Chapter 2: Machine
The Soldier awoke to sunlight streaming through the cracks of a sheet draped over the window of an abandoned apartment. He guessed he was still in Chicago, but most of the past few weeks seemed like fuzzy memory again. Still, the atmosphere of the awakening brought a certain fear to his heart. He couldn't shake it – it was always with him.
The constant dread lessened as he remembered that he was on his own now – as comforting as that could be. There no one was controlling him now, as long as he could stay hidden and lay low. Who knew what Hydra was doing now? Even with his freedom, he didn't know how to exist. A haze of hesitation accompanied every breath.
He groaned as he struggled to roll over, the weight of his metal arm too much for him right now and the pounding of a headache pulling him closer to the pillow. The Soldier had spent all night trying to make his memory work, which in his case, meant insomnia. Sleep had become an unnatural luxury. Still, there was no certain future for him, so he thought it best to try his hand at grasping something other than someone's throat.
But it was so painful. He couldn't remember who he was! Nothing before his last mission, nothing before the insistent and insanely confusing claims made by the Captain. Nothing but I knew him. That fact stayed.
At this point the Soldier was sitting up on the bed, studying the sunbeams. He reached into his pocket and retrieved a folded up photograph. A picture of two people, named Steve and Bucky. Best friends since childhood…inseparable….They looked determined and proud, leading a troop of soldiers into camp. The Soldier had discreetly torn the picture out of an album at the Captain America display back in D.C. and had learned all this from reading the exhibit.
But none of it made sense.
The Soldier now meandered into the small, dank bathroom. The round mirror in front of him evicted a greater sense of displacement; it was Bucky's face. But it was worn, tired, and drained. The dark hair hung around it like limp fingers and wrinkles in his white t-shirt evolved from lack of sleep. Was this who Steve knew?
He was a machine of man, fading back into the frailty of human condition.
He didn't know either of those men from the photo. Bucky was…good. He was loyal, determined and proud. The Soldier didn't feel any of that now. His memory hadn't been erased in a good few months, and that left him to contemplate the damage he had done from the last mission. Did he actually kill anyone? He knew if he had he wouldn't have cared in the moment. He knows he had hurt Steve.
I knew him. Those words seemed fatefully true, no matter which way he spun it in his head. Steve was important to him. But he couldn't understand much other than that. Since then it's only been a constant clash of the want of somebody, anybody, to tell him who he was and the fear that he couldn't trust it to be true. He didn't know himself. So who did? Still, he wasn't ready to see Steve again.
Right then, the Soldier's memory brought him back inside the helicarrier, facing off with him. The eyes were so pleading, so reluctant to fight. He had even come back to pull debris off of him. All I know is Hydra, I am here to destroy you, you are my mission. The glitch of emotion Steve's pleading had laid in him only made him angry. He had passed the breaking point a long time ago, but this was a whole other kind. Any traces of who he thought he was not permissible; the Winter soldier was stuck on performance. The confusion the Captain presented with his presence was overwhelming, and it had led him to attack without thought, without strategy. He threw punch after punch just to get the voices to stop.
With these thoughts, the Soldier threw the photo he was still holding aside. At this point he couldn't even remember the connection of most of his thoughts. There was not enough energy to try to make these it coherent.
Maybe the past would always haunt him.
Angrily, he smashed the wall next to the mirror with his left fist, leaving a baseball-sized hole in the wall. Still, it was smaller than the one in his heart.