The Fallen

The American is screaming again. His voice rings out high and awful, reverberating around her small cell. They’ve been here awhile now and they’ve both given up the thought of rescue. He seemed to think for a while that someone might be coming to get them, repeatedly describing someone. Although she can’t be sure who because she still can’t much understand him.

He seems to be better at learning Polish than she is at learning English. The girl curls in her corner of the cell which had only become her corner when they stopped separating them at night. She doesn’t know what they do to him, only that it makes him scream so horribly and that he now has shiny bits of metal protruding from his shoulder.

That in and of itself had been a terrible process. The removal of the stump and implication of something else, something other.

Bucky is smart. She can tell by his quickly shifting eyes, his ability to remember Polish words like it doesn’t mean anything, and the quick quiet wit always in his tone. He also seems to be getting better and better at understanding Russian. It’s almost eerie how fast he learns, almost unnatural. And maybe it is. Maybe the strange liquid sifting around in his blood has something to do with it.

She’s almost asleep, a strange memory of a golden field and a smaller girl’s hand inside of her own is lulling her into oblivion, when the door is thrown open. Guards march in and let him down none too gently near to where she lies. The lock clicks behind them, no words are exchanged, no resistance given. “I jak się masz tego wieczoru?” Bucky’s voice is hoarse and tired, even as sarcasm drips from his tone.

And how are you this evening?

Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth, is drying against his temple and splattered against his shirt, “Dobry, głupi żołnierz.”

Fine, stupid soldier. Her voice sounds harsh, but somehow oddly gentle at the same time.

He grins, although it looks to pain him as he shifts onto his back, head on her lap. “We don’t have much time left doll. They said it today. They figured something out, how to make us forget for good. How to make us something else.”

Ignoring his English, which she understood only part of and without any of it making much sense, she says, “Powinieneś przestać walczyć z nimi.” Her voice is soft as she tells him to stop fighting them, cradling his head in her lap, fingers gentle on his scalp.

“Wiem.” I know. Bucky whispers, letting her card her fingers through his hair, his head resting in her lap. “I wish we knew what they wanted with you. At least I have an idea with me.” And then, voice cracking he whispers, knowing she didn’t understand what he just said, “Obawiam się.”

I’m afraid.

Attempting to comfort him she says softly in his ear, leaning down so if there are guards in the hall they might not hear, “Me too.” English still feels strange on her tongue but she tries anyways, “I am afraid. But I have you.”

“Do you think they will separate us?”

It takes her a moment to translate his question. She shakes her head slowly, “Użyją mnie przeciwko tobie.”

They will use me against you.

“Nie.”

“Tak.” She murmurs, resigned to it. “They will. Control. Nie skrzywdzisz mnie. Wiedzą to.”

You will not hurt me. They know this.

Bucky had guessed as much, but it cuts him to hear it from her. It means that he has it right.

Their end is near, or maybe its their begining. But, Bucky thinks, they gave her something too, something is in her blood too. He reaches up and squeezes her hand when she presses it against his cheek. There’s something about her too.

And he’s always had a protective streak a mile wide. His mother always said so.

~

*Summer 2016*

“Is it possible that this woman wasn’t real?”

Bucky’s head jerks up sharply, eyes wide. “What?”

“Is it possible that she isn’t real? Our minds conjure things to help us cope in extreme situations. It’s possible that your mind created this woman to help you deal with the torture and the horror and the loneliness.”

He isn’t impressed with her analysis, not that he ever is. It’s why he had stayed silent for weeks on end, through countless therapy sessions. And then Steve had found out. And then he had been lectured. And so now he talks, if grudgingly.

And every time he does so he’s questioned. It’s not something he appreciates, considering the amount of time and effort it had taken him to recover some of his memories. He especially doesn’t want to hear that the woman there with him had been some figment of his imagination. “She was real. I learned Polish from her, how else could I have-,”

“You know many languages, Mr. Barnes. Spanish, Russian, Romanian, on and on and on.” Dr. Johnson says. “Is there some significance of Poland for you?”

“Just her.”

“Aside from this woman. What was her name again?”

Bucky reluctantly repeats it. “And no. There’s no other significance.”

“Was your family Polish?”

“No,” he grinds out. “They weren’t.”

She’s silent for a moment as she crosses and uncrosses her ankles. She’s sweating and Bucky knows her finger is running over the panic button disguised as her pen. In case he got violent. In case he might snap.

Bucky knows that she had been real. Memories invade his mind, consistently, of her. “And what might her purpose have been? They had you. Why would they need another person? And more curiously, a woman?” He stays quiet, keeps his eyes downcast.

“To control me.”

“They already had control over you. They didn’t need an outside source.”

Something scrambles to the forefront of his mind and he squeezes his eyes shut. “She took my dog tags. I gave them to her. She always wore them under her clothes until they found them.” That had been a particularly horrible day when they found her with his tags. She had been punished severely, Bucky made to watch. Her clothes ripped and tattered, and the screaming alone had been-

“You could have lost them. It was an identity piece to you and the loss of them could have been traumatizing. Therefore, when you realized you didn't have them anymore the girl suddenly had them. As someone to keep you identity alive and safe. ”

He shakes his head, “No. No, you don’t understand. I distinctly remember giving them to her. My hand was strapped down and I had to convince her to grab them.”

“But why would you give away something so key to your identity? It’s much more likely that you lost it somewhere along the way, and your mind instead lead you to believe that you gave it to a kind person for safekeeping. Until you could retrieve it, much like your memories still hiding in your subconscious.”

Bucky is eerily still. Why had he given them away?

It is farfetched. But so is his whole life and sometimes it’s hard for the therapist to understand him. He isn’t a typical patient after all. If someone claimed to be a hundred years old, normally that would be called a delusion. But for him, it's real.

“I gave them to her because I was afraid Hydra would find them.”

Dr. Johnson nods excitedly, thinking that they had reached some sort of realization on Bucky’s part. “Exactly! You were afraid of having your identity taken and so-,”

“No,” he shakes his head. The office is clean and white and pristine. It’s meant to be calming and orderly and comforting but instead he’s reminded of other colorless places. He’s reminded of blank operating rooms and cold cells. Bucky wants nothing more in that moment than to go back to his room and curl up under a pile of soft blankets for the rest of the day.

A headache is starting to creep up on him, his spine stiff with tension. “I gave them to her because I was afraid they would find out something about me.”

She frowns and sags in her seat. “And what were you afraid of them finding out?” She humors him as she marks something else down on her notepad. Bucky hates the notepad. He wants to rip it from her hands and shred it. Because the notebook is used in meetings about him, to assess his stability. 

He's tired of people making decisions for him.

A little flash of panic runs through him as he looks down and mumbles, “I’m Jewish.”

“You are?” There’s surprise in her tone.

“Half. On my tags I had the P for Protestant. My father’s side was Protestant. But there was the chance they might find out. And so I gave them away.” He rubs his thigh nervously with one hand. “Thinking back it might have been a little selfish. She didn’t know what I was saying.”

Her pencil is flying across the paper.

“But I know she was there. I remember her. Not just in the beginning but after too. I remember her always being there. After every mission. After every time they wiped me. After everything and then…they took her away from me.” He pauses for a moment and swallows hard. "They threatened to harm her if I didn't behave or do as they said."

The woman opens her mouth to say something, looking intense and serious and excited all at once. He must be in the middle of a breakthrough, he thinks distantly.

“And I think she’s still alive,” he whispers. “And I want to find her.”