Hey, guys! Sorry this chapter took so long to get to you, but better late than never! I hope you enjoy!

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Chapter Four

I rush out of the museum as quickly as I can, my head throbbing with each step. The walls of the museum seem to press in on me from every direction. Even after I made it outside, it doesn't feel like there was enough air in the world to fill my aching lungs.

Everything he said is real.

My name is Bucky. Steve Rogers is my friend.

But I tried to kill him. I was ordered to. I had to kill him-and part of me is still being pulled back to the river where I left him so that I can finish the job.

The world is tilting underneath me. I need to get away from here.

I stumble off in a random direction, straining to get my feet under me. I go as far away from that museum as I can get, but it's not far enough. The moon eventually comes directly above me, so I must have been walking for hours.

Every part of me hurts. I didn't get too injured on the tarmac, but I still took quite the beating, and I can barely keep my eyes open. I wander into a trash-filled alleyway and slip down to the ground. I hide myself in the shadows and close my eyes, resting my head on the hard uniform I had with me. It isn't comfortable, but it's better than the cracked, concrete ground. I drift off to sleep quickly.

"You died screaming. Yet the one who takes your place is silent. You are a weapon, and weapons do not weep(1)," Zola growls as I lay on the ground.

My face is wet, and there is hot blood underneath me. How long have I been here? I can barely remember. They try to erase me every day. It hurts so much that part of me wonders why I even try to fight it. They're going to win eventually. I can't go on like this.

But Steve will find me soon. He'll bust in here with the other Howling Commandos like in the labor camp. He will. And I need to know him when he does. I need to recognize that he's here to help me.

"You're still waiting for him?" Zola shouts, delivering a sharp kick to my stomach that robbed me of my air.

I cry out and try to quell the dull throbbing in my abdomen, but it just blended in with the rest of the constant pain.

"Steve Rogers thinks you're dead," Zola hisses. "They all think you're dead. There is no extraction team."

"N-no," I mutter, instantly regretting saying anything at all, but I keep going. I have to say it. I have to keep it fresh in my mind or I will disappear entirely. "Th-they'll find me. They will. They will."

Zola chuckles darkly. "Steve Rogers-"

"They will."

"-is dead," he finishes.

I freeze and look up at him. No. Steve can't be dead. He's a kid who got himself into trouble five too many times, but he's survived more than I have. He can't be dead.

"Your Captain is dead," Zola repeated, "and your…'death' had been lost in the noise of his."

Zola opened his blood-splashed suit jacket, and I instinctively lower my gaze, my breathing picking up with my heart rate. He dropped something onto the floor. "Read this, Soldat," he orders.

I automatically push myself up from the floor and look down at the paper Zola had dropped on the floor. There was a photograph of Steve in his Captain America get-up under the headline Captain America Crashes into the Ocean.

I skim the words underneath it again and again. Steve crashed a plane, ending the War, but at the cost of his life. There is a small picture of Peggy and Howard and a quote from them both saying that they were talking with him when the plane went down. The reporter said that Steve was dead.

"Your Captain's not coming," Zola said again, "and neither is anyone else. So stop fighting."

Stop fighting? If there was no one coming for me, I might as well. It would stop hurting if I did.

But I can't. Not yet. They would use me if I did. Not yet. I can't give in yet. I can hold out. Just a little longer. Peggy and Howard are my friends, too. If Steve can't come, they will. Just a little longer.

Zola grumbles quietly before looking up at the others around us. "Try again," he ordered. "I think we'll have better luck this time."

Armed guards grabbed my bare arms and picked me up, dragging me away, but I barely felt it. What I read in the paper had numbed me. I can't believe it. It had to be a fake paper or something, but I had no way to deny it. I had to remind myself every day what my own name is. I can't spare the concentration to try to disprove it.

They threw me down into the chair and strapped me in. I can't remember exactly what this machine does to me, but my body does. My breathing picks up as the restraints tighten more and more. This is going to hurt. I know it is.

My head is forced sharply backwards, and machinery whirred around me. My heart hammers in my chest as the pain started. It wasn't long until my vision blackened, but it was different this time. The pain went for Steve. It attacked every image I had of him, poisoning the memories with a pain that I didn't think it had before. The pain intensified more and more until it reached such an unbearable peak that I forgot his name.

I jump as I wake. The sun is just starting to rise, filling the alleyway I found myself in with light.

Where am I, again? I know I walked here, but where did I walk from? And wasn't I ordered to kill someone?

I hiss, and my hand flies to my temple to try and quell the rising pain, as I remember the museum, the mother and her son: Amanda and Jason.

Right. I'm laying low. Staying out of the way and disappearing. But I can't do that if I forget where I am again.

I glance around the trash-filled alley and spot a dusty and bent spiral notebook spilling out if a torn trash bag. I get up from the ground and cross the dirt-covered ground towards it. I pick it up and find a heavily scratched pen shoved into the broken binding. I carefully open it and find child's drawings. There were spaceships and dinosaurs combined with pink castles and magic wands. I move to rip them out so I could use the other papers, but the more I thumbed through them, the less I wanted to. Looking at them made the corners of my mouth drift up for some reason.

I flip to the last few pages and find an unmarked one. I take the pen out of he spiral binding and click it open. I rest the notebook on my metal arm and point the old pen directly up and down to write, but there wasn't much I could say.

My name is Bucky. Steve Rogers is my friend. HYDRA erased me.

I want to write more, but that's all I have.

I glance back down at the torn trash bag and find a strap sticking out of it. I place the notebook on the ground and rip the bag open further. Half-used and broken crayons, other notebooks and crumpled school papers from years ago spilled out along with a dusty backpack. I take the backpack and open it. There is nothing inside, so I reach for the uniform that served as my pillow during the night and stuff it inside. I put the notebook I wrote in inside after it.

A growl sounds, and I instantly look up, scanning the surroundings for its source. The growl comes again, and I stand up to get a better angle, but there was nothing there.

A dull aching radiates from my torso, and though my entire body is still sore from the battle on the tarmac yesterday, it feels different than a stiff muscle. I put a hand to my stomach as the growl sounds again.

It's me. My stomach is growling. I'm hungry.

(1) This is another quote from a Bucky edit I found off of Pinterest that I never found a source for

Hope to see you soon for chapter 5!