Coney Island
You were twenty-three when your childhood friends went to war and left you on your own, and frankly you were pissed about it. There was absolutely no way they would ever survive without you. Steve had always been puny and was the first down every single time the three of you would wrestle as kids, he was weak and small and you were sure he would be killed immediately. Bucky on the other hand was a smidge more physically capable, but ever the infuriating flirt, he would probably get swooned by some german broad that was actually a Nazi in disguise; and he, dumb and in love, would be none the wiser.
They were idiots and the day before they left you made sure they knew it, you teased them when they returned from their date at the fair, you teased them when Steve said he’d be going to war with the big guys, and with tears in your eyes you teased them as Bucky’s train departed the station and left you standing on your own.
If you were honest with yourself, you had no idea what you were going to do without them. You could always enlist and become a nurse but blood made you sick and you didn’t want to deal with whiny men who desperately wanted to get laid, you could stay at home and be one of the women who sewed clothes and flags for soldiers but that was dreadfully boring.
After much deliberation you ended up with a job at the library. It wasn’t anything special, you’d stock papers in the morning and make sure any soldier that stopped in was immediately served and felt welcome in his time at home. Sometimes children would stop by and you’d sit with them and try to teach them how to read before they inevitably had to go home to their worried mothers, tired from picking up the jobs that soldiers left behind when the war started. It was nice, but quiet and most of all unbearably lonely.
Stocking the papers kept you well-informed, and one morning to your surprise in bold lettering a headline declared that Steve Rogers, your Steve was “Captain America”. Sure enough, he was painted on the front page looking like a bodybuilder in a skin-tight halloween costume attempting to convince the public into blind patriotism. He looked so happy, so alive, but the smile plastered on his face left a pit in your stomach, what were they doing to those soldiers? Nobody else who had come back from the war looked so changed, yet there Steve was looking nothing like the boy you grew up with. You sighed, at least this was an update on one of your friends, Bucky’s whereabouts were still unknown. Last you had heard he was a part of the 107th, his last letter to you seemed a tad bit rushed but he sounded so excited that you hadn’t originally been worried. Then, the letters stopped coming and the only updates you got were the little times where he was mentioned or even more rarely pictured beside the Captain America.
The days stretched on for months after that, you woke up, went to the library, snuck glaces at the papers, and then went home and repeated the cycle all over again. There were some days, like one crisp morning late winter, where things seemed a little more hopeful than usual. Instead of dragging yourself to the library, you seemingly floated down the street and said hello to your neighbors and the kids playing hopscotch in the alley. Their happiness that morning is still etched into your mind, the cold that danced on your skin as you rushed to the library burns your memory, the contrast of what was to come made that mundane moment feel like a miracle.
“Hello Mr. Edwardson” You chirped, his head whipped up and he forced a grin that would usually come easy to such a cheery man. “Where are the papers, is the paperboy late? That’s not like Charlie, usually he’s on time.” You adjusted your watch, sure enough it was 7:28, he should’ve dropped them off half an hour ago.
“Don’t worry Miss Y/L/N, I already set them out for today. Today is going to be a pretty slow day, would you like the day off?”
You grinned, “Mr. Edwardson is there something in your coffee? For a grumpy, decrepit, old man you’re being rather nice today.”
Usually he’d join in, joking about how a young lady such as yourself should be more polite and soft-spoken, but today he just smiled at you like you were one of the sick soldiers stopping by the library for a book. “I just think it would be best if you take the day off, that’s all dear.” The sudden seriousness in his voice was foreign to your breakfast conversations.
You paused before hastily answering, “Yes sir.” The genuine peppiness in your voice was now grossly artificial. You quickly grabbed a paper on your way out the door, desperately hoping your gut feeling was wrong. There were only a few possibilities here. You were a bookworm as a kid, Mr. Edwardson knew you and knew your life and never had he once acted like he had this morning. Something was wrong. Was it your mother? No, surely your stepfather would’ve called when you had woken up if that was the case. It could possibly be the upsetting announcement that we had lost the war, which didn’t seem the case because the people on the street would’ve been more upset. When deliberating what could possibly be wrong your mind circled back to one fear over and over again and with every step you took it seemed more likely than it had before. You rushed to your apartment and flung the door open and laid the paper down on the table in the dining room, thumbing through the section about factory conditions which usually would’ve peaked your interest, you hated the way people were forced into factory jobs to make products for the war effort if they wanted to make enough to get by. War shouldn’t include the innocent few, children shouldn’t have to grow up worrying about fighting they don’t know the cause behind. Then you landed on the headline, Howling Commandos Dealt A Devastating Loss, underneath was a picture of the soldiers in the group. You didn’t know the names of the others but clear as day were Steve and Bucky. Your heart dropped to your stomach and you couldn’t breathe, you didn’t want to read the article but you couldn’t stop your eyes from soaking in the poison words on the page.
The Howling Commandos finally experience a bit of what they’ve been dishing out as one of their most skilled soldiers lost his life. In a recent mission, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes slipped out of the clutches of Captain Steve Rogers as they attempted to take control of a train being ridden by none other than HYDRA scientist Arnim Zola. The body has not been recovered but it leaves us at home to wonder, just how will the Howling Commandos deal with such a loss to their team and will it affect the final outcome of the war? More on page 15 where we read Howard Stark’s guide to the technology of the future.
You reread the lines until the words started to look jumbled and messy, you must have read something wrong, but nothing was making sense and you kept getting caught on his name. No, they must’ve made some mistake right? As you begin to close the paper your eyes flit up to the picture of them all, in the center is stupid Bucky with that perfect annoying mischievous grin that you’d seen millions of times before. He looked so foolishly happy, smiling for the cameras with a strong arm wrapped around Steve. A quick breath of air fills your lungs as you choke out a heavy sob, hot tears stream down your face. “No... No no no…”
Before you realize it you’re standing in the middle of your kitchen, sinking to the floor. Of course you teased them about it but there was no way Bucky could actually be gone. Not your friend, not like this. They had been doing so well, why did it have to end like this? They were supposed to win the war and come home and start families. You’d live in an overpriced suburban neighborhood and your stupid kids would run to school together and if anyone ever dared to mess with your daughter the boys’ sons would come to her rescue. It would be cookie-cutter, something none of you have ever really wanted, but it would be done together. It would be boring, but you’d rather die watching paint dry than live a minute knowing they were gone and you were here alone. You clutched the paper to your chest and tried your hardest to breathe.
It was only a couple weeks later when the papers announced that Captain America, America’s pride and joy, sacrificed his life in the fight against HYDRA. You didn’t shed a tear, you were too angry for tears.
When Peggy Carter, a friend of Steve's, helped found SHIELD you were one of the first to volunteer, and you were a damn good agent. You weren’t the strongest, but you were ruthless and smart. Other agents respected your cleverness and you never once let your emotions get the better of you. Sometimes Peggy would call you into her office and attempt to pry about how you were feeling. Though she hadn’t known you before Steve died, she had heard a few stories here and there where you resided in fond memories, she knew it affected you more than you let on. But you refused to dwell on anything, it was one mission after the other and you hardly slept any more than you had to to survive.
Maybe if you had been more careful and allowed yourself time to rest you wouldn’t have gotten captured by HYDRA. Maybe if you hadn’t been so tired and weak from whatever they sedated you with you wouldn’t have hallucinated the faint, far off pained screams of Bucky in the complex they held you in. Maybe if you had screamed louder he would’ve heard you too, but you were so tired that you slipped away into the darkness.
You don’t remember much from your time in the lab. Here and there you can remember short bursts of time, each littered with different people and varying forms of technological equipment. You can remember being cold and feeling searing, seething, pain. Every time they woke you they’d inject you with different serums and put you through different tests to see how your body would react to their tests. One of the doctors, though you never caught his name, was also working on the Winter Soldier Program. He would brag about his creation of the perfect soldiers and showed pictures of the assassins he formed in his godly image. It was disgusting, at one point the drugs convinced you that among the soldiers was Bucky. While it was certainly possible, seeing as you too had been captured and were being tested on after your alleged death, you comforted yourself in the fact that you had read the reports hundreds of times; Bucky Barnes was dead, and being dead was certainly much better than living in the hell that HYDRA put you through.
In times of clarity, when the drugs hadn’t made you sick enough to induce hallucinations and memory loss, you would realize how grave it was that they’d reveal top secret information right in front of you. They never intended on letting you escape, they wanted you to eventually die in that lab. The last time they woke you up was different than the last, the scientists looked frustrated as they prepared your body for hibernation, you could only pick out broken bits of Russian, “Silence… Asset… Can’t afford to lose… Value..”
The final time you woke up from being frozen you were alone in a dark lab, no scientists were there to greet you with angered expressions, you were just alone and in pain. Whatever suppressants they gave to you in the past were missing and all you could feel was pure agony, you stumbled past the doors to the lab and aimed for the light source at the end of a long tunnel. Later you would find out the absence of scientists was due to the “Blip” as they call it. Your entire ward had been taken out because of the snap and with nobody left to look after the lab, your cryostasis chamber got turned off after five years of running on emergency power. As you reached the doors and stumbled out of the bunker there was immediate painful overstimulation, it was too bright and so very loud. Car horns, planes blaring overhead, yelling, it all drilled into your head and you couldn’t breathe. Stop it, stop. You did the only thing you could, you screamed out every bit of agony coursing through your body and everything around you went dark.