Momentary Memories

Rubble.

He stood just past the bent gates, blown out by an impact - aerial missile from the looks of it- where he could see in his mind’s eye a variety of signs. Fort LeHigh… completely destroyed, as he stood under the graying clouds.

He let out a harsh hiss, as his head began to pound again. Constant… it was constant.

It was all gone. Of course it was. Some broken memory lead him here, triggered by some words in a museum. So of course, if it had been true, there was nothing but debris left for him.

He crushed a stray rock under his boot, frustrated as he walked past the entrance. This was supposed to lead him to answers. He needed them.

He scowled lightly as he walked across the uneven ground, he wouldn’t be able to figure anything out from all this. He remembered… now, two targets, not eliminated by the previous team. Sloppy, he’d thought then, to use a missile on such high value targets. No way to confirm, far too flashy. They needed to kill the maid. He was sloppy too. Then they sent him in, to where the targets had been seen next taking a hostage in DC.

Steve . Steve and his cohorts. He pulled out of his thoughts, back to his surroundings. Well what good did it do him, that Steve had been here? Of course he had. It didn’t bring anything back to him now. It was just bitter irony that it was him in parts that destroyed his own answers. He paused to wonder if that was always how it was going to be. No. He couldn’t let himself start thinking that, he had no option that let him think like that. Now that he could feel it. He could feel that part of him that was empty, and he knew nothing else since. Everywhere he turned, there was something he knew he should know, but he didn’t… or it was the flashes. Quick, almost indistinguishable flashes of lives. Lives he’d taken, lives he’d destroyed, a life that had been his…

Pain filled flashes triggered by anything, it seemed, didn’t tell him anything, though. The museum wasn’t enough. The day he spent on a library computer, wasn’t enough. The history book wasn’t enough. Those were just words… pictures… facts… he needed something solid to sort out the mess of voice and faces. He had to find a way to grab a hold of the jagged shards in his head. Had to make sense of them. He had to. He had to… or he’d go crazy.

He hadn’t needed anything more than ownership, while staring at his face on those memorials, watching himself interact with that man… with Steve. He’d watched those footage rolls for an hour, trying… he tried so hard to be there. His effort didn't matter, he couldn’t connect to it, he  just continued to watch, detached as his body laughed in front of him. It was in that moment he could feel this emptiness in his mind, when he reached for that moment… because he could see it, and there was nothing. It had always been this way, though, there had always been nothing to reach for and it had never been noticed… now… now it felt like a gaping hole, trying to eat him alive. He could see this man on the screen, a man he used to be, and he could feel how devastating it was that he wasn’t that. That he could barely remember it… oh but he was so close to it. Waking up in sweats from dreams, staggering in the middle of a crowded street as a smell from a vendor triggered something, or a model train made him drop to his knees from the terrible pain in his head. It was threatening to tear his mind to pieces, he couldn’t ignore it, not since the moment he dropped down from that burning ship.

It played behind his eyes, still, that voice echoing around the shake of the ships guns firing ahead. The explosions from it being impacted with close range fire… what started all of it... ‘I’m with you, until the end of the line…’

Steve… it was just a name… just a face, beaten and bloody from his fist… yielding in a fight for the first time… because of him… why did that hurt so much? He had no idea, couldn’t find a reason, but he felt it in his gut, the pain of it.   The end of the line… a little, scrawny, hopeless, brave kid standing in front of him, in his mind… and then it all crumbled away. Beams fell, explosions overhead and metal groaning its final defeats… and the man was falling…

His target was falling, would die, drown… mission complete…. But it wasn’t his target that he watched falling lifelessly through the air. It was Steve … and he didn’t know who that was… but he knew him… and the Winter Soldier knew nothing of anybody. Until then. Until that man took off his helmet and cracked whatever they had holding all this back in his mind.

He had captured a beam with his metal arm, keeping him clinging in the air. He remembered falling… the icy air whipping around his face… him… that man, Steve… arm stretched out trying to grab him as he flailed and suddenly, the Soldier had felt a new emotion creep over him… he remembered fear. He could hear it again, now… not Steve screaming… not Bucky… but the air, whipping violently in his ears. Only his heartbeat could be heard over it. That felt real. He had suddenly remembered how it felt to not want to die.

‘The thing is… you don’t have to. I’m with you to the end of the line pal.’

He could see the shorter man… and he didn’t look like this Captain America, falling below him… but he looked a lot like Steve. In the way he stared steadfast and stubborn, back up at him. He stared down as this man-he-knew’s body got closer and closer to the water... and he let go. The Soldier dived down to grab him, metal arm propelling him down faster than the sinking man. He couldn’t let him drown. He knew him and he wasn’t sure what exactly that entailed, but he knew it meant something important. He knew he couldn't let him fall too.

He slipped on one of the bits of crumbled cement under his feet, blinking away the memory of what woke him up. He wasn’t in the water pulling Steve out with himself with his injured arm. No, he was in this destroyed camp, his hands clammy and his forehead sweating.

He shook the memories trying to crawl over him, they weren’t what he was searching for. He didn’t want to remember dying… he didn’t want to remember fighting his target and failing, he couldn’t even remember why Steve was important. ‘Best friends since childhood…’ those were the facts. Too bad he couldn’t remember more than a moment. He couldn’t see more than a garbled mess and his shirt was sticking to his shoulders uncomfortably now.

Frustrated at another failure he searched for anything else that could help. So far, nothing… just another bitter disappointment. Anger started to turn him cold again, all he really wanted was to destroy them all. Go end them for what they’d taken from him… but as always he couldn’t. He realized many times by now that he didn’t know what they’d done to him. Not really, only what textbooks and history video’s told him he ought to have thought. Being told what he should be thinking wasn’t enough anymore.

Problem was, there wasn’t a whole lot left of 1942. Clearly, as he wandered further through the base, past the point of contact where the ground was caved in. He didn't want answers from Captain America either... he was tired of people telling him things. As honest as he felt Steve might be... he had to know, in his head. Had to connect it somehow, it must he in there if he kept having these flashes. He wandered past the blast radius, starting up a jog as he realized he could see the outlines of buildings appearing from the dark night and the very dim light from the moon. They were somewhat intact, he realized with a pit of hope in his chest, as he got closer. Two rows of buildings still standing on the farthest end of the camp. Houses, all in a row, matching all the rest. Worn, forgotten, their paint peeled and a few roofs sagging, but untouched by the explosion.

“MPH…” Military privatized housing. For families… or a married couple, not single men. He slid his glove off before setting his bare hand on the trim of one, his hand rubbing off the stiff, cracked paint from decades of disuse. Families…

“Come on James, time for supper.”

“It’s Bucky!”

“Say again, son?”

“It’s short for Buchanon! That’s what the men around the barracks took a shining too.”

“Well far as I’m concerned, I’ll keep to your God given name. Now wash for supper James and what has your mother told you about wandering off on base.”

He took in a deep, ragged breath, the flash of memory making his head clench... aching and pressing in on him.  Words, thoughts, a firm voice dancing above him but out of reach. A sharp pain. 'Bucky?' He glanced away, the name was shouting in his head now, a thousand different voices right after the other.

He sucked in for breath, finding it all used up, he kept trying to pull in more but he couldn't... that was... was him... he tumbled forward and gripped the edge of the building, peering around the housing community. When he was a boy… when his father was stationed here… and had his family moved here… from… he didn’t know where. Indiana, the history book supplied him. Indiana… his mind flashed to the deep, never ending starry skies there, that he’d missed so much after they moved from here to Brooklyn….

Brooklyn… Steve… that’s where he met Steve, yeah, when they were young, at school. He shook his head, trying to steady his breathing to fight through the pain. Pain... but it was good pain… whenever they came. Memories, more than he could untangle from the waterfall of voices and fractured images flashing through him and all only partially remembered, brought pain. The more he remembered, the worse the agonizing pain became. They were shoving a wrong peg through a hole, making a vice out of his head.

It was always towards the past, towards memories he couldn't hold onto. He managed to straighten himself as the tirade ended, but he felt weak and he stumbled past a few of the houses and drop to the singed grass. He pulled his knees up to rest his arms on, pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes, his fingers grasping at strands of hair as he tried to stop the pressure building in the front of his brain. This was worse than usual...

He was raised here, his father was a career military man, George Barnes… no , Pops… they moved to Brooklyn when his mother died… to be closer to his Aunt Ida… and he’d felt so much apart of the men’s lives here. He remembered the privates would sneak him stuff his Pops would have turned red from if he knew. Had his first cigarette behind the barracks. That was all before, before he was so angry at the world, when Mama died…

Sweat was trickling down his fingertips and he leaned in harder on he knees trying to anchor himself. James Buchanan Barnes… he enlisted… and Steve was hurt. He could tell… he wanted to help more than anything. James couldn't not, that’s what his family had been. Those were the men he grew up around until he was ten. It was certainly what his Father expected… he hadn’t really wanted it… but it was familiar, and it was what was right. He always did whatever he could figure was right, otherwise what kind of man was he?

“AAAAIIIIEEEEEE!” His tortured scream echoed through the dead air around the tattered buildings, unheard by anything but the skeletons. James Buchanan Barnes… that’s who he was. He knew the rest from the museum, he fought alongside Steve and the Commando’s and they did their best to wipe those filthy Hydra bastards off the face of the planet. To stop the horrors they continued to see throughout the war front. All that evil, all the pain, all the good soldiers on both sides he watched die in agony or in vain... Bucky... he was James Bucky Barnes.

He’d spent his whole life, Bucky’s whole life, fighting the people he took missions from and called ‘sir’ for the last… how long… his whole life? But now, it wasn’t. There was an entire life before it. Bucky shuddered, fingers loosening their hold as he felt a wash of hopelessness.

“No… no... ,“ He gasped, shaking his head in his hands sorrowfully. It just… couldn’t be. He couldn’t be this thing… he couldn’t be James Barnes… he couldn’t be the Winter Solder. He couldn’t be both… the two hated each other so entirely… they fought to their core for different things. But it didn’t matter, did it? No. He couldn’t undo it. He suddenly realized. How could he… all those innocent people.

Why didn’t he… why didn’t he stop him? Steve should have killed him. All those innocent people… someone had gone in his head and tampered with his brain… and he felt sick. It was sick… these missions he still saw, he murdered those people… and suddenly they all meant something. Bucky threw himself over his knees suddenly as he started retching on the ground where Fort LeHigh once stood.