Major Bucky feels alert! No Darcy in this one, though.
All of this is un-beta'd, of course, so there will be typos.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own the Marvel Cinematic Universe or any of its characters.
WORD COUNT: 1233
Sleep was not something the Asset was accustomed to. The closest thing it ever got to rest was when it needed maintenance that was invasive enough that the technicians were required to sedate it for their own safety. That, and cryo-freeze, but that was simply a holding pattern, not giving the Asset the health benefits provided by sleep.
After it escaped HYDRA – he, after he escaped HYDRA – he didn't even factor sleep into his plans to continue evading them and the authorities and the man he pulled from the river. He was fully aware of what sleep was, having killed many targets when it left them at their most vulnerable, but it hadn't occurred to him that he would need it. He made his way out of the city on foot for some time, stealing food and a jacket to cover up the metal arm. He intended to walk the whole way there, but after two days, he started feeling oddly weak, for no reason he could understand. Luckily for him, he came across a rest stop and, after nearly falling on his face twice, passed out on the nearest bench. Even more luckily, he wasn't disturbed until after he had woken up hours later, the strange mental flashes of the man he'd fought, reaching out to him and screaming that name ("BUCKY!") jerking him back into consciousness.
From that point onward, he made a point of factoring the fact that he would need a safe place to sleep from time to time. And he also quickly learned to dread those times, because he would experience violent mental images – nightmares – of various people dying in brutal ways, all from the perspective of the killer. It didn't take him long to realise that they were his own memories, of past assignments. He woke up in a cold sweat every time, feeling sick enough to vomit up whatever meagre amount of food he'd managed to consume in the most recent hours (which also brought back memories of someone who looked like the man from the river, only much smaller, hurling into a toilet while his own hands rubbed his back). And they seemed to have no rhyme or reason; he had no idea when any of the events happened, or even if they were in any sort of order.
So he tried to go as long as he could without sleeping, but it was hard to balance that with maintaining constant combat readiness. He certainly never slept two nights in a row. He could go longer than the average human, but he still needed some in order to function properly. Because if he didn't, he tended to collapse at the most inopportune moments.
When the man in the river – Steve, his name was Steve, and I knew him – finally caught up to him, he was going on ninety-six hours without sleep, having planned on getting some rest about forty-eight hours ago, only to stumble into an occupied HYDRA safe house and spend the following two days dodging those agents. He was exhausted, and was initially convinced that he was hallucinating from a lack of sleep. Until the very same HYDRA agents caught up to him seconds later, and the man pulled him behind cover as they opened fire in the middle of the crowded street market.
He got out of there with a bullet in his leg, and between the blood loss and his state of exhaustion, he passed out right on the floor of Steve's getaway van.
He woke up three days later, in the medical wing of what he was told was called Avengers Tower. He'd been sedated for part of that time, while they treated his injuries, but had continued sleeping for hours after, until someone was brought in with a busted nose, and cried out 'like a wimp' (as Steve's friend Sam described it) while it was getting treated. The shout woke him up, and it took nearly a dozen people to hold him long enough to get him sedated again, after he jumped out of the bed and mowed down a large number of people trying to find a way out.
When he woke up again, Steve was by his side, promising that this was a safe place, that he wouldn't need to defend himself in here. He didn't believe him, but when given a choice (a choice, there was something he was pretty certain he hadn't been given in years) between a holding cell and a spare bedroom in Steve's apartment, he chose the latter. Because the last time he dreamed, he dreamed of labs and pain and of Steve carrying him away from it all. ("I thought you were dead." "I thought you were smaller.")
But being in a safe place didn't stop the dreams. Sam told him that they probably were his own memories, and gave him a notebook to help him put them on paper and try to figure out how the disjointed fragments all fit together. He wasn't sure if he wanted to know all that, yet, but he recorded everything, in case he changed his mind in the future.
His sleep patterns didn't change, however. He still didn't sleep as often as the rest of the residents of the Tower. When Steve bade him goodnight, he waited until his old friend – yes, he could remember that they had been friends, now – had gone to sleep, then he secured the apartment door and stood watch, pacing the front room and checking out the windows, even if they were far too high up to be worried about anyone breaking in that way (snipers in other tall buildings were not out of the question, however).
When he did sleep, he pretty much always woke to Steve holding him down against the floor or the wall. His screams would wake Steve up, and when Steve tried to rouse him, he would react much like he had in the infirmary: violently.
As he grew used to his new surroundings, the list of his nighttime distractions grew. He spent a significant amount of time in the training gym, taking out his frustrations on the reinforced punching bags, which usually wound up breaking under his assault despite said reinforcement. He also took to patrolling the halls, sometimes crossing paths with one of Steve's fellow Avengers, a man named Barton, who apparently had some experience of his own regarding being controlled and forced to hurt others against his will.
It got to the point where Steve suggested he use pharmaceutical methods to get himself to sleep, without any dreams to disturb him. The idea of voluntarily making himself so vulnerable was terrifying, and he protested vehemently. But after an incident where he passed out in the gym, right in front of Sam, too, there was no denying that he couldn't keep going with this strategy. It was just going to cause him more problems. So, after extracting numerous promises from Steve to keep watch, he took some sleeping pills offered to him by one of the doctors, and spent the next ten hours dead to the world in his own bed.
He was pretty sure that it was the best sleep he'd ever had, since before the war.
I'm not sure if I like where I left this, but here it is.
Next chapter prompt: "No, stop!". It will be much lighter, and shorter. I'm not setting myself any maximum or minimum word counts with these. So while Chapter 1's word count was in the 1600s, Chapter 4's will be in the 500s.