Chapter 5
“Sometimes I feel like I’m…living a lie.”
Kristina turns from where she’s placing a final photograph on a bookshelf near the window. “What do you mean?”
The other woman glances around her small apartment, newly rented. The floors are worn wood and the walls exposed brick. Warm sun streams in the wide windows, slanting over the second hand furniture. “Like I belong somewhere else, if I could only remember where.”
Kristina rolls her eyes at the other woman, “You’re so melodramatic.”
But she isn’t. The young woman scarcely has memories of before a few years ago. She knows she has a mother and a father. She knows where she grew up and can remember schoolmates’ names but memories? No. There are hardly any.
A few maybe. Her mother’s hair, her elementary school building, the sound of her father’s laugh. But there’s nothing definitive, nothing that is distinctly hers. Part of her identity seems to be missing lately and she’s afraid to ask if other peoples’ memories behave this way for fear of going insane.
And then there’s him, hulking and always lurking in the shadows of her mind.
He creeps into the forefront of her mind at the worst moments. Because she wonders what happened to him, why her memories are only flashes, and most of all why there seem to be more memories of him every single day.
She finds that she misses him, someone she doesn’t even know, not really anyways.
But Kristina won’t understand this. “You’re right. But hey listen, thanks for helping me move. I’ll see you in class on Monday?”
“Did I upset you? Oh, god, I have, haven’t I?”
“No…no, no. I’m just tired.” She threads her fingers together and glances around the room. “I feel better here.”
Kristina nods. “You didn’t belong in England. I’m glad you decided to transfer and come back with me. I don’t meet many people outside the country that speak Czech.”
It seems like something she’s always known, she doesn’t remember learning to speak Czech, and so she just shrugs. “I feel better here I think, closer to home.”
“Good,” Kristina says briskly, grabbing her leather jacket to fish around the pockets for a pack of cigarettes. “Want a smoke before I go?”
The other woman is at the window, looking down into the street. “No. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Suit yourself.” The door slams behind her.
She turns to see the empty apartment and feels stifled suddenly. There’s something missing from her life, if only she could figure out what it is. This is her fifth move since 2014 and she’s starting to get a little sick of it. She’s jumped from Paris to Madrid, Madrid to Marrakech, Marrakech to Berlin, Berlin to London, and now from London to Prague.
Enrolled in Charles University she feels a sense of both home, that she hadn’t felt in the other places, as well as a sense of extreme displacement. She’s missing something she knows she is. She just doesn’t know what.
There’s something she’s missing, besides the memories.
She sits down on a chair near the window, a simple wooden one that creaks beneath her, and tries to figure out why she doesn’t belong anywhere.
Maybe, she thinks, there’s something she should be seeking.
~
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Johnson says. “I don’t think she’s real. That’s my professional opinion. I think it’s an elaborate hallucination.”
Steve, who has witnessed Bucky’s night terrors in person, who has seen his friend’s tears, who has heard his voice rasping in the night for someone, anyone, to please help him, disagrees. Because mostly there are two people he calls out for: Steve himself, and the girl who Dr. Johnson says is not real.
It was when Steve heard Bucky begging for her right alongside himself that he decided to believe Bucky. Because, at one point or another, Steve hadn’t been real for Bucky. Bucky remembers more, knows more, than people think.
“I disagree,” Steve makes his opinion known.
And besides, if Steve didn’t take a stand and fight on Bucky’s side, then he wouldn’t be Steve Rogers at all.
Everyone in the room stifles a groan as he starts arguing on Bucky’s behalf.
It goes on for much too long. Especially considering the person in question wasn’t even in the room. Eventually Steve stands and glares down at the table of supposed medical experts. “We’re going to look for her.”
“You’re fueling the delusion-,”
“No. I’m not. Not if she’s real, which I think she is.” Before they can interrupt he continues, “And Bucky used to think I wasn’t real. That skinny kid from Brooklyn? He was sure it was a delusion. How is this any different?”
“It is-,”
“How?”
Tony, who had been listening in the corner of the room, stands. He had hired the medical staff and so he insisted on sitting in. “Enough. Rogers knows what’s best for Barnes.”
Steve nods at Tony who rolls his eyes and throws open the door of the conference room, “Dismissed!”
Everyone shuffles around, gathering papers and themselves, everyone’s tempers a little flared.
The super soldier doesn’t even pause as he marches out the door after Tony, seeking out his best friend. It doesn’t take long to find him as Bucky is nearly always in one of three places. His bedroom under as many blankets as humanly possible, in the kitchen riffling through the fridge, or overexerting himself in the gym.
Today he’s in the gym, sweat rolling down his sides and face. “Buck?”
He sets the weights down and turns to face Steve. “What?” His voice is exhausted, “What is it Steve?”
“We’re gonna find your girl.”
Bucky just turns his back to Steve.
They really must think him unstable, to lie about something so important to him.
And anyways, he’s starting to believe them. The woman is a lie, fake, an elaborate imagination. He’s tired of being ridiculed, he’s tired of living in the past, and if the woman isn’t real, if she’s a hallucination then he will stop bringing it up, stop asking after her and talking about her.
He wants to be better and leave the past behind. Bucky doesn’t need a ghost following him. There are already too many.
They’re right, he decides in that moment as he ignores Steve, she isn’t real.