Now
He awakes.
The doctor's voice falls silent, and after the soldier blinks the ice sludge away, he looks around the waking room for the doctor.
The doctor isn't there.
The soldier remains very still, says nothing, looks straight ahead as the white coats sink the needle into the back of his weak hand, stick leads to his forehead, draw blood from his weak arm. He doesn't remember things well—he doesn't have to—but he knows the doctor is always there. The last time (maybe) the doctor was hollow-cheeked and sat on a chair the whole time, coughing
(die why don't you just die can't die be quiet be quiet be)
once in a while. This troubled the soldier, but only a little, like a jammed weapon. The doctor was always there, after all.
The doctor isn't there.
There are guards in the waking room. There are always guards in the waking room, but the soldier isn't sure how many. The barrels of their guns stare at him.
The doctor isn't there.
He kicks at one of the white coats.
After that there are more needles.
The doctor isn't there. Not even to punish him.
The doctor's voice is there, poured into his ears. Pictures are lanced into the soldier's eyes and settle somewhere inside his skull, in one of the places he can't take apart. It's all right. He has the voice, telling him things, who is the target, what he is to do, what he is for.
The soldier watches close to a road lined with large houses. Sunlight glints off window panes and chrome fixtures but there are always shadows, everywhere, at all times. From under his cover he can see the trickle of traffic. Two young girls (low threats) wearing pants that flare around their calves walk down the street with a German Shepherd (higher threat) on a leash. A Plymouth rolls down the tarmac, windows rolled down, music pouring out: a man telling trouble not to get in his way (car: threat, but pulling away).
He makes his way towards the house where the target is, silent and fast. There are trees around the house, and no good place to take a shot, but even with the leaves in the way, the soldier can see the target folding a newspaper in the kitchen, then putting a mug away before making his way to the bedroom upstairs. They do it like that, most of them: live next to wide windows and behind flimsy gates, their backs turned to doors. Even the car parked in the driveway is the kind whose fuel tank can be pushed forward and punctured. There isn't a single bodyguard, either.
Bodyguards can't stop the soldier.
His orders are to get rid of the body afterwards, so he slinks into the house, creeps upstairs. The target doesn't have time to turn around before the soldier fires two shots into him, one into his abdomen, the other into his head. The bullets are small caliber. If the pops carried outside the house, they were no louder than the sound of a car backfiring.
It's enough. The target staggers, threads of blood hanging down. He looks at the soldier, his face blank, maybe even calm. The soldier doesn't like (doesn't matter what he likes) looking at their faces, the eyes shining like steel needles, the parted mouths. But this face is drained now, because the soldier was made to never miss, and he's sliced all the bad thoughts clean when the second bullet bounced through the target's brain like a pebble going rattle rattle rattle inside a shell.
Bad thoughts. Bad things. The doctor
(wasn't there)
wouldn't have sent the soldier after him otherwise.
A swipe of the metal fist sends the target to the floor, where he slumps like a sack of flour. It will be very quick now.
The soldier has bad thoughts, too, sometimes. There's a machine that cuts them out. It's better afterwards.
After the body stops, he makes his way downstairs again. He needs to wrap the body up so he can carry it. Then he will
(wipe)
scrub everything until there are no prints, no blood. Then the body will go in the car and the car is going to blow up, the gas tank ignite so fast the explosion is going to sear flesh away and shatter bone.
After that there will be nothing. Nothing at all.
The door. The soldier senses the rattle of keys even before he hears it. He abandons his task and darts soundlessly to the top of the stairs, where he can see without being seen. He is fast, much faster than anyone. The Derringer is already in his hand. Two shots, but he only needs one.
It's a child.
A boy, maybe twelve. He's as loud as the soldier is silent as he opens and closes the door, tosses the keys into a dish, traipses across the foyer.
The soldier can see the Derringer's barrel shaking. He holsters the gun. His fingers hover near a knife handle.
The mission briefing, the words and pictures the doctor put in his head, said nothing about a child.
The doctor wasn't there.
No witnesses.
Below, the boy hops around on one foot as takes his shoes off and dumps a bag on the floor. 'Dad?' he calls out. He doesn't see the soldier, doesn't hear him, doesn't smell him. 'You still home? They let us out early.'
The soldier doesn't (can't) think about things. He has the mission. He has his purpose. The doctor
(wasn't there)
makes sure
(he wasn't there he wasn't there)
of that.
He has terminated the target. He can leave now. Disappear.
The boy moves towards the kitchen.
The soldier must get rid of the
(dad?)
body.
No witnesses.
The soldier's body rushes downstairs. He watches. He is a passenger. The boy lets out a squeak of fear and surprise as the soldier's arm grabs him, then yelps
(no no no no no)
louder as the blade slashes his side. An arc of blood sprays on the floor.
(stop)
(stop)
(stop it stop itstopSTO—)
'Stop.' The boy has landed on the floor and is trying to get away, smearing red behind him, before the soldier realises the word has come out from his own muffled, muzzled mouth. He looks down
(you are who are you)
(you kn—)
at his hands, one metal, one flesh, both blood-speckled. A bead of scarlet slips down the steel. His right hand is still holding the knife. Combat knife. It is a war. He is a soldier in a war.
Not a war. Not children.
The thought goes off like a flare inside his skull, and the pain spills into his eyes. He is not supposed to think like this. He is not supposed to have these things, scuttling about inside. The bad thoughts. The doctor takes the bad thoughts away. Bad. Wrong. Sick. The soldier is all these things. That is why he has to do what the doctor tells him. The doctor wasn't there. The things the doctor tells him to do are—
'No,' he whispers.
He has said a bad word, but it didn't slice his lips in half when it came out.
'Get away from me,' the boy says, as he crawls away on the floor. The soldier can smell his terror, coppery like the trail of blood, but when the boy cries out again it's not at the soldier. 'Dad. Dad.'
There is a thump upstairs. The soldier can hear it even if the boy can't. He walks around the boy and up the stairs. He can hear a whimper and a gasp behind him. He doesn't look back.
The man isn't dead.
One in the abdomen, another in the head. The soldier didn't miss. The soldier never misses. The man—the target—should be dead, blood dripping from his head, soaking his shirt, smeared all over the grey carpet. The soldier can see bone shards, flecks of grey matter. The man crawls, wild-eyed, dribbling sound. Slumps to the floor. His hand opens and closes.
The soldier still has his knife, the edges dark with blood. He has to complete the mission. A slice across the man's throat. Airway, blood vessels. A plunge into his liver. Cold tightens inside the soldier.
He doesn't know what's wrong, what needs to be fixed.
When he
(stop)
knifes the liver, the blood that will ooze out will be dark and slow. He remembers—
—crawling.
He is trembling.
The doctor—
He must be fixed. He must fix this.
'Leave him alone!' The boy has managed to climb up the stairs and has dragged himself in front of the man's body.
Finish it.
Not! There!
A starburst of pain blinds the soldier: a wad of cotton on his fingers a blond boy no a blond man wiping blood off his nose shaking his head come on let's clean you up at least I don't have a black eye I know I can't afford the steak laughter can't take you anywhere—
The soldier's hand fastens on the boy's mouth just as he begins to scream. The knife is on the floor. The boy's face is wet with fear and hot with anger and he tries to fight, but no one can't fight the soldier.
'Shh.'
A man telling him that. A girl. Hair ribbon. Pencils. Woman reading a book aloud.
The doctor was—
The doctor—
This is not—
This is not who you—
The boy's panicked heartbeats slow and he goes limp, weak from too little blood, too little air.
Pain ripples inside the soldier's head again. He can't see anything. He can see sunlight, snow, smoke. The mission. The mission is:
Stop this.
This cannot stand.
Pick on someone—
He hears the mask clatter to the floor. His hand must have pulled it off. Words bubble up. They feel odd in his throat, and so he must get them out.
'All right,' he says to the boy, but his voice sounds ugly to his own ears, rusty with disuse. The boy is half-unconscious. He can only let out a soft little moan as the soldier carries him into his bedroom.
He has stepped into the wrong bedroom. This one belongs to a girl, a pleated skirt folded on the back of a chair, a pair of mary janes peeking out from under the purple bedspread, colourful books on a shelf. But it is the right bedroom. The soldier knows because there are stars. He knows the stars mean something. The stars are important.
More half-memories jab the inside of his eyes, then slip out of reach. A girl again. A flash of light, breaking metal, a whiff of ghost-smoke, red. One of those. One of those what?
'It's all right,' he says again, as he lays the boy down on the bed and fashions a sheet into a bandage.
You used to do…
What? What did he use to do? What did he use to be? He is the soldier. There is nothing before the soldier, only there is. The memory scuttles about under his skin like a trapped insect. It makes him Sick. Bad. Wrong. He is a weapon. He is a wonderful weapon.
His metal hand has torn an edge of fabric to shreds.
He makes a sound, but the boy can't hear him. There is a trail of blood across the floor, the rug, pointing at the bed. The soldier picks up the rest of the torn sheet, follows.
The man is on the landing outside, dead, cooling, open-mouthed, open-eyed. (He doesn't like their faces.)
The soldier looks down at the blood, brown on the carpet, red on
(flesh)
the stairs. There is somewhere he has to go. He runs the torn sheet over the steps as he walks downstairs. There is something he has to do.
He has to—
—wipe it off.
He opens his eyes.
He is looking at a telephone sitting on a side table. He can hear a clock tick tick tick slicing time away, and looks at the telephone again. He doesn't remember using one before, but he knows how to do it, so he must have. There is a fat book on a shelf under the phone, and inside the book there are rows and rows of numbers, on yellow paper thin as onionskin. A page near the beginning says Emergency Numbers. Is this what this is, an emergency? He looks at the coiled phone cord, the holes in the rotary plate staring at him like eyes. Wires mean pain, but he trusts them. He knows what they do. He knows he needs them.
He dials the number. Blood drips onto the phone in fat droplets.
'State your emergency,' a woman says on the other end of the line. Her voice crackles a little. He knows that too.
The words trickle out. 'Forty-nine Sycamore Lane. He's still alive.'
He lets the handset drop, wanders towards the driveway. There is the car. They will see him. He doesn't care that they will see him. He needs the car. He needs to go. Where? The man inside his head, telling him shh. Not doing things to him. He doesn't know who he is, who the blond man is. He doesn't need to know anything that isn't the mission. He breaks into the car, slides into the driver's seat. His hands fasten on the steering wheel, not tightly, but he hears the plastic crack. Another jab of pain, behind his right temple: a city called New York. He knows it exists, he has always known it existed, but it matters.
His head hurts. He isn't supposed to hurt. Hurt others.
Save. You gotta save—
Who?
Who?
New York. The city called New York. He hot-wires the car, which is easy enough to do with the metal hand, then drives away. He knows how to drive a car, drive a truck. Ride a bike, fly a plane. The knowledge bulges inside his skull. In a moment the bone will crack and it'll all spill out.
The doctor. The doctor pulled him out of the dead. He doesn't like the living. That is why he has no past, no name, no family.
You have a name. You have…
It is too hard to think. He focuses on the mission: New York. He follows the signs telling him how to leave this city
(philly you know philly remember when we)
and get to the target. Soon enough the traffic thickens, a sea of chrome fixtures hazy in the heat, and sweat pools under his body armour. He knows what is happening. Without the doctor, he is starting to come apart. His skin will flake off, his bones crumble. His insides will fill up with loose wires and mould. He can feel the start of it: great big splotches of purple and blue in his eyesight, a tremor that has started deep in his flesh and is spreading outwards. His throat is sandpaper-dry.
New York. He needs to go to New York. There is someone he needs to see, to save. His father? Did he have one? Is that the blond man? A brother? The girl, the woman? Images curdle and sting just behind his right temple, always out of reach. He wishes he could just claw them out.
The car runs out of gas soon, and he pushes it into an empty dirt road before carrying on on foot, guiding himself by the turnpike and its constant rumble of traffic. He stays out of sight but he knows his appearance will draw their (whose?) attention once he reaches places thick with people. When he slips through a town scattered around the main roads he rummages through the dumpsters behind a cluster of warehouses and finds first a jacket with a hole, then a pair of old pants. They'll do, even though they fit poorly and smell of day-old fried clams.
How does he know that? Is he hungry? His stomach tightens, his head sways, and he throws up behind the dumpster, the sound of his retching drowned out by the rumble of traffic.
His punishment is going to be something he can't even imagine. His stomach clenches again, but instead of vomiting he just coughs up some more burning fluid. It bubbles in his mouth and nose. He hides his two guns under the jacket, straps his remaining knife above one of his boots, where he can reach it easily. He starts walking.
The sky darkens with clouds, only they're not clouds, it's the ice-sleep, numbing him, numbing everything.
He opens his eyes.
Now it's dark, real dark, the kind with stars, and he's shivering again. The pants' legs and his boots are soaked and leaves cling to his clothes. Has he been walking through bushes, wading through water? Cold darts through him. He checks for the guns, the knife. Still there. His hand, the real one, is smeared with something that looks like oil, but he knows from the smell it's blood. There's some on his mouth too.
New York. The mission. He has the mission. Overhead, a plane roars past. He can only see tarmac and the sodium haze of lights and the black slickness of water, but he knows he's getting closer. It only takes until daylight for him to see the shape of the city. He does not recognise it, but here and there there are shards, like the ones digging through the inside of his head.
The doctor wasn't there. The doctor can see him, everywhere, out of glass, the sheen of the sun on tarmac, headlights, the silver haze of water on the
(island)
horizon. The doctor is seeing him through all these people who walk past him and pretend not to notice, women, men, children, sunglasses, squinting, beards, white hair. He slinks further out of sight, to where it's most shadowy. The sun beats down, burnishing everything, even streets clogged with cars and dotted with trash.
Terrible things will happen. Terrible things.
He stows away on a ferry, makes his way towards the place where the towers tear into the sky. Names rip through the inside of his head like slow bullets. He can feel them cut through blood vessels, grey matter. Through steel. Staten Island. Hudson. (Person? Place?) There are too many people. Threat, threat, lower threat, higher threat, threat. Too much noise, too many cars, too many smells. He doesn't know this park, these streets, the towers of glass reaching up too high, the pointing cameras like guns.
The bridge. He knows the bridge. He has to stay out of sight, head low, metal hand in his pocket, but on the bridge he is hemmed in by girders and granite. He wants to break into a run. No, being hemmed in is Good. Being in the chair, the ice. The dark.
It's not dark here. It's sunny. He passes boats, piers, flower sellers, yellow cabs, a woman hosing down a sidewalk, rows and rows of houses. He knows these houses. He doesn't. The air smells of exhaust. A paper under a marquee catches his eye. The poster is full of dark shapes and he walks fast, but he can read the names. Steve McQueen. Ali—
Steve.
There is a wrong thing inside his chest. He can feel it beat against his ribs.
Steve, was that his name? Is that his name?
He doesn't have a name.
What has been done to him?
What has been done to you?
Me.
He opens his eyes.
He is in a park and it's twilight. He can smell caged animals, hear the din of traffic. Ahead of him there are trees.
Out of sight he will be able to pull them out, the things beating loudly inside his right temple. He has been chasing them all day, he knows. Following them down alleyways, around street corners. He must have.
He is shaking again. His vision is blurry, there's an iron band of pain around his head, a smaller ache in his legs, his stomach, his throat, his back. He needs the doctor to fix him. He needs the doctor to fix him soon.
He is never going back.
Dead is better.
There are people boxing him in. Two in front, two more behind. They are pretending to be a man in a suit hurrying somewhere, a man and a woman in brightly-coloured shirts pushing a baby chair, blending in. But they move too stiffly, their pace too similar. The baby chair is too covered up for hot weather. What's inside? Guns? Knives? Ropes? Grenades?
His body may be starting to fall apart, but he knows that the loop of footpath up ahead is where they'll make their move. He slows down, doubles back towards where there are more people (balloons, ball game), then darts into a darker spot under tree branches before breaking into a run across the woods.
He can slip through their fingers. He can just disappear.
He crosses a footpath, then edges out of sight again when he notices a pile of rags on a bench. No, not rags—a body, which stirs. He slows down, watches for a threat. There are only a few last embers of sunlight, but it doesn't matter. He can see almost in full darkness.
The body slumps off the bench and onto the ground. It's an old woman, stick-thin, a sour alcohol smell clinging to her. She struggles on the ground, then stops in confusion.
He has to run.
Threat?
Help her?
?
He edges out of the trees, soundless. There is the footpath. He can run down the footpath.
The old woman is still on the ground.
He senses the electricity even before it starts. It spreads out from his metal arm, races through his body, knocks him down, makes him convulse and choke.
It's over. He tastes dirt and blood, reaches for a gun, a knife. His left arm doesn't work. His right one, only barely. His hand jerks, almost out of his control, and there's fire spreading under his skin, through his wrist, up his arm, but if he can reach, if he can just reach…
The old woman isn't an old woman at all. Did he always know that? He must have.
Fire. Sting. Needle-prick.
The world around him starts to spin.
His hand flops down. He tastes dirt again.
He feels himself be lifted, herded. His legs move out of his control. He can only see branches, a swatch of dark sky.
He can't stop this. Doesn't even know how.
It's better this way, he supposes. Everything is as it should be.
The barrel of a gun is pressed under his ribs. 'Be quiet.'
He couldn't scream if he wanted to. His tongue lies in his mouth, a dead weight like his body.
Even so he manages to squirm when he's dragged away. He manages to fight them a little.
The world spins faster, then his head is forced into a hood. He can feel himself being bound and shoved into—a van? A truck?
This time he does want to make noise, but instead of words or a shout, only a dribble of spit comes out. Breathing is hard, and he wishes he could make himself stop, but his chest keeps rising and falling, drawing in air.
It's Good, though. Good that he can't move, good that he's hog-tied and pressed face down on a hard metal floor stinking of motor oil. This way maybe it means he didn't completely want it. Not completely. Maybe it's not entirely his fault (it is).
Light blinds him. He's come to in the chair, the one that scrubs the inside of his head. The metal arm is gone, transformed into jaws holding him in place.
The machine closes around him.
He can makes sounds again. Yell. Beg. Scream. It doesn't matter.
Better this way.
The electricity races through his head, his skin, his nerves, and this time it burns, this time it will kill him, it will, he hopes it w—
:=:=:=:
light
fire
black water ice
blackout
TBC…
Author's note: Putting all the annotations for the previous five chapters/sections here at the end of Part I so as not to break the flow. So, chapter 10: Bucky humming—he's probably not even aware he's doing it—is once again a reference to the Cold Case episode The Road (season 5, episode 15), where it was a sign that one of John Smith's victims wasn't completely broken yet. "Yet" being the operative word in Bucky's case, it seems. The General is a shout-out to General Karpov from the comics. Obviously 616!Bucky and MCU!Bucky have very different backstories, not just in general—to the point I see them as different characters to a certain extent—but also specifically wrt the creation of the Winter Soldier… but I thought it would be an amusing little touch nonetheless. Hey, in Ed Brubaker's CA:TWS cameo he got to fry his fave's brain, my sense of humour is totally unobjectionable in comparison. ;)
Chapter 12: In case the date doesn't make it clear, the 1964 mission is supposed to be Bucky's first Winter Soldier assassination. His unease around heights is taken from the comics. Comics!Bucky is afraid of heights and, in my head-canon, so is MCU!Bucky. It probably has something to do with the plunge into an icy chasm, igss… The drowning a target in a bathtub thing is also from the comics. (Oh, and for the terminally curious, the people he kills are either Russian nationals (possibly defectors), British nationals, or American nationals, and this takes place in Hong Kong. I tried to think of what would be the most shit-stirring thing for Hydra to do, and obviously the first answer was sending Bucky to personally pee in LBJ's coffee. But that might be beyond even their powers, so they had to settle for sending someone with a Soviet star on his arm to kill a foreign bigwig (and, as bad luck would have it) his wife in a British protectorate right next to the PRC. But seriously, they're still bitter about that coffee thing.)
Chapter 14: The botched mission in 1973 references an equally botched mission in 1973 from the comics. There, Bucky was sent to the US, his conditioning slipped, and he ended up making his way to New York in what was possibly the world's least fun road trip. He wandered around in the city for a few days, but since his memories were still gone, he was quickly picked up by his handlers again. Department X then decided not to send him on any further missions on US soil for fear this would happen again. In my fic, of course, I changed all this considerably, partly because of the obvious differences between the comics and the MCU, and partly because MCU!Bucky's conditioning is quite different from comics!Bucky's conditioning. MCU!Bucky also clearly doesn't have any problem with US missions by the time the events of CA:TWS roll around—and by implication this was already the case in 1991, taking it as given that he really was involved in Howard and Maria Stark's deaths—but even assuming, as I do, that Pierce's hold on Bucky was much stronger than Zola's, it made sense to me that the real catalyst for Bucky slipping his leash would be Zola's death in 1972, followed by a mission likely to trigger some of his memories.
The song Bucky hears coming out of the car is indeed Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man. Because it was released in November 1972 and I am a terrible person. ;) No, but seriously, the real reason I used it is because, as I see it, Bucky's whole Winter Soldier plot line is basically a perversion and distorted reflection of what happens to Steve. The serum amplifies what's already inside, yes, but whereas in Steve's case his good qualities are put to good use, in Bucky's case his good qualities (loyalty, care-taking, eagerness to do the right thing) and less good qualities (ability to compartmentalise/suppress things under his Cool Guy—reference very much intended—persona) all get turned against him in horrific ways. So it's in keeping with the theme that a song Steve associates with someone he loves and trusts would of course be playing during one of the lowest points of Bucky's life. Because that's just how we roll in this fic! Speaking of rolling, the Steve McQueen/Ali McGraw film is The Getaway (/ba-dum-tish). The lines in this and previous chapters about liking the dead better than the living come from James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, which was actually a major inspiration for Part I of the fic.
Also, while I tried to make sure Bucky's trip to New York, hallucinatory/disjointed as it is, is geographically accurate, I've never been to New York (and of course I can't time-travel to the 70s!) so I do apologise for any mistakes.