A/N: Almost there! Two chapters to go (which could potentially turn into three. Last one might need some chopping up as well.) Thanks for the positive feedback and I hope you guys enjoy this update! Sorry if it gets a little bit repetitive. I like that, but maybe you won't. Just a fair warning!
Dear Everyone I Have Killed [Part Two]
The Winter Soldier Session III:
She has been a bad reporter. As she sits in front of Bucky during their third quasi-interview, as he explains the feel of his World War II uniform to her, she knows how bad of a reporter she has been. Avoiding all of the tough questions in favour of the easy ones. The ones that make it sound as though he is a hundred-year-old veteran with a heart of gold.
Her boss keeps emailing her. Taunting her with the tape. It's Thursday and the piece is meant to be in Sunday's paper. She is running out of time.
Which is her fault. She skipped out on an interview yesterday in favour of watching more films with the former assassin. Good Will Hunting, Jaws, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and Jurassic Park to round it out.
Part of this deal, she likes to think, is helping him integrate a little more into the 21st century. Thanks to her, if he ever gets accosted by a movie freak he'll be able to hold his own.
"Something's on your mind," Bucky says.
Darcy startles, her pen clattering to the floor. He's holding her gaze. She wonders how long she's been holding his, her mind wandering, stressing over their time constraint.
"I'm okay," she says. Rubbing her eyes, she collects her pen and readjusts her position on the ground. "Should we continue?"
"You haven't been asking any of the questions I've been expecting," he says, adjusting the white tank Darcy found in John's bag of clothes. It's tight against Bucky's chest, and he keeps dipping his index and middle finger into the collar, keep the fabric away from his throat.
Looking away from the Winter Soldier's chest, Darcy moves her eyes back to his. She taps her notepad with the tip of her pen. "What questions have you been expecting?"
His shoulders move up from their relaxed position. It's good—he's much calmer today. He sunk into the sofa when they began, completely at ease.
She doesn't want him to lose that. Doesn't want to frighten him with the heavy stuff. He has only just started retreating from his shell. It would kill her to shove him back inside. Can't she turn this into a fluff piece? She can see the headline now. "A Reformed Assassin: Find out what the Winter Soldier's favourite flavour of ice cream is."
What a joke.
But none of this is funny. None of it is fluffy. Even as he told her Tuesday about his time at bootcamp, there was a cloud weighing down each of his words. A struggle as he tried remembering his Sergeant's name.
"I guess I keep waiting for you to ask me about HYDRA," he says eventually.
"Do you want me to ask about HYDRA?"
This is the journalist in her talking. Smoothly reverse-psychology-ing the subject of her story.
Bucky's shoulders are steadily moving closer to his ears. At the mere mention of HYDRA his body starts to coil.
"I want you to write a good article." He stops, tongue between his teeth. Shoulders, meet ears. "I want to protect you. Your boss wants all of the dirty details about my time under HYDRA's control. I'm ready to give you answers."
The Winter Soldier doesn't sleep. Darcy knows this because for the few nights he has been supposedly sleeping on her couch, she has twice come out of her bedroom in the middle of the night to find his body upright and on full alert.
Her own personal guard dog in the shape of a hundred-year-old man with a metal arm.
Really, though, who needs sleep when the organisation that held you for so many years kept you frozen whenever your services were not required? Surely he has slept enough.
"But what if I'm not ready to ask those questions?" Darcy presses. She kneels, raising her body off the floor. "What if—what if I can't ask those questions?"
Bucky's eyebrows slither above his nose creating a crease. A sharp line between his brows inside of which Darcy could fit her pinky finger. "Why wouldn't you be able to ask the questions? I'm helping write this exposé so your bastard of a boss doesn't release that tape. We need to get to the harder questions, Darcy."
"Don't do that," she warns, rising to her feet. There is the coffee table separating them, but Darcy looms over him now. Winter Solider or not, she is angry, and when Darcy Lewis is angry, she does not hold back. "Don't put all of this on me. I'm trying to help you. Remember? I don't give a shit about that fucking tape anymore! Let my bastard of a boss give it to every potential future employer of mine. Let him hand it out to my colleagues. This story is so much more than that damn sex tape. It's about you and it's about HYDRA and it's about SHIELD. It's dangerous, Bucky."
"And I said I'd protect you!" Bucky hollers. He stands now too, but she refuses to back down.
"That's all fine and dandy, but who's protecting you?"
Tensions are high. She shouldn't be shouting. But she is not the one in need of rescuing. And maybe he isn't either, maybe he really is fine. Unaffected by all of this bullshit. But Darcy doesn't believe that. Not really. He isn't soulless. He's just a soldier, trained to not feel anything. And when someone hasn't felt for so long, they start to think they're invincible.
Nobody's invincible.
"I don't need protection!"
"Maybe you will!" she bites. "Maybe recalling the hell HYDRA put you through will send you spiralling down some rabbit hole that no one will be able to get you out of. I can't do that to you!"
"Why not?"
"Because . . ." Darcy trails off, catching her breath. They are both panting, nostrils flaring. Bucky's face is red. A vein in his forehead pulses. "Because it isn't fair," she says softly. Because I care about you is what she wants to say, but she can't. Not yet. How silly is it that she has grown fond of the guy? "It's not fair to put you through this."
"I'm sorry," he says after a momentary silence. "You're right, I shouldn't put this on you. Like I said on the rooftop, I want to do this for myself. To prove to myself—and to them—that I'm more than what they made me to be."
Darcy's hands itch by her sides. She clutches the ends of her lightweight cardigan. "You are," she tells him. "I can see that already."
His mouth twitches, but she can't tell if it's in a smile or a frown.
"Don't worry about me. I'm ready to get this off of my chest."
"The story or that wife-beater?"
It twitches again, his mouth. This time, it's clearly a smile.
Following a small break—they both needed one; to breathe if nothing else—they are back in position. She clicks her pen a few times, trying to get out the shakes before she hits the hard stuff. Bucky looks calm, but she can see a glimmer of fear cross his stubbled face every time he blinks.
Darcy glances over her page of questions. A few of them are scratched out, deemed too invasive by herself. The majority of the ones at the bottom of the page—the light questions that she had to reach in her mind to find—are all checked off. It's the ones at the top, the ones about death and destruction, that she focuses on now.
"How do you want to do this?"
"What do you mean?" Bucky fixes his posture and takes a sip of water from the glass in front of him.
"I mean," Darcy says, clicking her pen, "do you want to just start talking about certain subjects, or should I ask you specific questions. If you wish to do the latter, would you prefer I first ask the questions I think would the most difficult to answer, or would it be best if we eased into it and made those the final questions . . .?" She stops herself from trailing on. She raises her eyebrows at Bucky in questioning. "Pick your poison."
"No easing into it," he decides immediately. "Ask me the tough ones. I need to get this out. Don't go easy on me, Darcy."
"Okay," she says, pumping herself up mentally for the onslaught of questions at her disposal. "Kills. Do you remember them?"
Shit.
Darcy nearly swallows her tongue.
That was the first question she wrote down. It has a dark strike through it.
"I—I retract that," she says quickly. "You don't have to answer it. Forget I asked."
But either Bucky didn't hear her, or he really meant it when he asked her not to go easy on him. "I remember all of them," he says in a whisper. He stares blankly ahead of him at the door to her bedroom.
Darcy hand trembles as she debates whether to put his words on the record.
"That's the thing about mind control. I don't know if they realised it would be a side effect, but I can remember everything that happened when I was under their spell," he says. His breathing grows increasingly laboured. "I remember every scream. Every drop of blood. Whenever I started to come out of it, before they put me back under, I would go over everything I had done. Over and over and over. I tried to think of it all, to hold onto it. Because if I remembered it, if I remembered them, the people I killed, the innocent people I killed, I thought maybe I would be able to fight the control they had over me."
"Were you ever able to fight it?" Darcy croaks. She hasn't written a single thing he has said down, but she doubts she needs to. All of his words are stamped in her brain. She won't forget any of it.
Bucky looks at her suddenly. His hard eyes are glaring, but they soften the longer he stares at her, like he is remembering this is a safe place and not an interrogation room. "I don't know. Probably not. But it got harder for them to keep me under. I snapped out of it quicker towards the end."
"The end," she says, reminding herself that although this is not an interrogation, she is a journalist. It is her job to find answers. This isn't story time. She must continue with her questions. "Tell me how you escaped."
Bucky outlines his encounter with Captain America—his childhood pal, Steve Rogers. As he speaks, Darcy sees the confrontation playing out before her. Two friends: one stuck between the memories of his youth and the serum controlling his mind, the other balancing the line between loyalty to his nation and loyalty to his best friend.
Water fills the apartment as Bucky recounts jumping from the failing aircraft into the Potomac to rescue the man he had been sent to kill.
"I dragged him out of the river and disappeared," he finishes, refusing to detail where he went or how he got there.
"It was Steve that finally saved you, then," Darcy concludes. Bucky's face takes on a look of confusion. "He helped you remember who you were before HYDRA took you," she clarifies.
"In a sense. I was already remembering things," he says slowly. Quietly. Like these are dirty secrets. Which, Darcy supposes, they are. Ugly secrets he is only sharing with her to better himself. "They were having to work harder to suppress my memories."
"What sort of things were you remembering?"
Panic flashes across Bucky's face. His eyes close, his face twitches, as if he is pushing away those same memories. "They—HYDRA—they . . . experimented on me. When they rescued me after I fell, they took me to a lab and operated on me. They gave me this arm," he says, his bionic hand rounding in a fist, "and made me the Winter Soldier."
Darcy scribbles in her notebook, her chest tightening as she listens to Bucky tell his tale.
She always knew the world was full of shitty people. Always knew HYDRA were some of the worst shitty people. But hearing this from the mouth of HYDRA's secret weapon, their most prized assassin, and knowing that beneath his title of Winter Soldier is a man hurting, makes Darcy want to go back in time and kill whoever it was that turned James Buchanan Barnes into their plaything.
"So, they would zap your mind to better control it?" she says when Bucky's eyes open. They are lined in red, and this only makes Darcy's heart sink further into her belly.
"Yes. In order to make sure I was susceptible to their commands, I was forced to lose any part of my former self."
"The self you're trying to reclaim through this exposé?" Darcy implores. He nods. "Now, when you become the Winter Soldier"— Darcy breaks off, not liking her phrasing. —"How did you become the Winter Soldier?" she asks. "What would they say or do to you? Can you describe it?"
Bucky sucks in the deepest breath she has ever seen. Obviously this is a touchy subject. Not that anything they've spoken about today has been easy.
Don't go easy on me, Darcy.
She most definitely is not doing that.
When he is ready to give his answer, Bucky adjusts himself on the sofa and stares right into Darcy's eyes. There is an intensity in the blue of his eyes that halts Darcy's hand. He looks almost frightened. Like he is worried that with the information he is about to supply to her, she might turn around and use it against him.
"This doesn't have to be in the piece," she says, hoping her own gaze is sincere enough for him. "I won't write any of it down if you don't want it in the paper."
"No. I'll tell you and you can put it in the story," he says resolutely. "They would say these words. Random words, meaningless words. I can feel it when it—when he—starts to take over. I get blindingly angry, and then everything goes black.
"Then I'll wake up," he continues. "Slowly things start making sense—I'll remember bits and pieces of what happened while I was under. That's the worst; when I have to see what I've done. If not physically, then in my head. In the end, I remember it all. Until they zap it away again when they decide it's time."
Darcy's mouth is dry. He isn't looking at her anymore. His stare has returned to her bedroom door. She wonders if he spends his nights watching that door. His eyes seem so used to being there.
Several hours later, Darcy and Bucky guzzle water to soothe their scratched throats. She is almost done. Only one question remains.
She has not allowed to herself to hold back. She has hit him hard and she has kept going even when Bucky's answers threaten to shut down her entire system. Even when he struggles to speak.
But she is ready for this to be over. Tonight, she will go into her room and lock herself inside until the exposé has been completed. Over the next couple of days, she will spend time editing the story before sending it in on Saturday for Sunday's paper. And then, finally, it will be done. Both she and Bucky will be set free.
"Alright." Darcy sets down her glass. Bucky does the same. He fiddles with his too-long hair, brushing the fringe out of his weary eyes. "I have one last question."
"Okay," he says, sounding relieved. "I'm ready."
"Good. That's . . . good. Okay, Bucky, why are you doing this? Exposing yourself to me and the world. Why not stay in hiding for the rest of your days? What do you gain from this article?"
Her final attempt to push away the Winter Soldier. Let people understand the true nature of Bucky Barnes. Understand how badly he wishes to be separated from the beast HYDRA turned him into.
She only hopes it works.
There is a pregnant pause following the utterance of her question. It fills the entire space of her lounge. It is loud. A ringing in Darcy's ears. She hears nothing but the silence. She is about to repeat herself, perhaps rephrase her question, when Bucky's mouth opens and he begins speaking.
"To get back those years they stole from me. To once and for all cut all ties with the Winter Soldier," he discloses. His right hand goes up to his left shoulder and he rubs against the red star. His fingernails, blunt from his teeth, claw at the Communist symbol. He drops his head, chin bumping his collarbone. "That's cliché, I know."
"None of the is cliché," Darcy avows.
Bucky's head springs up and he gives her a disbelieving look.
"This is unprecedented. Nothing like this has happened before. A cliché," she says, "is something overplayed or hackneyed. A device people are so tired of hearing. Mind-controlled HYDRA escapee trying to rebuild his hundred-year-old life is hardly a familiar trope, Bucky."
Bucky tilts his head very minimally to the side and Darcy watches as a small, tired, thankful smile pulls at his cheeks.
Going over her notes, Darcy offers him her own smile. "We're done," she says.
"Done?"
"Done," she confirms. "I'll write it up tonight and spend the next couple of days making it sound as though I got all of this information through secondhand sources, and then I will send it in."
Bucky glimpses the clock above the TV. "It's almost midnight."
"Yeah," she says, getting to her feet. "I write best when I'm sleep deprived. There are some leftovers in the fridge if you're hungry. Feel free to watch something while I work. Don't worry about the volume. I listen to the Beatles when I work through headphones." She picks up her notebook and takes a few steps to her bedroom. "I suggest Slumdog Millionaire."
"Hey, Darcy?" Bucky calls as she enters her room.
She turns around. "Yeah?"
"What are the Beatles?"
"Um . . . tomorrow," she says, fighting the urge to laugh. "We will discuss the Beatles tomorrow. Don't watch Slumdog. Go for Across the Universe. All Beatles music."
Bucky nods his head, showing he will take her suggestion, and Darcy shuts the door to her room. She sits down at her desk, eyeing the street below. In a few days, all of the people in the city will know about the man switching on her television. They will know of his sufferings.
Opening her laptop, Darcy pulls up her writing app and flips her notes to Session I.
Darcy Lewis cannot stop the tears scurrying down her face. Three hours into composing the article and she is having a mini breakdown as "Golden Slumbers" blasts through her earphones. She breathes through her sobs so as to not disturb Bucky.
But he is a super soldier and she is not surprised when she feels a hand clamp down on her shoulder. She looks up, her earphones falling out. The last strands of "Golden Slumbers" play quietly through the buds, leading into "Carry That Weight."
"I'm sorry," she gasps, swallowing a gulp of air.
Bucky stands over her, his nose crinkled. Eyes imploring, staring deeply into her own. His fleshy hand moves up from her shoulder and grips her face, and for one terrifying second Darcy thinks he has reverted into the Winter Soldier. One graze of his thumb and her neck would be snapped.
Of course, this is ridiculous. His thumb is gentle, and it wipes at the trail of tears gathered on her chin.
Closing her eyes, Darcy tosses her fear out and leans into his touch.
"I'm sorry," she says again.
"What happened?" he asks, voice gruff. "Did your boss send another message?"
She shakes her head, burying it deeper into Bucky's hand. "No, nothing like that. I was just . . . I was just writing the article, and I got to the stuff we were talking about today and"—
Darcy cuts herself off, unable to speak without sounding as though she is having a panic attack.
Bucky does something strange. Dropping his hand, he goes for her wrist and carefully pulls her up. When she is standing, her iPod on the floor, the Winter Soldier pulls her against him. Instinctively, she wraps her arm around his waist, squishing her face against his chest. Bucky's arms go around her shoulders. One hand holds the back of her neck, the other, the metal one, smoothes between her shoulder blades.
"Aren't you angry at them?" she asks, tilting her head up. Her chin rests on his sternum.
Bucky angles his head downward. His face holds a thousand questions, but he asks only one. "Angry?"
"At HYDRA," she says. "Aren't you angry at them for doing this to you? Because I am. I am so angry."
"That's why you're crying? For me?"
With their heads inclined towards one another, she can feel his breath circling her nose. He smells of sweet mint. Toothpaste.
"For you," she confesses. "For everything they took from you. How were you able to stay so calm while I asked you all of those questions? Going over your answers just now—I could never really understand your pain, but getting even the slightest glimpse of it has me breaking down. How are you so strong?"
The hand gripping her neck slips away and Bucky moves strands of her out of her face. He tucks them behind her ear.
This is mad. His touch is soothing her. Calming her.
This isn't supposed to be happening. They are supposed to maintain a work relationship. Professional. No tender touches. No soft words.
But she is far too weak to stop him now.
"I'm not strong," he says. His blue eyes swim in the muted yellow light from Darcy's desk lamp. "I'm . . . I don't know what I am. I've had my life stolen from me. Everything that I am has been stolen. Of course I'm angry, but I'm also tired. Most days I want nothing more than to die."
"Why do you say that?" she begs, ignoring the strain in her neck.
"I've done so many horrible things. I have no right to be alive. I deserve to die as penance for my crimes, but also because this world has nothing for me. Not anymore. I've realised that today."
"How can you say that?" Darcy says. She pulls herself away from him. He looks startled at her decision. "Remember when you said why you were helping me with this article? Up on the roof, you said you wanted to break free from the Winter Soldier. Today, earlier, you said you wanted to reclaim your life. Now you want to die? That isn't part of this deal, Bucky."
"I don't belong here," he says.
"You do. This is your life. If you let yourself forget that, HYDRA wins. You'll be remembered as their prized assassin. They'll hold that over you long after you're dead."
Bucky slides his hands through his hair. "I"—
—But it is his turn to be unable to speak. He pants, backing up until the backs of his legs collide with her bed, and he sits, clutching his head.
Darcy is unsure of what to do, but when she hears Bucky let out a guttural sort of cry, she quickly finds her place beside him. She touches his back. Rests her hand flat against his spine.
"You need to sleep," she murmurs, refusing to cry anymore. "I can take the sofa if you think a bed would help you rest."
Bucky's head sways side to side. "No. Stay with me." He releases his head and looks at her, a wetness draped over his stubble. "Please."
It is a bad idea. Spending the night with Bucky Barnes. But like she already knows, she is weak.
Nodding, Darcy slides back on her bed, glancing at the space beside her. Bucky moves in her direction. Neither change into nightclothes. There isn't any time for such trivial things.
When they are both beneath the sheets, lying on their backs, eyes towards the ceiling, hearts thumping, Darcy asks, "Do you want me to turn the light off?"
"No," he says, "leave it on."