited for the train to come to a stop for one reason or another, tears running freely down my face.

I was still awake almost two hours later when the train pulled into a small-town station. My tears, like the rain outside, were gone when I woke Natasha.

We jumped out of the freight car before the train came to a complete stop and hurried across the tracks to the trees beyond the station. We passed a sign declaring that we were in Tuapse, a place I'd never heard of before.

Our first priorities were to find civilian clothing and some form of transportation. We wandered through the streets until we found a store that sold clothes and waited in a dim side street across the road until it opened. We bought what we needed quickly and paid the bewildered-looking cashier from a wad of rubles Rogan had given us before the mission. Hopefully it was too early in the day for any news of us to have reached this place from Sochi.

We changed clothes in a public restroom and shoved our assassin clothing and gear into a cheap backpack. Then we bought bus tickets to a city further north called Rostov-on-Don. Only once we'd arrived there six and a half hours later did we really stop to think.

Up until now, we'd been running blindly, relying on our instincts and training to keep us going, and shutting out everything else. But Natasha had reached the end of her endurance, and I wasn't doing much better. We needed to eat, rest, and plan.

All of that was easier said than done. We couldn't exactly get hotel rooms without risking being identified and captured. That meant we had to settle for less ideal living quarters – namely an apartment in one the most run-down buildings I had ever seen.

The area it sat in, on the outskirts of the city, made carrying a gun something of a prerequisite, and the building itself looked ready to be demolished. The landlord didn't seem to recognize us or care who we were as long as we paid the rent, and that was fine by me.

We bought food and other necessaries at a small corner store and ate our first meal in over a day in the silence of our fourth-floor apartment's small living area. The whole place smelled of mildew and the curtains were more moth-eaten holes than fabric. The bare wooden floor served as chair, table, and sofa in the absence of any furniture – save for a rickety bed in the bedroom that had been left by the last tenant.

I simply didn't care. All I wanted was to wake up and realize this whole thing was a dream. I knew such wishes were irrational, but that didn't lessen the longing. I had deliberately denied myself the chance to deal with my thoughts and emotions since the train trip, but there was only so long you could shut out reality before it forced its way back in.

That time had arrived.

"Did we do the right thing?" I asked Natasha as we rinsed our dishes in the kitchen sink. "Running?"

She didn't meet my gaze. "What else were we supposed to do?"

"Turn ourselves in?" I suggested.

She smiled humorlessly. "Maybe, if you wanted to get shot."

"Maybe I should've stayed in Iran," I muttered. It had been my hasty action that had led us to this, and I couldn't forget it.

"You couldn't have known this would happen," Natasha said. "None of us could have."

"But I knew it could," I retorted bitterly. "I knew the Winter Soldier programing was still in my head and I exposed myself anyway. I put everyone at risk, and look what happened!"

"This isn't your fault, Bucky," Natasha began firmly.

"Don't tell me that!" I snapped. "You have no idea what it's like to be me!"

I might as well have hit her. Natasha went very still as she met my gaze. "Don't I?" she asked quietly.

I couldn't hold her gaze. She knew exactly what it was like to be me, more than anyone else alive. But I hadn't been thinking about that as I yelled at her.

I turned away abruptly and left the apartment, letting the door slam shut behind me. I couldn't stay there a moment longer.

I took the stairs to the first floor without thinking about it and found myself walking down the street to a grimy building with "Bar" written in Cyrillic over the door. I didn't know if a super-soldier could get drunk, but right now I was willing to give it a try.