Weeping, Achilles spoke; his Goddess-mother heard,
Beside her aged father where she sat
In the deep ocean-caves: ascending quick
Through the dark waves, like to a misty cloud,
Beside her son she stood; and as he wept,
She gently touch'd him with her hand, and said,
"Why weeps my son? and whence his cause of grief?
Speak out, that I may hear, and share thy pain.

Homer - The Iliad, Book 1

She followed him from the river, trailing drops of the Potomac washing green behind her. The man on the bridge lay on the bank, yet it was the asset that she haunted. Perhaps he was mystery she could not solve, perhaps she could not bear the eyes of the other man, that saw her and did not know her.

She was not with him at all times, but after the museum his wanderings lead him across the ocean, to Europe and she was there on the frigate, and along the roads he would see her in glimpses. In the Alps he followed the route of old train tracks cut into the mountain and the steep slope down to the river below and she was there, perched upon a rock, watching him.

They did not speak. He knew she was not human, and that was enough for now. He wasn't sure he was human, either.

"There is a sea nymph following you."

Steve looked up from the data pad. On it was a map of Europe, locations crossed out, making a trail. With Ultron dispatched and the Avengers undergoing the task of rebuilding, others kept an eye out for new threats. They were finding their place in the world, he was once more free to resume the search. Sam had done his best, but the map was lined with dead ends. What he wasn't expecting was such a nonsensical statement and it took him a moment to realize his deafness had not returned, that he had indeed heard correctly.

"A sea nymph?" Steve said dryly.

Thor nodded. There was something about his certainty, with no trace of smile on his golden features, that sent a chill down into Steve's gut.

"She is clothed in black, and her shadows linger in the corner when she believes you are not looking. She is subtle, and very, very old. Older perhaps than I. There is a strong resemblance between you."

"A sea nymph," Steve deadpanned. Then, "There's no such thing."

Thor frowned. "With your own eyes you have seen wonders this world once thought unimaginable. Your flesh is a miracle of science and magic, in your veins runs the river water that separates the living from the dead. Yet you would question something so common as a sea nymph?"

At the mention of the river water, Steve straightened. A memory flickered at the back of his mind: a shadow upon the wall, the schnapps on Erskine's breath, and the tale of a sacrifice made to cross into the underworld. Disbelief had sat uneasy in his chest, as if placed there by someone else, someone who did not want him to believe what he was hearing.

Steve's brow furrowed, and he felt it now, the knee-jerk instinct to scoff at Thor. Yet how strange were sea nymphs in a world of otherworldly creatures and souls that lived in machines? Too much had happened for him to look back, to question the shadow upon the wall in the form of a woman with trailing black hair, or the dreams that haunted him at night of another battlefield, dust rising from sandaled feet, and the gleam of bronze.

"There's no such thing," Steve said, jaw tight, and this time he did not meet Thor's eyes.

The facility was a burned-out husk, with no trace of the water and ice that had once trapped him. Glass lay scattered across the floor, the metal tube that had been his bed and his home a shattered ruin. There was nothing there.

The cuts on his hand healed, his hair was now tied back at the nape of his neck. Each day the water flowed through his veins, mending all the little signs of life, holding back death. Each ache and pain washed away, with no scars left to show the passage of time. His brain it mended as well, proof enough that the serum was both blessing and curse.

He was human, of that much he was now convinced, or at least he had been. So the fact he could not remember anything of who he was troubled him, sat heavy upon his soul. He could not have sprung fully formed from the earth, he was no soldier sown from dragon's teeth. The man on the bridge had called him Bucky, and his face in a museum had named him James Buchanan Barnes. But memory was kept from his waking mind as if by a wall of ice, separating him from himself, like looking across a river to a far shore shrouded by fog.

So he wandered, No Man never returning home, retracing the steps of his journey and the sight of locations from his file struck his consciousness like meteors upon some distant moon. They left their impressions, but nothing lived or died there. He knew, distantly, that he had killed, and killed and killed and killed. Amazing what a man would do, when he knew no other life.

Only killing the man on the bridge had felt wrong, had felt like anything at all when the man dropped his shield and said the asset should finish his mission. For him, the asset traveled now, for the promise of a memory, for a dream on the other side of the river, blocked by the waters that ran through his veins.

He wandered, and the sea nymph followed.

Once caught, Steve could not shake Thor's warning. He began to look into shadows, noticing when they danced in ways that did not match his movements. That was always the sign before he caught a glimpse of her, her black hair coiling like a river snake, white flesh pale as a drowned man's face.

After all, how could he, an impossible creature with a myth of his own, deny that the impossible outside himself?

He thought he saw her in his dreams, sometimes, when that fish-gut mouth did not look haunting but simply familiar. Did not all mothers have piranha teeth, and black eyes dark as night, and, like night, without edges so when you stared into them it was like looking into a well of stars that went on and on forever? Did not all men look up and up and up at their mothers and see a goddess, a creature of another world who once had decided if you lived or died? He knew no fear in those dreams, only a rightness of being, just as with all children, what we know from earliest memory is not strange to us, it is only what is.

The trail went cold again. If Bucky was out there, he did not wish to be found, last seen crossing into Eastern Europe where their eyes were not quite so sharp, where a man could cover his trail with untraceable paper money and dive into the squalor at the edge of civilization, where no one was who they said they were, and all knew not to ask too many questions. What was one man among so many, in a place where so many did not wish to be found?

So why then did Steve feel like he was the one who was lost? Every day Peggy remembered less and less, and he could not be selfish when her real family deserved as much time with her as the family that would never be. Those were not his children and grandchildren gathered at her bedside, even though when he closed his eyes, for just a moment he could see what might have been. A son, red-haired like Steve's father, maybe. And then, another vision, a brunette with dark, shining curls like Peggy's and a name, Iphigenia, no more than fourteen and for some reason, an altar that was for their wedding but not. Her father walking her up an aisle that led to another life, an ended life and Steve shuddered at a sense of betrayal he could not understand...

What could have been, what never was, and what he now could no longer claim. Would he have still been young had they been married, without the ice to arrest the aging of his flesh? Would he still be just like this in that other life, eternally, damnably young next to his dying wife, wearing the flesh of a golden god that even today felt as separate from him as a suit of armor?

The end was coming. Soon, Steve knew he would be alone again, as he had been when he was eighteen, all except for Bucky and Bucky was out in the world, at the other end of a line he could no longer see, his anchor trailing into the dark below the waves, the chain snapped. He was helpless, and helplessnes had only ever made him angry, when he was sick, when he was small, when there was nothing he could do but watch Bucky slip through his fingertips, down to an icy river thousands of feet below.

Steve knew the price of anger, just as he knew how it coiled within him, like a snake easily roused, ready to strike if he did not soothe it. If he did not quiet it, and let it sleep. It grew and grew in the face of helplessness, no longer a tool for the heat of battle but a monster that would wrap him in its coil, and swallow him whole. Only now the anger was directionless, the most dangerous of all. There was nothing to rage against except time itself, and death, and the fact that death had not come for him sooner, though he was not ready to die, not yet. If he had died, then Bucky would have had no one waiting for him seventy years later, too late to stop it but maybe not too late to save. If he had died then, Bucky would have been alone. If he had lived… if he had not gone into the ice…

His children standing at Peggy's bedside, and maybe someone would have asked questions. Maybe someone wouldn't have dismissed the Winter Soldier as a myth, maybe that someone would have been him, and they would have fought in crumbling towers and flying ships while the gunshots of World War II still rattled in their ears and he would have pulled off the mask sooner, and Bucky would have looked at him with eyes that did not know him sooner, and his heart would have been broken sooner but there might have at least been a chance…

Steve started at a cracking sound, a spark of pain in his knuckles and pulled his hand free of the wall, the plaster a spiderweb of cracks around the imprint of his fist. He shook his hand out, though the pain was already gone and tiny scratches on his knuckles already healed.

The rage coiled and hissed in his belly and pounded in his head and he remembered no, not this time. He had learned his lesson on rage. But the pounding was like a war-drum in his head, it furled around him like smoke. He needed to get away, from this helplessness and and rage, from Time who sat as an indifferent High King, denying him all that he had wanted or earned, just a little happiness, just someone to call his own.

Then, like a finger trailing down the back of his neck, like a shadow moving strangely at the corner of his eye, he remembered. The sea. A mother's touch and voice calling from waves that crooned and soothed their son. Easy sometimes to forget, in the depths of the city, that New York was a seaside town in the place where Hudson met Atlantic, the fresh water turned to brine. Not so far in Brooklyn, for those swift of foot.

He found a shore not far from the apartment, where the water ran black, and if there were stars in the sky they could barely be seen against the fire glow of the city turning the clouds to burnt umber. Only the lights of man glittered in the Hudson. Here Steve found a dark place, not a peaceful beach where the Aegean met the Dardanelles, but a dockside where those on the edges of society went to be alone, for business, to hide away, or to drown the bodies.

Steve took a deep breath, taking in the smells of the city freshened by the water: the dumpster further down the pier, the vents from the subway tunnels, and that unnameable mix of smells that was simply New York. He looked out to the river, maybe like he was praying, he wasn't sure, only unlike anger he still had his stubbornness and that he didn't rein in so much. He felt like he was waiting for something.

It was 5 AM in Bucharest, and he was walking beside the river, which meant that they were walking beside the river, the shadow that stalked his side like a beast that had not yet decided whether it would gain more pleasure from its prey by eating it or playing with it. He hated her, which seemed to suit her just fine, and it suited him, this agreement of creatures that were not quite human. He did not know why she stayed by his side when it was the other one she wanted, that they both wanted. But who was he to judge? He stayed away too, probably for the same reason. When you want something so bad, sometimes it's just easier to stay away.

The shadow that wavered on the water like a shark lurking just below the surface stopped, then from the center of that shadow like a water spout rose a woman's form, dark and forbidding. She looked to the West, away from the sun. Her body was suspended as if by a thread, poised and alert as a predator smelling blood. Yet there was longing in her eyes.

(longing)

(rusted)

(seventeen)

(No, please stop.)

"He is calling for me," she said, and in her voice was water. Not the goddess's crashing sea, but the tears of a mother aching for her son. For just an instant there was a flash of something mortal in her eyes.

And just like that, she was gone, sparing not a glance for the shell of a man that she haunted.

"Do not turn around."

Steve froze at the woman's voice, deep and echoing and somehow more real than the distant hum of the city or splash of waves against the concrete shore. A hand brushed his shoulder, and he heard the rustle of silk as she crouched behind him, the press of a woman's eyelashes against the back of his neck and the dampness of tears, cold as the sea.

"You must not look at me," her voice wavered, and the fingertips on his shoulder clenched helplessly. Steve remained still, some part of him knowing he should fear the cold kiss of a gun barrel against his back. He feared it less, knowing it would not kill him, and feared himself more.

"Why not?" Steve said. "Who are you?"

"Your mother," the voice said. "On the shores of the wine-dark sea your father captured and held me, and put you inside me. You are the only joy that mortal life has given me. I took you to the River Styx and dipped you by the heel into the water, my son, my only. You were to have an immortal life, but it was not enough and you died, and only your name was immortal. As you wanted, as you asked. But now you have returned to me… my Achilles."

"Sarah Rogers is my mother," Steve and felt her tense, those long fingers tightened on his shoulder, not enough to hurt but there was an a terrifying strength behind them. Like his own, when the ability crush was easier than remembering to hold back.

"She was only a womb," the woman spat. "I am your mother."

He wanted to pull away at that point, shout down this phantom creature behind him and somehow put words to the memories rising around him like smoke. Sarah Rogers, Mama, with her golden hair tied back and tired eyes that were nonetheless kind, of those final days when the only way to keep her from tending to the dying was because she was dying herself, coughing out her life in the other room and he could not go to her because if he did he might die too. So he watched helplessly from afar as his mother faded to nothing, and was gone.

Instead he said, "Let me see you."

"You are mortal. If you see me as I am, you will die," the voice said and trembled so that Steve regretted his harshness.

"No," he said, and remembered something that Erskine had told him that night when the shadows had danced on the wall and he had caught a glimpse a woman, this woman, the sea nymph because even in public schools they teach you the mother of Achilles. He remembered the river water in his veins. "I am not mortal anymore."

The words tightened in his throat, the ones he had been afraid to speak because they sounded too much like Schmidt when he stood across a river of fire, taunting Steve. We have left humanity behind.

But right now it is the right thing to say, and doesn't Captain America always do the right thing? Unlike Achilles, who always did what his heart told him, Achilles' heart that was so full of rage, that had loved Patroclus, and fame, and war, and had brought him early to the land of the dead, where he swore that he would not make those mistakes again in his next life. That he would be better, not a perfect soldier, but a good man, and he would this time not lose Patroclus, and he would not fling himself into war, and he would not let pride and rage leave him hollow.

Except it had not gone that way. It had gone the same way, and Steve did not know where these thoughts were coming from but perhaps the sea nymph hovering at his shoulder had brought back these thoughts that hovered in his head like half-remembered dreams. But it had been the right thing to do, because she moved, the cold press of her skin against his faded as she drew back, and knelt before him on the concrete steps at the edge of the river.

"See," he said, as she looked up at him. Utterly inhuman, black eyes against a pale face laced through with green veins the color of the Hudson, and from those dark eye dripped tears unheeded as she looked up at him and he did not die. "I told you."

"My son," she whispered, like the hiss of ocean spray. She reached up and pressed cold fingers to his chin, brushing her thumb over his jaw, and wrapped her other arm around his knees.

"Mom," Steve said, as much a question as a name. It didn't feel right, but it was close. His mother had died when he was eighteen, in 1936 which was ten years ago and eighty, something no one really seemed to understand when they reminded him that he was old. He had found her headstone rubbed smooth by time. Part of Steve didn't mind this creature calling herself his mother, even if it was just a little off from center, just a little wrong. That part of him was just happy to have one small thing back after everything lost.

"You are mourning, my son," she whispered, looking up at him. "Why do you mourn, when your fame is eternal, and your body strong, and all the world lies at your feet for the taking?"

He had to stop himself from recoiling, the illusion of a mother from shattering, and pushed away the image of a twisted thing before him, slimy and glistening from the bottom of the sea as memory rose again. She only cared for your happiness when it matched her happiness, a voice at the back of his mind said, as if reminding him. She wanted you to be immortal, because that is all she understands. She never understood about…

"Patroclus," Steve said.

Her expression locks tight as powerful jaws slamming shut. "You will not find him. Not when he does not wish to be found."

"So he's alive?" Steve pressed. "Please, just tell me he's alive. Is he safe?"

"Not safe, no," she said. "Not from you, or his keepers, not even from himself. He is something else now, for he took up your shield, and all that he was has been destroyed. I warned him of this. He did not listen." And beneath the ocean roar of her voice, a hint of smug satisfaction.

He grabbed her arm, fingers curling around flesh as cold to the touch as an eel. She went still, staring up at him, lips parted to the very tips of pointed teeth showed behind the fish-gut red of her lips. "Take me to him."

"I cannot," she said, and he tightened his grip, shook her.

"Then help him," Steve said, and her eyes narrowed.

"I will not," snapped the sea nymph.

"Mother." And he remembered the sign she had made, kneeling at his feet, one hand to his chin the other wrapped around his knees. The sign of supplication, even the gods could not refuse one who begged with such a gesture, one of utter self-abasement. He didn't care. He would beg, if he must. He touched his fingertips to the bottom of her chin. He would go on his knees and swear oaths and serve whatever god he must, it didn't matter. "Please."

"Do not ask this of me, Achilles," she said, her eyes flickered down to the hand brushing her chin, to the desperation that must have been clear on his face. "He is not worthy of you, he never was. Let him go then, only another mortal twisting in the breeze, soon to be snuffed out once they find him, and learn what he has done. He is a pathetic creature, unable to remember even why he is hunted. There is Lethe in his veins. He is lost."

"Lethe," Steve said, seizing upon the word that took him away from the sick feeling twisting in his stomach, at Bucky hunted, shot like an animal and not even knowing why. "I remember that. What is? What do you mean?"

She hesitated, but then she had never been able to deny her own son. When she spoke next it was halting, reluctant, each word off kilter like a wave disrupted in its rhythmic crash, so that a listener waits, suspended, for the next beat of the tide. "They who worship the river serpent, the many-headed Hydra, they have poured Lethe water into his veins. He is barred from his own thoughts. Like the dead, he will not remember himself until he passes once more into the Underworld, when memories of all past lives return to mortals."

"No," Steve said, as if words alone could change reality. Maybe they could. He remembered the word waiting on the tip of his tongue, and that for some creatures, names have power. "Thetis, please. Save him. That's all I'm asking."

"If I remove Lethe's water…" Thetis said, with such reluctance and hatred on her face that it twisted her, and made her seem more monstrous and more human all at once. "Then he will know who he is. He will remember you. But nothing can save him from what is to come."

"I can," Steve said, and looking into the eyes of the water nymph, he remembered a beach, and weeping for a lost woman he had owned as a slave, and he shuddered at the man he had been. How this woman, his mother, had gifted the man he had been with armor to soothe his wounded pride. But he had learned since then of the danger of pride, how in the end no shield was worth the loss of Patroclus. He would do better this time. "Mother, this is all I will ever ask of you."

Her inhuman eyes searched his face, the lines of hatred still etched on her features as if they were carved there, never to be washed away by even the strongest tide. "You are a different man. My son knew there was more importance in glory and his immortal name, than for such broken creatures as pass their days in a blink on this failing world."

"I know," Steve said evenly, holding his gaze steady. "Just like I know I was wrong. Maybe only creatures that can die can ever learn from their mistakes."

Her expression hardened, and for a moment he wondered if he should take it back, if he should humor the sea nymph, this impossible being who had once given birth to him, and that wasn't even by far the most impossible part of his life. Was he being cruel to a creature that found her joy in cruelty? Was a little of the old Achilles shining through?

What would that do to Bucky?

"I will do this for you," she said, and stood. For the first time he saw the black gown of dripping silk that trailed from her white shoulders, down into the water. She looked back at him, over her shoulder. "But only because he will not thank me for it."

Steve's eyes widened. "Wait!" he snapped, starting to his feet on the hard steps, reaching out for her arm.

She leapt, too swift for mortal eye but not for his, a blur of a woman becoming water, if she had ever been anything else, and Steve's hands closed around empty air.

The yellow light of morning crested the narrow window of the basement in which he slept, and illuminated a black figure rising from the ground, where water trickled into the room from a busted pipe in the corner, its steady drip, drip was the only thing counting time in that empty place. He awoke to the sound of her footsteps, the slither and slip of them across the floor and her shadow as it crossed over his face, as she looked down at him with eyes that had never known death and so perhaps had never been alive.

"You," he croaked, looking up at the creature who had been his constant companion since the waters of the Potomac. You, she had always echoed back, their ritual, their greeting.

Her hand closed around his mouth.

He seized, the thing that had once been called Bucky closed his hands around hers, clawing at her with his nails and metal fingers, but she did not release him. He choked, feeling something rise inside him like vomit and he was drowning from water so cold it made him long for the warmth of the cryo tube. He shuddered and gagged and struggled in her grip and she looked down, implacable and satisfied and cruel, inhuman face twisted between resentment and satisfaction. Her hand lifted and he choked for air but the water kept coming, a thin stream that shone silver in the morning light through the grubby window and his hands flew to his throat, gasping for air, then to his head as the first vision crashed into his mind.

Sergeant Barnes, you will be the new fist of HYDRA…

Friends call me Bucky.

Let's hear it for Captain America!

Aristos Achaion! Aristos Achaion! Aristos Achaion!

Bucky, grab my hand!

She yanked, and the thin stream snapped free of his mouth. It hovered in a silver ball above her hand, and she looked down at him, black eyes without pity. "Consider this my gift to you, little soldier, your homecoming after so many years. You will find more dangers here than you ever did lost upon the waves."

But he did not hear her, nor noticed when she turned and vanished back into the shadows that swallowed her like the tatters of night. Vision after vision flashed in his mind. Brooklyn and Steve and the army and falling and freezing and death after death after death… The fog that shrouded his mind cleared as if blown away by a harsh wind and finally, after seventy years, he could see the far shore of his own memory.

Bucky pulled the pillow over his face, teeth clenching in the fabric, and screamed.

Author Note: Thank you for reading! I think this story has a bit of life in it yet, now with Cap 3 out. I hope you enjoyed, please if you have a moment leave a comment! I'd love to know what you thought and it really is the only repayment I seek for spending the time writing this.