I know it's a bit crass to kick off a story by telling its readers to go read someone else's fic, but seriously, this story would not exist without The Urban Spaceman's We Were Soldiers. There's giving your muse a bit of inspiration and then there's putting a grenade in its hands and making it clear it's either write or explode.

Plus the fic is just, y'know, really good. I went into it liking Captain America: The Winter Soldier and came out of it liking James Buchanan Barnes. In terms of fleshing out a character I can only relate it to dropping a depth charge into a puddle.

On that note, the fic you actually came here for.


Chapter 1: Waking Up


The Soldier doesn't know when the screaming started. The Soldier's sense of time is fragmented and those fragments are measured in hours—hours between the chair, mission successful, the chair again, and cold sleep.

Each time he wakes, at some point in that endless cycle of chair-mission-chair-sleep, the screaming becomes loud enough for him to hear. It's never the start of the scream, no; it's only after he can't ignore it that he realizes it's been there all along. When it gets too loud, the flashes start, the distractions, and his handlers use the chair to make it quiet again.

The scream gets loudest, then. In the chair. A voice in his head wailing NO and maybe other things, too, until the chair burns it out of him.

The missions are always successful and the scream is always under control. Until they aren't and the scream is deafening.

"I'm not gonna fight you. You're my friend."

The scream hits new registers at that, greater than the wind pouring through the dome's broken glass, greater than any of the helicarriers' munitions exploding around them. Trying to drown out the Mission. Trying to rip away the Soldier's focus. So he yells, tackles the mission, beats that focus into the Mission's face, screams back at the scream, and only makes it louder.

He draws back his fist; the mission isn't fighting back. He's just lying there, purple and bruised and broken. His head lolls and words fall from bleeding lips:

"Then finish it. 'Cause I'm with you to the end of the line."

The scream is all-consuming. It's tearing through his brain, ripping up his focus, lowering his arm and squeezing his heart like a burning vice. It's a punishment for a crime he doesn't remember. A fragment breaks through the hurricane, a recent mission, burned out but not completely: but I knew him.

I knew him. I KNOW him.

Debris crashes down and with a great groan of defeated metal, the floor gives out and the Mission falls into the river. The Soldier hangs, watching him fall, dislocated arm twitching as the scream changes pitch to almost sound like a name. A desperate cry snatched away by snow-laden alpine winds and—

He's diving down after the Mission. Can't leave a man behind. Never leave a man behind.

A voice, disjointed and distant, weary and angry: "Some fucking sergeant I am. I couldn't even get his tags."

The thoughts, full of flashes that send bolts of discomfort through his body, make no sense. Nothing does. Not the failures, not the Mission, not anything. The only thing that makes sense is following.

He plunges into the polluted water, tucks his useless arm to his chest, and swims. There's a shape amid the girders and glass and oil: the Mission. He grabs, pulls, kicks. Ignores the burning in his lungs. The Mission comes first.

He breaches the surface with a gasp. Far side of the river; a rocky beach, trees. He drags the Mission halfway clear of the lapping water. Strength exhausted, he just drops him. Stares, not trusting himself to stand up again if he kneels to check for a pulse.

His world tilts; he should be checking for the lack of a pulse. The Mission—the mission is, was, to kill this man. Stop him from stopping HYDRA.

The scream doesn't like that. His eyes pinch from the pitch of its cry. His entire brain is inundated by the scream; pinpricks of pain flare within its suffocating sound like lightning between thunderclouds. The man's words circle and dive through his head like hawks.

"Please don't make me do this."

"You're my friend."

"Your name is—"

The man shifts. A bit of water trickles out of his mouth. His chest rises, falls, rises again. The scream quiets all on its own, leaving him to grapple with a disorienting and heady silence.

He cuts his gaze across the water. The helicarriers are wreck and ruin, smoke and ashes. Though one is still firing on the others with its final functioning guns even as it tips over and tears itself in two, the truth is plain to see: they won't rise again.

Mission failed.

He looks back at the man. Prods the place the scream stems from, waiting for it to surface and give him an internal target for the black rage of mission failure, but it's silent and dark and walled off by fire that throbs in his temples.

If he's failed at his mission, then it doesn't matter if this man dies anymore. He can't bring himself to be angry at the man more than he's angry at himself, nor can he pinpoint exactly why he feels that way. He's useless like this: injured and distracted and broken. He needs—

"—James Buchanan Barnes."

—to be fixed.

Staggering towards the trees, he focuses on putting one sodden boot in front of the other while freezing water runs in rivulets down his face. He needs to find his handlers. Needs the chair, or else—when the scream returns—he's not sure anything will be strong enough to make the distractions go away.


The handlers are gone. The emergency rendezvous: empty. The safehouse: surrounded by local police. The second safehouse: torched. The phone number burned into his head: disconnected.

The Soldier leaves the phone booth and retreats into an alley. Takes inventory.

Most of his weapons are gone, lost in the fight or the swim, and though he'd been perfectly capable of pushing his shoulder back into place it'll be days before it's back to full strength. The broken ribs are on a similar timeline. He has one knife and two magazines for a gun somewhere at the bottom of the river.

"C'mon, let's go for your date with the quartermaster. It's not even your fault this time! Blame the Krauts for managing to put a bullet in your gun and not you. Besides, I'm sure he misses you."

"Sure, but his aim's getting better each time."

He shakes his head to clear out the voices, which doesn't work. His attention trips on the second. He doesn't normally pay attention to how he sounds when he speaks, but…

"His aim's getting better each time," he tries.

Gruffer, now. Cracked and tired from the fight, the pain, the hours hiding from pursuit. Even so, the same voice.

His attention, already tripped up, wanders back to the fight. To his own involuntary cries of pain when the man pulled his arm out of its socket, when the metal pinned him down. Takes that sound and holds it up against the scream in his head.

The same. Maybe. He'll know when the scream returns. For now, he needs supplies, a chance to recover, and a way back to whatever handlers are left.

That last thought sends a tremor through that black box the chair could never fully burn away. He won't be waiting long for a comparison.


One week after the mission blows up, he dreams. It's a fragmented thing, flashing lights and disinterested voices and cold fingers that blur into ice a disembodied pair of hands injects into his temples. The ice turns to fire and the Soldier wakes with a scream locked behind his jaw, because even with the distractions trying to interfere he can still force his body to obey a command of silence.

He's awake now, though, so he throws aside the thin motel sheets he'd dragged to the floor—the bed proved irritatingly soft—and pads to the dingy bathroom. A couple raided ATMs to a thrift store to three motels in three nights, a scattered trail across the East Coast. Some vague plan of finding a harbor and stowing away on an international freighter. A plan growing more vague and less urgent with each fresh wave of distraction.

Cold water on his face snaps him awake with more adrenaline than it deserves. Memories dance like fireflies just out of his reach, flaring and then disappearing. Something about a hose. Cold water. Punishment, probably. For letting the distractions take hold. They'll do that and more when he gets back. The chair has a lot to burn through, and he deserves the pain for letting it get this far.

The scream bites at his focus for that, making him wince with a scrap of a voice saying the thing is, you don't have to, and it's a movement he catches in his reflection. He swiftly schools his expression into a mask.

Most often, the scream is often more of a murmur, now. A constant background hum that occasionally surfaces to throw a flash of memory at him. Somehow, it's even more distracting this way. Where is its desperation, its rage? The Soldier can handle that. Rage, he understands. This quiet persistence is…new. He doesn't often deal with new outside of mission parameters, and without a handler as a source of truth he feels lost for handling this change.

He's discovered one thing: thinking about handlers, the chair, and going back in any capacity rouses the scream back to its old volumes. Its refutation is impossible to ignore, its enunciation clearer than it's ever been: NO NO NO NO. Why? Why not?

It never answers. Can't. Isn't anything but a shadow in his head without a mind of its own.

His own face stares back at him while he thinks, a mask of calm laid over features he's learning to see as familiar. Lanky brown hair. Shadowed blue eyes. Stubble that somewhat obscures a slight cleft in his chin.

Reaching up, his fingers brush that stubble. A vague sense that he should shave rises up from the black box—"Dames don't like kissing a porcupine, pal"—but it finds no purchase and sinks back down.

They sent him without a mask on that last mission. Last? He shakes his head again. The mission. That mission. Why?

"Please don't make me do this."

The scream ripples and stretches. More fireflies. He knows why the man sounded so pained. Why his voice broke on those words. He knows, and yet he doesn't.

Because the chair took it away. The treasonous thought comes unbidden and refuses to leave. It took me away.

His hand drops. He stares into his own eyes and tries to see through them to what lies beneath. Unperturbed blue stares back.

He closes them and reviews his vague plan. His handlers, whoever remain, don't know where he is or they would've picked him up by now. He can't signal them; all the hidden channels he knows are down or compromised. A detour to this town's public library earlier in the day had revealed to him the extent of his mission failure: all of SHIELD's secrets—and by extension, a good chunk of HYDRA's—dumped onto the Internet for all to see. His handlers in this country and many others are either in hiding, imprisoned, or dead.

His eyes open. The library revealed one other thing, too. An ad while he was perusing news from D.C., one that boasted about the new Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum.

In the mirror, blue eyes, empty and cold as ice. In that ad, a man to Captain America's left, frosty blue eyes staring out across the page under a shadow of brown hair. A slight but noticeable cleft in his chin. A name.

"Your name is—"

The scream shivers, and so does the Soldier.

"Bucky?"

"People are gonna die, Buck."

He has to know. The hidden handlers have been waiting for a week; they can wait a bit longer.

The scream shivers again, releasing a new wave of adrenaline into his veins.

"Hey, Sarge! Did ya hear yet? We got new orders!"

He pushes off the sink, heads for the door, and tries to ignore the phantom soldiers marching in lockstep all around him.


The museum isn't all that crowded at midday on a weekday. A couple school groups, some curious adults, a handful of Captain America fans he identifies by the overpriced paraphernalia they've already purchased from the gift store and the way they whisper and pose for pictures next to his star-spangled image. Things are muted, too, by the specter of what's just happened.

It's still enough of a crowd to blend into, though. In his coat and baseball cap, the Soldier is just one more nameless face to be forgotten as soon as he's out of sight—unlike the faces plastered on the wall behind the mannequins he finds himself stopping in front of. The faces make the scream pitch higher so he drops his gaze to the uniforms.

The one in front is wearing an outfit he recognizes from the helicarrier. The man, Captain America, Steven G. Rogers, had worn it. Is this a replica?

His eyes slip to the right shoulder. The memory of burying a knife there up to the hilt is still fresh, as is the nigh-invisible stitching in the fabric. Not a replica. Not at all.

Mural-Steve's eyes look heroically to the horizon and the Soldier can't bring himself to shift his gaze to the man next to him, the one whose blue eyes will stare not at that distant line but right at the Soldier in…in what? Accusation? Pity? Fury?

The scream hasn't stopped shivering since he stepped into this exhibit and it's making it hard to think, much less stay aware of his surroundings. He steps back and bumps into a child, who tumbles to the floor with a yelp.

"Sorry," he says on reflex. He reaches down to help her up on the same reflex, which demands he use his closest hand. His left hand.

She takes it before he can pull it back. Her fingers are tiny and white against the black leather; her weight, absolutely nothing to pick up.

"Are you okay?" he asks, because a couple other patrons are still looking his way and if nothing else he knows how to avoid making a scene when needed.

"Yeah." She stares at his hand after taking her own back, then seems to forget whatever she's thinking. "I shoulda looked where I was goin'. Did you see where Elise went?"

He shakes his head.

"Aw. Elise!" she takes off at the same pace that ran her into the Soldier's leg. A moment later, a harried young man hurries past, presumably in pursuit. The stares finally turn away from him, so he slinks farther into the exhibit.

The rest of it hits him like a train. It starts slow, the scream's reach extending a little farther, a little louder as he reads about scrawny Steven Grant Rogers.

"James, right?"

His face screws up while he hauls the kid out of the dirt and picks up his books from where the bullies had scattered them. "Bucky. Only time I'm James is when I'm in trouble. You're the new kid, right? Steven?"

Now the kid's face is the one to twist. "Steve. Except when I'm in trouble."

He reads about Steve, and the Howling Commandos, and the SSR's campaign against HYDRA.

There's a brief display about HYDRA. He makes it two sentences and one old recording's flash of the flag deep before the scream whites out his brain.


"Again, Soldat." He goes into the ring again. He comes out covered in blood and breathing hard—the latter draws a frown. "Again."


"You'll feel a slight pinch." The bespectacled man slides a needle into his arm and it burns like a lit cigarette. A cry builds behind his teeth. "Quiet now, my dear soldier. You are going to be the Fist of HYDRA." A proud smile that burns almost as much as the venom in his veins. "You can yet be so much more than this."


Screaming—in his head and without. A rubber mouthguard forced between his teeth. Hands pushing him back into his seat. A circlet of metal around his head.

Defiantly: "My name is—"

Pointless resistance. White. Bright, searing white.


A single window in a metal tube. Solution swimming under his skin, dulling his thoughts but not enough. His own face reflected in the dirty glass, colorless and pale. Frost pours into the chamber, his chest squeezes, and he reaches up for that man in the window—but his frozen limbs don't reach, and he falls.


Somehow, amidst the pummeling, he finds his way to a bench in a smaller, darker room. It's a much-needed respite from the kaleidoscope of memories assaulting his mind. At least until the far wall lights up with a woman's face. She speaks but he can't hear the words over the howling between his ears.

Bar. Not enough whisky in the world to drown what's burning him up inside. Red dress. Helplessness thick enough to suffocate. "I'm turning into you."

The woman is older in this interview. He looks closer. He knows her from somewhere else. A briefing. A mission.

A failed mission. Just one of them, a failure buried by the chair because the Soldier did not fail. The details come back in fragments: he tried to kill her. Was ordered to. Did not want to. The Soldier had wanted something against orders because the scream was new and loud and relentless and it threw off his aim. The handlers said it was for the good of the world and he told them he didn't believe that. Told them something else, too. Many many many times. What was it?

Sweating, shivering, he escapes that room and washes up against a commemorative display. There's a droning voiceover for the exhibit but he doesn't hear it. Can't, over the words in front of him.

"While on tour in Azzano, Italy," they read in stark white text on a black background, and the name of the place alone has a new cold sweat breaking out, "Rogers heroically saved 163 lives—including that of his best friend, Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes."

The scream isn't a scream but a drone, a litany against a cold table and cold hands and cold needles sliding lava into his veins:

"My name is James Buchanan Barnes. Age, twenty-six. Rank, sergeant. Service number, 32557038. My name is—"

More flashes. More tables, more syringes, more doctors and empty smiles and cold water and colder ice and this will make you stronger, Soldat until his stomach wants to heave itself up his throat. Each memory is a painting not given time to dry before the next one is smeared on top. It's a masterpiece of pain, confusion, and terror varnished by the despair of knowing he never made it out, not really.

He moves. He has to move. He has to—

Just past that, a massive display of his own face. Black and white, clean-shaven, framed by short hair, but his. The biography on the right-hand panel sets his sense of self spinning like a top and he can't move or he'll fall.

"Best friends since childhood," the exhibit voiceover says, breaking into his whirling thoughts. "Bucky Barnes and Steven Rogers were inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield."

"Please don't make me do this."

"Barnes is the only Howling Commando to give his life in service of his country."

If his world had rocked before, now it collapses in on itself. He pulls his baseball cap lower with his left hand because his right is trembling too severely to move and through some kind of providence finds a bench tucked in an alcove out of the way and mostly out of the light. He collapses onto it and marvels at the tightness in his chest, the sensation of not-enough-air-not-enough-space. His muscles are on fire. Sweat drips down his neck. His arm is clicking softly under his coat, mechanisms confused by the scattered signals shooting up and down his spine. He gets it. He's confused, too. Confused and pretty sure if he gets any air in his lungs it'll come out as a scream that'll never ever stop.

"Breathe, Steve. Ya gotta breathe slow and easy, like this. In, out. See?"

A rasping, asthmatic reply: "Easy—for you—to say."

He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to stay afloat amid the tidal wave of fragmented memories. He gets it. He can take a hint. He'll breathe.

For the first time in nearly seventy years, Bucky Barnes inhales, exhales, and doesn't feel the chair's hellish embrace come to rip him away from himself. He's a trembling, shaking, sweaty mess in a back corner of a Smithsonian exhibit, but he's himself.

He's himself.

And then he's not just a trembling, shaking, sweating mess, but a crying one, too.