Before
The asset is familiar with thousands of different words and phrases in thousands of different languages and dialects.
He has pried guttural pleas from the broken teeth of screaming men. He has listened to women whimper confessions that are barely audible over the steady dripping of heavy blood as it pools along the floor and the serpentine plates of his arm. He is well versed in the way a target chokes on their own blood when the asset cuts out their tongue and starts pulling on their teeth.
The asset is familiar with the languages of pain and despair, which is why he does not understand how the blonde man with haunted eyes brokenly whispering the word, "Bucky?", can make a chill creep up his spine and make his aim unsteady.
The asset is not familiar with this.
The asset does not understand why the blonde ma- the target's- brow is furrowed in such a pained expression, pink mouth in a grimace and shoulders rigid and taut like a bow string.
The muzzle had come off in their struggle, yes, but the asset had not fired at him nor had he sunk his wickedly sharp blades into the meat of the target’s neck to account for the target being so distraught.
This target is a good match for him, can withstand the punches with both flesh and metal hand, can parry the asset’s well aimed kicks as well as his attacks with both gun and knife, and the asset is disturbed to find that he finds himself somewhat…proud… that this man can hold his own in a fight and that this ma- target- bears the shield with the star so well.
The target wields it with ease and dexterity, blocking strikes and always keeping himself in a favorable position, his fighting style swift and strong. No matter what the Asset dishes out, this target not only takes it in stride but isn’t shy to give it back; the asset kicks him off a car, the target flies to his feet. The asset tries to drive a blade into his neck, the target evades. He fights and he dodges and he doesn’t stop.
Stubborn mule, the asset thinks, and then flinches because he has never fought this particular target before and has certainly never dubbed a potentially lethal target as a “stubborn mule”.
But then again, the asset has never been dubbed “Bucky” either. It’s unusual.
If the asset's normally functional brain hadn't decided to falter in his usually sure steps, if he had taken advantage of the vulnerable stance of the target perhaps the target would have been spilling intestines all over the pavement by now, but.
The asset had faltered and the target was mostly free of major injuries, nothing so severe as to account for the still tortured expression on his open face.
The asset means to take a step back to compose himself but finds his body taking a step forward instead; his grip goes somewhat lax on his rifle and his mouth is uncooperative because he is not supposed to speak to the target unless he is extracting information, but he wrangles the words out of his mouth anyway.
“Who the hell is Bucky,” he growls, once again alarmed by the sheer amount of hurt that drowns the target’s face, his hands twitching as though they want to reach for the asset, not to strangle or hit or hurt, but to brush back his dark locks and press a calloused palm against his chest to feel the thud of the asset’s heart underneath all of his Kevlar and armor and weapons.
He does not understand this reaction, but he does understand his own when he catches sight of the injured female target as she hefts the asset’s own weapon onto her bleeding shoulder and launches a grenade at him; he understands when his legs swiftly carry him over bullet casings and droplets of blood and back to his handlers.
He understands when they shout loud things across him to each other as they barrel him into the back of a van, roughly inspecting the damages to his arm and promising punishment for the pieces of his uniform that he lost on the bridge; the lost mask and lost goggles and lost sense of familiarity with his work and with himself.
He does not understand the itch he feels when he thinks of the target being apprehended, perhaps even killed by someone that isn’t him.
It bothers him.
It bothers him and he doesn’t understand, but he is pliant and cooperative when they sit in him in his Chair. The silence in the lab is electric and stifling, and he doesn’t understand so he sends the technician flying across the room in one fell swoop of the damaged arm.
He understands when his cheek stings belatedly from a hard slap because of his inability to reply to his main handler, and he knows he’s going against protocol but he can’t get the image of sad blue eyes out of his head and his face faintly hurts.
His mouth tastes like blood and his cheek feels like it should be throbbing, and he truly means to give a report on the mission but instead finds himself asking, “The man on the bridge, who was he?”
He understands the staff’s shocked reactions because he spoke in English and not in Russian, because he spoke at all, but his handler does not give him the answer he seeks, does not disclose full information when he evenly replies, “You met him earlier this week on another assignment.”
He tunes out his handler’s condescending drawl and his recounting of the asset’s hand in the molding of the century, his gaze going glassy as he thinks back to the bridge and back to his target and the shield. He means to try and recall the way the target’s pink mouth had looked when he spoke, but instead he finds his mind enveloped in a different memory of the target.
The shield gleams newly under the golden flicker of the fire, the warm flames reflecting off the smooth surface and throwing pretty shapes of light onto its surrounding objects, glimmering on the blonde man’s bruised cheekbones as he laughs at something the asset has said.
The asset watches the dizzyingly pale expanse of the blonde man’s porcelain throat and the shadows that pool around the hinges of his jaw as he tosses his head back and laughs, and the asset can’t stop wondering what such milky skin would feel like under his lips.
They are seated closely around the fire, thighs touching more than they should because neither of them are bothered by the grime and blood that covers their clothes. The asset presses his thigh more snugly against the blonde man, and a dreadfully wonderful chill creeps up his spine when he hears the other suck in a sharp breath.
It feels dangerous and it feels right, and the asset feels warm and he feels light, and the blonde man looks happy and his hair looks soft.
They had set up camp deep in the woods, or the mountains maybe, the ground covered in a fine powdering of snow, and it must be cold but the asset feels as warm as the sun. All around them are the faint noises of rowdy men bickering and rifles being cleaned and assembled, but the din is muffled to the asset and his eyes are trained on the swell of the blonde man’s plush mouth and the way his hand is inching closer and closer to one of the asset’s own flesh hands.
Time is still and the asset can’t stop watching the pretty fan of the blonde man’s dark lashes and the shadows they throw on his pink cheeks as his hand finally closes around the asset’s and holds tight. It sends a thrill through the asset and his hand feels hot, as if he was touching the sun.
“Bucky,” the blonde man had whispered, stars in his eyes. But this time it wasn’t pained; as it left the blonde man’s pouty mouth, the name was beautiful and soft. The asset felt a flush high on his own cheeks and a smile tugging at his own lips as he breathed back, “Stevie.”
The asset blinks wildly, the warmth of the fire gone and his hands clenched on the armrests of The Chair and not in the blonde man’s firm grip, and he looks to his handler and tells him, “I knew him.”
He understands he is not behaving but he does not understand what is happening and why the blonde man had held him so tenderly, and the room is spinning so fast that he barely pays attention to his handler’s commanding voice as he places orders for the asset to be wiped.
His chest is hurting and his eyes feel glossy, but he briefly understands what is happening when a rubber bit is shoved into his bruised mouth and cold shackles encircle his arms and legs with a sinister click.
He understands, until he doesn't have anything left to understand anymore.
***********
There must be something wrong in his circuiting, some glitch or unfinished repair on his lower skull or in the arm, because the asset finds himself unable to eliminate his target for what oddly feels like a second time.
The smooth rupture of the target’s blood does not unclench his stomach (?) and the sickly crunch of bone does not lessen the pressure of the idea of incompletely annihilating his target.
It only makes his head spin and his arm click and whirr unhappily as it sits poised above the target- the captain's- crunched face, makes him screw his mask free face in frustration at the undeniable trust in the captain's good eye when the asset abruptly stops bashing his face in. It makes the asset release his vice grip on the bloodied straps of a tired uniform and results in a gentle press of his cool thumb on the captain's bloodied mouth, just before the shattered floor beneath them gives way and the captain plummets toward the unforgiving black water that lays below.
Bruised velvet words echo around the asset's head, the captain's weary gravel voice coughing out yet another string of unfamiliar yet familiar words, the likes of which had earlier made the asset's aim shake and now urges the asset to dive into the rubble and wreckage ridden river to grab ahold of the captain where he sinks among the muck and grime.
He feels his chest burning and his eyes are stinging, and he doesn’t understand. But, he thinks, maybe he might if he grabs ahold of the captain’s limp body, tugs him to the surface in order to trace the ruined lines of his mouth with metal fingers and feel the flaxen hair underneath his flesh, to shake him until he explains why the asset could not comprehend his words and why the asset's mind had felt like static and dust when the captain had breathed, "I'm with you till the end of the line."
The water is cold but the asset has long grown accustomed to the cold, and he swims down to where the captain is still sinking and loops his metal hand in the sodden straps of the captain's uniform and lugs him to the surface.
The captain is heavy, but the asset's mind is heavier as he reels from the extent of his disobedience.
He should not have saved this man.
He should have let this bullet ridden corpse sink to the murky bottom of the river, should have finished punching his face in, and should have killed him on that bridge. The asset’s mind screams in confusion at this, because the asset has never fought this well matched opponent before, and certainly not on any bridge.
Or, something screeches to a blinding halt in the asset’s mind, maybe they have fought before, and maybe even on a bridge. The asset blinks away faint flickers of a memory of a bridge and a pained whisper, tightening his hold on the captain and training his eye on the ever nearing shore.
There must be something wrong in his circuiting, because he is malfunctioning.
There must be something even more severely wrong than he first thought, because as he finally reaches the shore and the captain is starting to breathe, he realizes that he would save this man again.
The asset also belatedly realizes that he has not yet cataloged his own wounds, and his head pounds as he counts the shallow breaths that make the captain’s chest heave, finds watching the captain struggle to breathe is a startlingly familiar sight, except the asset thinks the captain would look even more familiar if he had been frail and tiny and easy to pick up and curl around to keep warm.
The asset stumbles toward the captain, his metal hand reaching out not to strangle or hit or hurt, but to feel his weak pulse and wipe the blood from his face because this punk must like to get punched for all the scrapes he gets into.
When he finds out who it was that gave his Stevie a bloody nose this time, they’ve got another thing coming. Don’t they know who the asset is? Don’t they know what he did during the war, what he did for Steve?? But wait, that doesn’t make sense because how could those assholes give Steve a bloody nose when Steve is with him on the frontlines, but Steve is supposed to be back home in Brooklyn and the asset hasn’t slept in a long time but-
He makes a sound, a tiny hurt sound, and he drops to his knees beside the captain. His foggy mind is moving too fast for him to make any sense of the waves of halfway there memories and feelings that are crashing down on him. Nothing makes sense but everything does, and the captain is still bleeding and the asset is still malfunctioning.
The steady sound of the river lapping at the shore startles him out of this haze though, and he quickly glances up to scan their surroundings. In the distance, the crash site burns and ugly gray smoke billows up into the sky, and the asset can distinguish the sound of an approaching helicopter.
He doubts he would be able to hijack the chopper in his delirious state of mind, and the captain needs medical attention because the asset shot him and stabbed him and bashed his face in. The asset’s stomach twists uncomfortably at these facts, his metal hand curled in fist as though it knows it did something bad. The asset is being bad and the captain needs help the asset cannot give, so the asset gently brushes the captain’s hand with the knuckles of that treacherous metal hand and then he’s up and plunging into the trees and away from his captain.
He doesn’t know where he’s running but he knows he can’t go back to base or to his handlers; not when he knows they’ll make him sit in the chair and when everything will go back to blank and he won’t be able to recall the captain’s voice.
The asset has taken more lives than he can count, but he has never felt more alive than he does right now with the phantom feeling of the captain’s hand still tingling in his fingers and the drying river water still weighing him down. He has to find a database because surely there must be something about a place called Brooklyn but a home called Steve, and the asset isn’t sure but he thinks he might’ve had a name once, too.
As he runs, Dum Dum tosses him a cigarette and he can see Stevie running up ahead in his stars and stripes, but when an explosion sounds and he stumbles over a tree root he looks down and finds his ankle is bound to a metal table and he can feel fluids pumping into him and over everything, he can hear someone repeating their name and rank and serial number and he has to stop and dry heave against the rough bark of a tree that could also be the back wall of a decrepit apartment building because maybe, maybe he’s never gotten off of Zola’s table; maybe Steve never came for him and maybe this has all been some ugly fever dream that his sad excuse for a brain has decided to give him to numb the pain of scalpels and needles and the cold.
The asset shakes his head, blinking away sweat and tears, and he trudges on.
This world is a mesh of dirty city streets and frozen mountain sides with ugly patches of laboratory and an overwhelming amount of Steve, his captain, his target.
Steve when he was little and frail and had a sharp shoulder blades and even sharper wit; Steve with charcoal smudged on his fingers and on the peaks of his high cheekbones, eyes glinting in the setting sun as he sits on the fire escape of their building; Steve swaddled in all 3 of their threadbare quilts with a runny nose and a hacking cough; Steve hiding his face with his long artist fingers as the asset lingers by the door, boots shiny black and army coat heavy on his frame; Steve gently wiping away blood from the cut in the asset’s chin, delicate touch burning his skin the longer his hand lingers; Steve with blood smeared over his face from a busted lip, his eyes heavy lidded and dark as the asset presses his thumb into the gushing wound. Steve happy, Steve sad, Steve small, Steve strong, Steve angry, Steve bathed in liquid silver moonlight with his nose pressed to the front of the asset’s throat as they sleep with the windows open and their legs tangled together.
The asset stops again, his vision spottily registering that his feet are ankle deep in a little stream. His boots are getting logged with water and he’s going to get in trouble when he gets back to base for ruining his uniform even further, but then he remembers he is not going back to base, will never go back to base again, so he crouches and splashes his face with the cool water, letting it run down his neck in rivulets and seep into his jacket.
He cups some in his hands and takes the tiniest of curious sips because he doesn’t really remember ever having to drink water, is used to having it pumped into him through tubes. He wonders briefly if Steve gets to drink water or if they feed him through tubes, too, because drinking water feels rather nice and he doesn’t think Steve would want to miss out on real water and not tube water.
He feels marginally better after his brief visit with the stream, and he is able to regain his thoughts and determine the extent of his injuries, which weapons he still has, and how long the ammunition he is carrying will last him.
The sound of a branch snapping behind him has him standing in an instant, loaded guns in both of his hands and a snarl on his face, but he only sees the tip of a boot sticking out from behind a fallen log.
Quietly, he makes his way over to the foot and finds a young sergeant sitting there, smoking a cigarette and staring amusedly at the asset, blood dripping from his ears and a smattering of bruises littered on his cheeks and temples.
“кто ты!!” the asset shouts, “Who are you!”
The sergeant smiles up at the asset, all dimpled chin and strong jawline, and blows a smoke ring at him. He’s filthy, covered in soot and grime and blood, but his tags are clean against his tattered clothes as he shrugs at the asset.
BARNES, JAMES B.
"я сказал, кто ты ! ответь мне!" The asset snarls, "Answer!"
The sergeant takes a deep pull on his cigarette, a smirk playing at his mouth as he inspects the asset's raised hackles.
“I’m surprised you don’t recognize your own mug, soldier. I mean, I guess I’m not that surprised you don’t though pal, after all the shit we went through.”
The asset blinks at him, lowering his weapons and furrowing his brow. “I do not understand… I think I am malfunctioning,” he looks back to where he came from, “There is a high possibility that I have lost my mind.”
He’s quiet for a moment, brow furrowed as he flexes his metal hand, “The captain drove me crazy.”
The sergeant’s laugh is loud and brash, and the asset immediately trains his guns back on him. The sergeant cackles again when he sees the asset’s startled reaction, tossing his cigarette behind him before chuckling, “You and me both, pal.”
His grin dies out though, and his young face becomes weathered and gaunt, his dusky gray eyes filled with torment and his mouth in a pained scowl. He tilts his head at something only he can hear, and he blinks dull eyes up at the asset.
“You better get out of here, soldier. This ain’t the time or place to talk to ghosts. You’ll figure it out soon enough, and then all this,” he gestures between himself and the asset, “is gonna make no sense. Shit, it don’t make sense now, but. I guess we gotta cope somehow, right?” He chuckles again, but it’s an ugly sound filled with fatigue and pain, and his head sags against the tree he’s rested against. “I’m mighty tired, soldier. You gonna be alright taking over from here? You’ll get the hang of it, eventually. Hopefully. Maybe. I don’t fuckin’ know.”
The asset growls at him, confusion dotting his mind. This encounter with this strange sergeant is making his head hurt so he shoves one of the guns roughly against the sergeant’s already bruised temple.
"I do not understand!" the asset snarls, head pounding, "Where did you come from!"
The sergeant smiles bitterly at the asset before leaning into the gun's barrel and closing his eyes. "Soldier," he sighs, "I think the better question would be, where did you come from."
The asset freezes and drops the guns away from the sergeant's face, bringing up his hands to press his knuckles into his eyes. "I should kill you," the asset says quietly, "But for some reason there has been a lack of killing today, at least on my end."
He opens his eyes to find the sergeant watching him with that same tired gaze, but now with a thoughtful tint. He doesn't say anything for a moment, before he nods to himself and jerks his chin at the asset.
His steely eyes have a calmer look to them now, and his voice is soft when he speaks. "You don’t know a lot of things anymore, soldier," he says, scratching at a bit of dried blood on his neck, "Mostly because some fucked up shit happened to you, and I’m real sorry. I don’t know what else to say, I guess. I’m sorry. You poor bastard, damn you. You’re a damn wreck with a fuckin’ metal arm, kid, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen now. But," he shoots the asset a pointed look, "I do know that you've been standin’ here talking to nothing for way too long."
The asset narrows his eyes and lifts a pistol to the sergeant's eye level again. "Talking to nothing? I do not understa-"
"Yeah yeah, you don't understand a lot of things," the sergeant says impatiently, struggling with his tags before tossing them at the asset, "And you will continue to understand nothing until you go figure out where Stevie is. Those tags are yours, by the way."
The asset catches them easily, bringing them up to his face and reading them in a reverent whisper.
“Barnes,” he croaks, a sense of longing flooding his veins as he does.
The sergeant makes a noise of affirmation, rolling his eyes at the way the asset has continued to mouth Barnes Barnes Barnes Barnes the longer he stares at the tags. “Yes, you dolt. You’re Barnes. Congratulations. You’re alive after all. Or rather, you kept something alive all these years; I guess we’ll see what survived soon enough.”
The sergeant reaches a dirty hand up impatiently and motions for the asset to help him stand up. The asset hesitates, quickly inspecting the sergeant for any visible weapons, before pulling him to his feet. When he’s standing, the sergeant is as tall as the asset but much leaner and with an exhausted slump to his shoulders and no metal arm.
The asset is wary and his mind is still reeling from everything that has been going on, so it’s understandable that when the sergeant suddenly turns to the asset and claps him on the shoulder, the asset has a blade against the sergeant’s neck in the blink of an eye. The sergeant goes stiff, sighing before he says, “Can you relax please? I’m not about to do anything, I’m too fuckin’ tired to even scratch my balls.”
The asset slowly lowers the blade and tucks it back into his belt, but his thumb stays toying with the hilt of it just in case this sergeant tries anything. The sergeant eyes his hand and sighs again, pressing his scarred hands to his face before saying, “You need to go, Barnes. You may be dumb, but you can’t be dumb enough to think no one is looking for you. There’s a place, you’ll have seen it in passing glimpses, called the Smithsonian. That’s where you need to go.”
He straightens his tattered shirt and rubs a hand across the back of his neck, shooting the asset a look and a quick two fingered salute before he starts to stumble back in the direction the asset came.
The asset watches him leave with bated breath, the tags in his hand cutting into his flesh, and he is about to start running again when he looks back and finds him gone. He stumbles slightly, brows furrowed, when he hears the sergeant’s voice, soft in his ear.
“Welcome back.”
***********
The asset’s head is throbbing, there is a crumpled Smithsonian pamphlet in the palm of his metal hand, and it seems that Steve- the Captain, the target, the strange fragment of the asset’s jumbled memory- and the asset have met before.
This much, (and more), is blatantly evident from the first glance the asset gets at the strange exhibit dedicated to Steve; an eerie, shrine-like place riddled with information, remnants, and memorabilia from what must have been Steve’s life before.
Before what, the asset has no clue, but he supposes that the best course of action as of now is to slink his way throughout this strange invasion of Steve’s personal life, to scan every available piece of information to find the importance of the asset to Steve and for a slight clue to the blank spaces in the asset’s mind.
He presses a knuckle into his eye, idly wondering if it would really be so bad to scrape it out of his skull and ease the building pressure in his brain. He stops pushing at his eye when he notices a woman staring at him though, her eyes prying and shoulders tense, and he’s actually rather pleased with himself when he refrains from snapping her neck for looking at him too long.
It’s hard to fight his instincts, but if the asset had been good at doing that, he wouldn’t be here in this crowd of civilians right now, pretending to be one of them and hiding his whirring arm underneath a warm sweater sleeve.
The fact that he doesn’t, or can’t, remember the last time he was warm and wearing soft cotton clothing rather than the sturdy bulk of his uniform and the ever present weight of an arsenal of weapons worries him slightly; he keeps trying to remember things but it always met with a wall of resistance or small, inconsistent flashes of hazy dreamlike memories.
He tries to recall learning how to calculate a civilian’s weak spots but can only come up with the memory of his hands bound to the chair, tries to remember learning how to line his boots and seams of pants with tricky little knives but only recalls the silent creeping cold of his tank.
He tries to remember being fitted with his heavy, smooth metal arm, this arc of pure destruction, and is buffeted with the dizzyingly soft memory of someone’s slender hands tracing the curves of his shoulders and back. The person in his memory is slight and golden, cerulean eyes laughing and pink mouth pressing softly at the nape of his neck, and the asset feels warm and he feels glorious, and he almost cries when the memory fades and all he can feel is his sore rib from where Steve’s shield had crunched into his side.
Blinking away his oddly emotional response to a fragment of a memory, the asset quickly regains his bearings, noting that the crowd streaming into the exhibit has lessened and that there is a clear opening for him to squeeze his way onward.
The asset is playing with his smooth tags in the palm of his flesh hand, reveling in the feeling of the worn metal and the raised bumps that spell out his new name. He knows that strange sergeant had said it was his, but the asset still is unsure. He figures he should ask someone who knows for sure. Maybe Stevie would answer him if he asks.
He frowns at himself, rubbing his thumb over the B in Barnes. Maybe not yet, though.
The asset pauses for a second, reading the name over and over, his own thoughts echoed in the way Steve had said it, the same way that young sergeant from the woods had told the asset the tags were his.
Quietly, he stalks through the beginning of the shrine, mind cataloging the seemingly endless information about Steve. The asset is only slightly surprised to learn that Steve wasn’t always that threatening figure wielding the shield but a slender boy with illness plaguing his every move, his fever-like romp through the tree-line having gifted him with that small glimpse of a barely there memory of a tiny Steve, looking much like the Steve in the pictures and footage on the walls.
It’s when he’s tracing the gentle slope of the tiny Steve’s shoulders and unintentionally committing them to memory that his gaze catches on a smaller, quieter section of the exhibit, the harsh lighting of the exhibition hall dimmer and the crowd milling around less hectically. He carefully makes his way through the crowd, heart pounding the closer he gets to this little glass display, a creeping sense of foreboding filling him as he finally comes to a halt.
The quiet little wall is covered in a small paragraph about one James Buchanan Barnes, a familiar sly-smiled, dimple chinned young sergeant with dark hair and grey eyes. The asset registers that Barnes, James B. is his new name in the same instant he realizes that the “B” probably stands for Buchanan, (he also realizes and that the face on the display belongs to the young sergeant from the woods). His eye pounds a little harder when he skims to the bottom of the paragraph and reads that Barnes died in the late November of 1945.
The asset stands there for a minute, feet splayed wide apart and shoulders rigged as he reads and rereads that last sentence. Barnes, James B. died in late November of 1945, but the asset has his tags and also has his name, now.
The asset is Barnes now, but maybe he was always Barnes, too.
He shakes his head, a creeping sense of panic flooding his body. He knows logically, this makes sense; it’s why Steve remembered him and it’s why he remembers Steve, but he also knows he’s always been the Soldier, the Asset.
They used to tell him that back in the base, as they strapped him to his Chair and gave him the rubber bit to cry into. They used to tell him he was born to fight and murder and destroy, to kill the Captain and to follow orders. Always to follow orders. The asset wonders now if any of that was true.
According to the display, it’s not.
The asset once had a family and a life in Brooklyn and a childhood best friend turned Captain America; Captain America, who ended the war and saved the other Barnes from dying on a cold metal table with his body full of fluids and his ears bloodied and his temples bruised. Captain America, the man the asset recently pumped full of bullets and left half dead on a muddy river bank.
That Captain America.
The asset looks up from his tortured gazing at the photo of who he apparently once was in order to watch the video of himself and Steve that is playing on a loop near the display, his hammering heart quieting a little as the pair in the footage laugh at some private joke. His stomach does something weird when the Steve in the video laughs at the other Barnes, and he feels dirty for the swoop low in his gut so he looks away, a flush blooming high on his cheeks.
The other Barnes watched Steve openly, his hollow grey eyes burning with an almost overwhelming intensity as he traced the way Steve’s mouth moved like a flame. It is obvious the other Barnes felt adoration and pride for Steve, and the asset can feel echoes of the same emotions in himself.
If he really is Barnes, it is not surprising that these feelings still exist.
It seems the longer the asset is alone, the longer he lives in his utter disobedience and betrayal of all he knows, the longer he is free, the stronger these feelings get and the clearer his dodgy memories become. I mean, he can’t remember everything the paragraph on his display says about him (like his mother or his siblings), but he can remember Steve and he also remembers Azzano in gritty detail and, perhaps worst of all, he remembers a speeding train in the bitter cold and his hands slipping and Steve.
He can remember his Stevie and the way his voice had sounded like everything Barnes was ever afraid of and the way his bloodcurdling screams had carried over the whistling wind and the sickeningly bloody crunch of Barnes’ body when he landed.
He also remembers the reasons he survived that fall, no doubt thanks to his torture and the experiments done to him, yes. But, Barnes clenches his eyes shut, there was another reason; some underlying anchor that kept him breathing and fighting and, oh.
Of course.
He opens his eyes, lashes wet and tangled, and watches the video of himself and the way he once watched Stevie like he made it easier to breathe, and wonders for how long he’s lived his whole life for Steve.
He wipes roughly at the wetness under his eyes with a gloved metal finger, and slips his tags over his head.
These tags belong to a dead man, he thinks distantly, but they belong to him, too.
He’s still sniffling softly, adjusting the tags so that they lay under the collar of his sweater, when he distantly hears the sound of van doors opening and men with heavy boots and guns stashed in their long jackets and backpacks flood the opening of the museum. His shoulders tense when he hears the first scream of scared civilians, his hand stilling, and he sighs tiredly, tugging his cap more snuggly onto his head and flexing the metal fingers of his hand. He casts one last glance at his somber display, before he’s vanishing out a high window with one thought on his mind, burning brighter and clearer than it has for 70 years.
He’s alive, and so is Steve.
It’s a pretty good thought to have.