Prompt Post 1

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At least one of the characters in your prompt must have been in Captain America: The First Avenger or Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

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Update, April 22, 2014:
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Fill: And I Am Always with You, Part 21 Warning: Gore

[lauralot]

The Soldier dreams.

In the dream he is on the helicarrier and the mission is pinned beneath him. His hand, his right hand, is raining blows upon the man and every time his fist connects, blood flows like the river beneath them. It drenches their bodies and stains the glass around them such a vivid red that it hurts the Soldier's eyes. With each strike the mission's face becomes muddled, indistinct, as if he exists as a drawing on paper and the Soldier's fist is smudging the lead. The Soldier thinks that this mission knew how to draw, as if that information would have been included in the dossier. The Soldier thinks he is fracturing the man's skull and the mission won't retain the cognitive functioning to hold a pencil after this.

The Soldier's knuckles split, and instead of blood there are flashes of silver beneath the skin.

The man screams a word every time he's struck, something that the Soldier doesn't understand. It isn't Russian and the broken jaw isn't making the speech any clearer.

It is only when the mission shatters into fragments of blood and bone that the Soldier is able to look at the components and realize the whole. Steve. It is only when he's struggling to piece the shards back together, watching wide-eyed as they disintegrate at his touch while his own skin sloughs off his arm, exposing metal below, that he recognizes the word.

Bucky.

The glass gives way beneath him and he is in the water, and his body is steel and wiring and it is dragging him down. He is sinking, the water cold but not cold enough to numb, not like ice, and there is a something above him, blocking out the sunlight, nearly on top of him before he recognizes it as a body. It isn't until he makes out the smile that he recognizes Steve.

Steve grabs hold of his arm, watches the metal reflecting what little light is drifting down to them, and the smile fades. The Soldier braces himself to be released, left to drown, but Steve is still pulling him up until he is on the shore, gasping for air. "I'm sorry," he says, even though Steve is here and no longer broken to pieces. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

"I know." Steve is smiling, but the Soldier thinks the smile doesn't reach his eyes. "I'm sorry too."

"Why?" It is not the Soldier's place to ask questions, but he can't help himself. He is backhanded for speaking out of turn and he can feel metal beneath when his lip splits.

"Because I wanted you to be Bucky." Steve sighs, shakes his head. The Soldier thinks the look on his face is called disappointment, and it is the most painful thing in the world. "I wanted you to be a person, but you can't, can you? I should have known."

"Are you going to kill me?" the Soldier asks. It's inevitable. He cannot be what is required. He is broken.

He isn't hit this time. Instead Steve takes his hand and pulls him to his feet. They aren't on a shore now, but in a room. The Soldier doesn't know the room, but at its center is a chair, and the chair he knows well. "I won't kill you," Steve says as he leads him to it. "I can't kill you. Weapons aren't really alive. And you're my weapon now. That makes you happy, doesn't it? As close to happy as you can get?"

"Please," says the Soldier, but he is already lying back and no one listens when a weapon begs. Steve is gone and the metal is closing around his head, and he tells himself that this is for Steve, that he can be brave and not scream and allow himself to be repaired without struggle, but the shocks begin and he can't keep from crying out.

When the Soldier wakes he is still screaming, flailing to escape restraints that are no longer there. He has not dreamed in seventy years and he has nothing but the faintest memory of the concept, and everything that preceded now felt too real for him to question. He is not accustoming to questioning. He can feel the electricity coursing through his mind, the sting in his chest that accompanies Steve's disappointment, the cold and wet of the ocean. He collapses against the floor, panting, nerveless, and as his heart rate slows the sensations begin to fade.

Save for one.

The Soldier sits up to verify that the pants on his body are, in actuality, wet. He knows that there exists a phenomenon in the world called hallucinations and he is willing to say that everything he just experienced falls under that category because that would be better than the alternative, but from the thighs down he is drenched. He stares, confused, and notes that the pressure he had been feeling in his abdomen has dissipated.

There is a moment of what the English voice believes may be called panic as the Soldier thinks he may have torn something internal.

It withers as suddenly as it blossoms when he remembers.

It is not a flash of words or images. It is not a sudden knowing of a single detail in an overall blurry picture. It is a memory, as if he is there again.

He remembers lying in the chair, boneless, sore and collapsed. The shocks made the body contract, rigid and trembling, and when they were through, things became limp like a newly dead corpse. He couldn't move, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but ache as motor control slowly returned to him, and as he lay there he became aware of being wet.

When he managed to sit up, he was sitting in the fluid that normally exited his body via the tubes. Every part of him had gone slack once the sparks were done firing in his head, and he imagined that is when this happened. The Soldier blinked, staring down. The doctors assisted him out of the chair, and he was dragged to running water, given a change of clothing.

The Soldier presently has no running water or new clothing. But this is…normal? Not normal, but his body is not irreparably damaged, it seems. When he drinks, that which is not used comes back out. There is a sensation that precedes that release. He can likely track that sensation and prevent this experience from repeating.

And he can remember things, fully remember them. For the first time since he left Steve on the shore of the Potomac, the Soldier feels that maybe it is possible for him to find James Buchanan Barnes after all.

He strips from the waist down and pours some of the water bottle's contents onto the clothing, then onto his legs. His mind returns to beating Steve to a pulp on the helicarrier, drowning, being led to the chair by Steve. It strikes him as unlikely that any of that transpired, because the skin is still on his right hand and he can feel that there is no metal beneath it. He thinks he was unconscious. Is that what happens when he becomes unconscious without HYDRA's injections? He would prefer it to never happen again.

The fabric is dry by the night and the Soldier dresses, hides his hair beneath the hat, prepares to leave.

It strikes him that he never found Steve's apartment.

The night that he sought it out was the night he discovered that his body ran on water, the night that Steve found him. He had become distracted, first preoccupied with saving his life, then trying to locate where Steve had gone and determine whether or not he was being pursued. Steve's apartment had been forgotten. And Steve's apartment still stands, unlike James Buchanan Barnes's complex. He read online that it had been preserved as a site of historical interest.

After the graveyard, the apartment may be guarded, but guards have never prevented him from succeeding, he thinks. And now that he knows he can remember, it seems necessary to make this final stop before exiting Brooklyn. So he heads that way, the directions easy to follow now that he is not dying of thirst. His stomach aches and he is mildly dizzy, but this is the closest to full capacity he has felt since before his shoulder was dislocated.

He is lingering some hundreds of yards away from the building, taking in the entry points, when he hears the voice. "Hey, Bucky."

The Soldier turns his head and finds Steve.