Achilles,
you have no cause to grieve because you're dead.'
"I paused, and he immediately replied:
'Don't try to comfort me about my death,
glorious Odysseus. I'd rather live
working as a wage-labourer for hire
by some other man, one who had no land
and not much in the way of livelihood,
than lord it over all the wasted dead.

Homer – The Odyssey, Book 11

He fell.

In that final moment, as he looked up at the retreating train and the last glimpse of sunlight he knew in this world, he remembered picking up the shield. Not in a moment of clarity, it was not a decision as Patroclus had made, begging and wheedling Achilles for permission to take his armor to the battlefield.

(He had only picked up the first barrier he could against the energy blasts, trying not to look at where Steve had fallen hard against the wall. Dispatch the threat, save Steve, fight—

Then the cold, rushing emptiness beneath him and the wind stealing the tears from his eyes. Reaching, grasping for any purchase. Failing.)

He remembered her parting words inanely through the rush of wind. Do not take up the shield of Achilles.

Prophecy cannot be so easily avoided. Those who try play right into its hands.

FallingrushingfreezingCOLD

At such a height, even a fall into water is hard as stone. It is so sudden, jarring and painful as being caught between hammer and anvil, as Hector's spear going up and under his ribs and finding his heart and he is crushed between gravity and the ground. Blackness, or so he assumed, because when he awoke he'd washed up against the jagged stones that lined the river. The water was so cold it pierced like needles, feeling strangely hot, and he knew he was dying. His blood swirled and twisted in clouds from where half his body was still submerged in the water. His left arm was gone, severed below the shoulder. The thought was vague in his head, insubstantial as the cloud of his breath, as quickly caught by the wind and stolen away.

He was not alone.

(He was so cold he was almost warm, broken, crushed and bleeding, dying miles below the train, from where anyone would find him and he was not alone.)

She sat at the edge of the rock, a shard of granite that rose from the snowdrifts that lined the waters of the river. Her hair trailed behind her and down in a stream, and her skin was the faint blue of arctic ice. Yet her eyes and hair were black still, black as the waters that stole his life and she watched him, pitiless. If there was any gentler emotion in her eyes it could only be called curiosity, but when he saw the flash of her piranha teeth in the fish-gut red of her mouth he knew it was bitter triumph.

"You were warned, mortal. That is more than most can say."

When Patroclus had been a ghost haunting his own cairn, a whispering fading voice that shrieked on the wind and begged for a name carved into stone to set him free to the afterlife, they had spoken, him and Thetis, at length. He had told her the song of Achilles as he lived it, the paeans to the golden boy they both worshipped. But she had watched and hated him then, just as she did now. He could not speak, not even the faint and whispered voice of the dead twisted in the wind. His lips were frozen, he could hardly breathe at all.

"Yet you took up his shield despite my warning. Hubris."

He wanted to protest, to defend the moment of chaos and the heat of battle where a shield was not a piece of his doom but only a barrier to the more immediate threat. But he could not ignore it, the moment where the shield had felt right in his hand. He would die for that.

"Death? You will not have so simple an escape, mortal."

This roused him. Bucky stirred, the blood flowing in a renewed burst as he shifted to look at her. Sea nymph they called her, but in this moment she looked more like a banshee, a pale horror sounding the end with her voice, perched upon her gable. Perhaps nymphs took on the elements of the water around them. She had been gray in Brooklyn as the water of the Hudson, dark green veins lurking beneath her skin. Here she was dark, and pale, and frozen blue, melding into the landscape, the rocks slick with ice. He stared at her, the words forming in his mind that he could not speak, could barely form words as his own fading consciousness could not summon the strength to breathe.

But you said…

Words in his head that flashed like letters on the page, twisting in the confusion of his dying brain, like paper fluttering in the wind.

"That should you take up the shield, all that you are will be destroyed. I never said you would die."

How…?

She did not answer but looked up, like an animal tracking a scent, her long arching neck as sinuous and stretched, utterly alien as a sea serpent rising from the depths. When she spoke again her voice echoed in his brain with the crash of a breaking dam.

"They are coming for you."

He heard it. The tramp of boots in snow and for a moment his heart leapt. They had come for him, just as Steve had found him deep behind enemy lines, when all others had given him up for dead. Steve had not given up, would never give up. A man as tenacious and fierce as the sun would not be stopped by winter.

There was the crunch of boots breaking ice and Thetis looked at him just as the men's figures came into view. She waited just long enough for him to see, the black of their uniforms, the masks they wore. Skulls ringed with tentacles. She waited just long enough for the first frantic whimper to break his lips, the only scream he could form, as he twitched, failed to move, wished to slip beneath the water, to die.

Thetis dove beneath the waves, the arching of a snake, black robes trailing in an arc behind her, gone without a ripple. They seized him and he fought, the whimper turning to a scream.

It was not the last time he saw her, but it was many years again before he would know her name.

"Sergeant Barnes," Zola crooned above him. In his hand was a vial of water and Bucky's eyes flickered to it, breaking into a fresh, cold sweat. "You will be the new fist of HYDRA."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Bucky croaked. "If you think I'm gonna work with you bastards—"

"James," Zola tutted. "Of course I do not expect you to serve us. Not as you are." He held up the vial in front of Bucky's eyes and swirled it. The water was utterly pure save for a sheen; glowing as if it were liquid glass. "Do you recognize this? No, of course you would not. No one living would remember it."

He did remember though. Voices like dry leaves in the area, a river before him and the golden shadow of Achilles behind him. Pressing his lips to the water that ran like glass and feeling the cold, like ice, colder than the river they had dragged him from, his bloody stump leaving a trail along the ground. His final words to the Fates. I want to remember him, he said. Then drink only a little, or it will drive you mad.

Bucky seized on the operating table, kicked and tore at the bonds, screaming and writhing but they held and he was too weak, he would not die it would worse, and he was too weak to save himself and Steve was gone, a thousand miles away and he would not remember because—

"These are the waters of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness," Zola said. "They will make you stronger, Sergeant Barnes, and they will make you forget. It is amazing, don't you think, what a man will do when he knows no other life?"

There will be a price.

Keep your word, and I will bear it.

We always keep our word, even when it seems we do not.

"No, no no no. You swore, you swore!"

A strong man, but a bound man, it was a long time before the sedative kicked in and the screaming stop. From there the injection was easy, the dose of clear river water straight into the vein, the dose the water nymph had helped them find. Zola spared only a moment to wonder what the former James Barnes meant with his screaming, but even that was forgotten when a new weapon opened empty eyes.

There was a woman in the room with him.

The Winter Soldier did not wonder who she was. He had no basis for curiosity.

It was 1945, but the date meant nothing to him. He was strapped down to a chair as his arm underwent recalibration. For the next hour he must sit perfectly still while the mechanism realigned itself with his nerves, his muscles, and cells. To move, to even twitch, would invite agony so intense that he could do nothing but howl. There was an alien machine embedded in his flesh, they were not yet one.

He was to be sent on a mission once calibration was complete, he knew, but that was not what the technicians spoke of while the sparks of their tools flew, as they grafted metal to flesh. They spoke of confusion, a lost cube, and a missing leader. Defeat and triumph mingled, they had hidden friends in a place called Washington, and they would survive.

A plane had gone down in the Arctic.

"It was my punishment. They promised me he would not die," the woman said. He did not move, or speak, but his eyes flickered. She should not be here. No one was allowed in during recalibration. The doctors knew better. Yet she spoke as if she knew him: no one could direct such bitterness towards a stranger. "Why are you here and he is not? Why are you awake when he does not breathe, or speak, or know me?"

Everything about her was water, and that made something stir within him. Not memory, but perhaps instinct. Her hair was black and trailed dripping on the floor. She crouched over the arm of the calibration chair, and for all that she was water, her eyes burned.

"I can hear you, in there. Part of you knows, alive but buried. There is a part of you screaming in there like a drowning man. Yet I cannot raise what is left of you hence. There are some waters more powerful than I. Lethe, the Fates, the Underworld, they are greater," she said, each word rolling like a tide, and like a tide's voice it held no meaning for him. The stir of recognition became a tingle at the back of his neck.

"Are you my mission?" his tongue felt thick in his mouth but he managed the words without jarring the sensors. He did not dare move further.

"No, little soldier, little tool. I am not."

"Shame," he said, and his lips flicker in the muscular memory of a smile. "I think I hated you, once." He paused; unable to place where those words had come from. Somewhere deep within, on the other side of the river within his mind that parted him from all he had once been. All he must have been, because men were not born fully formed into the world. "How is that? Who are you? Who am I?"

The other shore in his mind beckoned, offering an answer to the blankness within. Perhaps this woman, clothed in black like a shroud, its tatters hanging from bare white shoulders and her long black hair shimmering wet down her back, trailing through the doorway… perhaps she could answer questions he no longer remembered how to ask.

"You are No One," the woman answered. "Lost and far from home. The war is over, yet for all your wanderings you cannot return there. Monsters you will fight, and monsters you will serve, before you find it again. This I foretell. This is all I may offer."

The door opened, the men in the lab coats returned and when his eyes flickered back she was gone. The next wipe would remove the memory of this meeting, but it was many months before his heart would forget the loss, that brief flicker of rage like a candle in the darkness.

Acheron. Styx. Cocytus. Phlegethon. Lethe.

The gods may swear their oaths by the Styx, and bathe their heroes in its waters, but even they know who are beyond her reach know that Lethe is the more powerful. Lethe, who offers solace to the lost, through whom life and death be breached. Those clear waters are the most sought, the most soothing, and the most to be feared.

A rumor spread to the very borders of the otherworld. A dead man hunting, a hero lost, a beloved beyond reach. Lethe in his veins, and at his hands many went down to the Underworld to cross the rivers. They whispered that he was immortal now, that Lethe had given him life.

Yet the time of gods was over, and their truths had only the half the power once possessed. Water did indeed make a man immortal. Yet no gods or water nymphs were needed when Mankind crossed into the once immortal realms, science the new magic at their fingertips. The water that made the Winter Soldier immortal was not just of the rivers, but of ice, enclosing and trapping him in sleep.

Thetis knew the truth. Water had always been her realm and she watched Patroclus as he slept, chill fingers caressing cold cheeks as she curled up beside him within his frozen tank. So long as there was water, she was there. A thousands miles away, the son of her soul if no longer of her body was trapped in mirrored deaths within the ice.

The silence stretched over decades. Water and ice and rivers, and dead men walking with Styx, Acheron, and Lethe in their veins.

She remembered.

And waited.

Author Note: Thank you for reading! Please consider leaving a comment, and/or come visit me on Tumblr under Avelera!