Orienteering
The Winter Soldier, who might be James, is going to bring down HYDRA. He decides this once he’s more lucid, the wound starting to really close up. It will scar - it was big enough and left long enough - but what’s one more of those. He writes up everything that happened in his journal. Everything that he can remember, at least. Things were fuzzy. He underlines that Steve Rogers makes his head hurt. This is important. Mission subgoal: make Steve not hurt him. That seems more doable than ‘fix brain’.
He decided on James, because it is James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes’ name, and he might actually have some tie to that man. It is also a middlingly common name. Easy to remember, easy for others to forget. He writes it down in his journal, so that he can remember it too. Most of the time, he still thinks of himself as the Asset, but he considers James from time to time, like the name’s a rock he picked up out of a river because it looked interesting under the water. Once out, he’s not sure it looks the same, but it’s going into his pocket anyway.
Anyway - the mission. Originally it was to understand why Steve Rogers hurts his head. But there have been so many parts of it that the mission has become something else. He has learned to take care of himself and that he is allowed to use his body and maybe his mind and he has learned that he is not ready to see Steve Rogers in front of him. So the mission shifts to deal with these developments. He needs to be ready to see Steve Rogers and that means making his body and his mind his own. So HYDRA has to be eliminated. He writes this down. He does not know exactly what he will do when he’s ready to see Steve. Surrender probably. That is always the end of things. It always ends in surrender. Someone has to control him - though this presents a paradox, considering his goals - and it might as well be Steve. His head hurts. They are all the same. But at least Steve would be gentler than HYDRA when he didn’t have his secondary around.
The Asset decides that the easiest thing to do is to focus on destroying HYDRA. He’s been trained for destruction. It will use the skills he’s most familiar with.
It takes some coaxing to get his brain to cough up the location of various bases around the world. He writes down what he can and endures days of flashbacks. He buys a map of the world to facilitate the process.
He will have to amass materiel for this, though. A gun and several knives will not get him though HYDRA’s presence in this world.
This necessitates a return to the base that he came from in DC. It’s a dangerous move - they easily could be waiting for him to come back, but his guess is that they burned the base when everything came crashing down. Maybe literally, maybe not. He’s going to have to take a risk in order to make all of this work. And if nothing else, the Winter Soldier knows how to take properly calculated risks.
The Asset takes its time in scoping out the base. If it is abandoned or on a skeleton crew, it will be the first place he hits. It stands outside the former bank and his mind fills with pain and silenced screams and the restraints of the chair. He has to break another finger. He almost can’t walk in the door, even once he’s determined that there’s almost certainly no one there. It hurts and it doesn’t want the fucking chair. It doesn’t want it. The chair hurts, the chair erases, and he’s come so far to lose it all if they catch him.
But the Asset knows what it is doing. He walks into the bank and figures out a way down. He is on a mission, his hands do not shake. He will pay for this later, but that is to be expected. He does not remember where they kept his weapons, but there is a logic to the layout of the base. He breaks the lock to the storeroom. There’s the slight crack of electricity that the Asset thinks is probably related to an alarm. Oh well. When he’s done here, they’ll know very well that someone was here. It looks like they cleared out quickly - the room is empty at the front, but the back corner still has guns in it. He inspects each one for sabotage and then goes on a hunt for ammunition. That’s the real limiting factor here - they really cleaned that part of the base out. But he finds some clips all the same.
Next, and most importantly, he’s going to have to bring down the base. This takes some problem solving. The Asset knows that he doesn’t have too much time, and so he scours the base for either explosives or something that will catch fire.
The Asset has to enter the control room. He throws up at the door, because the chair is sitting right there, waiting for him. The rest of the room is a chaos of papers and overturned chairs, but the chair is just as pristine as it always has been. They knew he would come back. The Asset shakes imperceptibly, feels its mouth opening for the guard to be inserted. It cannot. It doesn’t have time for this. It had found a lighter in a corner of the base, one for cigarettes. It knew how to use it. Curious. He lights the papers on the floor. They crackle and the Asset forces itself to leave the room. The chair will not burn because the chair will always exist in his mind and that’s about as fucking eternal as things get. He has to continue. He does not want the chair.
Finally, it finds what it was looking for. Gas for a generator - that fucking thing uses so much power, hopefully there won’t be another brownout - stored in a back room. The Asset pours an unbroken trail of it all the way back up to the reception part of the bank. It lights the gasoline on fire and escapes out a door.
It is dark out, which is good - everything has gone relatively to plan. James will not be noticed, because James is never noticed, but the darkness hides the guns a little bit better. He makes it back to his base and repacks his backpack. Time to move on. He will not work in a pattern. HYDRA taught him too well for that. And he will use what HYDRA gave him. It’s only right.