The Fallen

“Isn’t this a little obsessive?” Kristina asks, glancing around her friend's overcrowded apartment, at all the papers and printouts and pictures. 

The other woman shakes her head and walks away from the front door, pulling her robe tighter around her body. “No. It’s not.”

“Okay. Then come out tonight.” Clearly Kristina wouldn’t take her shit.

“Can’t.”

Kristina rolls her eyes, “And why not?”

She turns and glares at her, “Because anytime I try to leave I’m over whelmed with memories of something I don’t understand and I puke my guts up until my stomach is on fire.” She mutters a string of curses under her breath as Kristina laughs.

“Okay, okay, so you’ve gone a little crazy. But who hasn’t these days?” Kristina puts her hand on her shoulder and immediately pulls it away again as though shocked. “Jesus, you’ve lost weight.”

“I told you that I was sick.” She sniffles and looks around at all her research sprawled around the room. It is starting to look like a conspiracy theorist’s lair. “I’m afraid if I go out he’ll be standing there, waiting for me in the street.”

She can see it clearly in her mind. Walking though the throng of tourists with her arm linked through Kristina’s, laughing at something stupid, when she looks up and the crowd parts and he’s standing there. Black tactical gear, face obscured, gun pointed right at her.

“You’re being ridiculous. The world savior-,” she rolls her eyes dramatically before continuing, “-Captain America has proclaimed to us all that the Winter Soldier is a murderer no longer. So you’re safe even if he does want to kill you.”

She shakes her head and turns to sit down on her small couch. “Either way I’m sick as a dog.”

“Well I guess that’s true,” says Kristina, bouncing on her toes. “But you’re also crazy either way. He was a nightmare for a long time. Someone probably told you a story about him as a kid and it stuck. You’ve never met him. How could you have?”

There’s no explaining to someone that you have no memories beyond a few years before and that you’ve never thought to question it until you saw an ex-Soviet assassin on the news. And only later realized he was the man you were dreaming about even before you saw his picture. There’s no way to explain to someone that the memories you do have of the past, a school, your mother, your father seems false. So, she only sighs, but she doesn’t say Kristina is right. Because she isn’t, she can’t be.

“They’ll come for me.”

“You’re starting to scare me.”

She curls in on herself, wrapping her arms around her knees. “I know. But it’s true. He wants to kill me.” Her heart catches in her chest. “He hates me.” Kristina sits next to her and wraps an arm around her shoulder.

“Everything is going to be okay.”

Something is swirling in her brain again, trying so desperately to get out. But she ignores it, instead curling into Kristina who pats her hair and murmurs something under her breath, her voice calming and smooth.

As much as she tries to stifle the memory it flies to the forefront of her mind anyways. She gasps, pain tearing through her skull. “He hit me,” Kristina’s arms tighten further. “He beat me. I was his plaything.” Her voice transforms then, a deep, black disgust filling her, inking out the pink, tender places in her heart, “And I hate him.”

~

He’s at a coffee shop, trying to pass as a normal person, which has been going well so far, when something starts to nag at the edge of his consciousness.

Bucky knows he needs to get back to the Tower, and soon. The small itch can very easily turn into a full blown memory, which meant he needed to be somewhere safe and warm. Sometimes the memories made him pass out, other times scream in pain, and either way both of those things terrified the general populace.  

So he reaches forward and tugs on Natasha’s sleeve. “Natalia…” And he must sound sufficiently wrecked already that she forgets about ordering her coffee entirely, takes his hand, and marches them out to the curb where she parked illegally not five minutes before. “I’m sorry,” he says, once safely inside the cool interior of Stark’s horribly expensive car.

Natasha only shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it Barnes. We got though most of my errands anyways.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he says as she pulls away from the curb to a tune of harsh, irritated honks.

It doesn’t take long to get back to the Tower. But by the time they make it to his room he’s already dizzy and sweating. He thinks Natasha has said something about fetching Steve but he can’t be sure as he collapses onto the bed and curls in on himself. Someone comes into the room and piles blankets around him as Bucky shakes and waits for the memory to takeover, push him away from the reality he knows and make him scream.

“Soldier-,” her hands are careful as they pull away metal and leather. She sits on a stool next to the chair. “Do you know me?”

He recognizes her eyes and so he nods, expression never changing. She’s his. She’ll help him. Electricity still sparks along his skin and in his blood and so he cringes when her fingers find his.

“This is the last time you’ll see me.”

That seems wrong. She should always be with him. “No,” he says, voice harsh and commanding. She only pulls his hand up and kisses his palm. It’s a loving kiss, warm and small, the flutter of her eyelashes felt against the inside of his wrist.  

She pulls back to meet his cold stare. It’s a look she’s accustomed to and it doesn’t frighten her in the slightest. She also knows he doesn’t mean it to be imposing to her, that his expression hides whatever is inside. “It’s unfair but I’m going to ask you to remember me. I want you to remember me. You know me but I want you to remember me.” She swallows and kisses his hand again. “Please. All this suffering can’t mean nothing. We can’t mean nothing. Please remember me. You’re the only one left that can. You're the only person left in the world who knows me.”

Again he murmurs a 'no' to her. Because she is his and it sounds like she’s saying goodbye. “I’m sorry but, yes. They’re finished with me. My time is up. I don’t know what they’ll do with me but this mission for you is important. And they can’t have me there. My time is up.”

“Stay,” he murmurs, a little emotion filtering into his eyes. The woman can’t leave him, she can’t. “Stay.”

“Your name is Bucky.” For the first time in decades it doesn’t make him violent. He sits stock still and blinks slowly at her as she continues, trying in vain to give his identity back that she had kept safe for years. A tear tracks down her cheek when he doesn’t respond. “I fell in love with you over the years, you know? We’ve been together a long time and soon I’m going to be buried in a cold grave. And no one will ever know I had existed.”

And then the Soldier stirs and says her name. He repeats it several times as she reaches forward and pats his cheek. His eyes never leave hers. She moves her hands down his bare chest, coated with sweat from the exertion the machine inevitably drew from him. It’s almost as though she’s trying to memorize him. Each of her hands go to his biceps as she leans forward and looks him in the eyes. “I love you, Bucky Barnes, and I will forever be sorry about your fate. You never deserved this.”

On instinct he leans his forehead into hers, not sure why it mattered. “Don’t go.” Something breaks then and his voice cracks when he whispers, “Don’t leave me alone.”

“You won’t be alone for long, Bucky. I know how you hate the dark but I think the light is finally coming to swallow you back up.”

He moves his metal arm, shaking off her hand, to press his hand to the back of her neck, keeping her in place, “Not without you.” The words feel bad on his tongue, something bad was coming. “Please.”

“You’ll be alright,” she whispers. “Your friend is coming.”

It makes no sense to the Soldier. He only has her. And she’s leaving him alone in the dark with nothing but pain and punishment for company.

He jolts in confusion and surprise when her lips press to his. He doesn’t kiss her back, unsure what to do, when the agents march in. Hurriedly she takes his hand and presses one more lasting kiss to his palm.

She’s yanked away from him as someone snaps the metal back in place over his arm. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Bucky! I’m sorry. I-,” Someone gives a pointed hit to her temple and she’s knocked out, dragged from the room.

~

When he comes to, Steve is sleeping soundly next to him, Natasha sprawled on a plush chair in the corner of the room. His mouth is as dry as a desert, he’s shivering even as he sweats, and his head aches dully. He rolls over and shakes Steve awake.

“Buck,” Steve voice slurs as he rubs his eyes and sits up. “What is it? Are you okay?”

“They took her, Steve, right before I was sent to-to get you. They didn’t kill her, I know they didn’t. She-,” he pauses and swallows hard. “They took her memories but, she must have escaped.”

“How do you know they don’t still have her-,”

Bucky shakes his head as though Steve is the densest person he’s ever spoken to. “She would have come for me by now if they did.”

“She couldn’t possibly take you on. I barely could-,”

“Doesn’t matter.” Steve opens his mouth to ask why when Bucky answers his unspoken question. “She wouldn't have had to fight me. Because I would have followed her.”

There’s a pregnant pause as Natasha continues to snore lightly. “How do we find her?” Bucky asks, voice desperate. Their task seems impossible, undoable. “How do we find her when that’s all I have to go on?”

Steve stands and pulls Bucky to his feet, “C’mon.” He follows reluctantly after Steve, only pausing to tuck a blanket around Nat and kiss her cheek.

They end up in the kitchen where Steve starts a pot of tea on the stove. He forces Bucky to sit down and then goes to the living room to fetch a blanket when Bucky starts to shiver again. When the tea is finished and they both have a mug Steve sits across from Bucky and says, “Okay lets think about this-,”

“Why did we need tea to think?” He murmurs staring into his cup.

Steve rolls his eyes, “It’s warm and supposedly comforting.”

“Are you comforted?”

He stares at Bucky for a second. “Yeah. I have tea and you.”

“Okay.”

Bucky is at times hard to help. This seems to be one of those times, as he's resistant to coddling and kindness. “Jesus Christ, Buck. Do you wanna find this damn girl or not?”

His head snaps up, rage now flowing off his body in thick waves. “Do not-,”

“I think we should think about it in terms of you,” Steve interrupts before Bucky can get worked up.

A frown etches itself onto his face, “What do you mean?”

“Why did you go to Romania?”

Safety.

He had went there because it seemed safe and when it proved to be he had stayed there. “Safe.”

“And?”

“Familiar. A bit isolated.”

“So she would want to be somewhere similar right?”

Bucky shrugs. He honestly has no idea and all of their digging through files for weeks and weeks and weeks had yielded them nothing. “Maybe.” Then, he glances back at Steve, eyes wide.

“What?”

“Poland.”

Steve mulls it over for a moment as he takes long sips of tea from his mug, while Bucky uses his more as a warming device for his hand as he holds it to his chest. “Do you really think it would be that easy?”

No, he doesn’t. But it’s their best shot and he tells Steve as much. “It was such a big part of her identity…I know that. She would feel safe there.” Bucky thinks about the war then and the terrible things that happened there and sighs, “Or maybe not.”

“It’s a start, Buck,” Steve says gently. “That’s what’s important. We’ll start in Poland. We’ll see if there are records to search there. And we’ll see if Tony can go start searching security cameras in Eastern Europe.”

It still feels like it isn’t good enough.