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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And I Am Always with You, Part 34

[lauralot]

"What?"

Steve does not move away from the wall he struck when the Soldier shoved him. His face is still, eyes wide and mouth hanging slightly open. The Soldier doesn't bother to decipher the expression. He can't look at Steve; the more he looks the more he is torn between completing his mission and hugging the man in atonement for shoving and throttling him for lying.

"Лгун," the Soldier mumbles, stunned. "Лгун." How can Steve lie? He never lies; that was the first thing the Soldier could remember about him. No, the second. The first memory, the one that preceded any knowledge of Steve's honesty or even his name, was

[he was there he stayed with me I remember he was there]

a friend kneeling over the broken body, Steve's smile providing the only warmth while Barnes lay bleeding in the snow.

The memory hurts, stinging like ice and wind scraping exposed skin, and other, similar recollections come trickling from nowhere, pooling together like a puddle of blood formed from many little slices. He can see a tile floor, the grout lines stained red. A cell. He sees his body strapped down while the flesh is peeled back from his left arm, exposing the bone. He sees weapons and oranges and fire hoses and Zola and most of all he sees Steve.

"Bucky—"

There is a hand on his shoulder and the Soldier strikes out. "Не трогай меня!" The metal rams into Steve's chest and sends him staggering back into the wall. The plaster cracks this time. Over his heartbeat he can dimly hear JARVIS translating his words but all he can see is the damage to the wall and blood on tile and it isn't his wall to break, it's Howard's, and he's going to be beaten for this, going to be sent back to the chair, but isn't that what he wanted?

"Okay." It's the winged man's voice, far off. "It's okay." It's closer this time, and he manages to look the man's way. "No one's gonna lay their hands on you again, all right? We want to help you, but you need to explain what's upsetting you. Can you do that?"

"Я хочу домой." It is a low whine forced from a throat that hadn't planned to speak, fingers winding through his hair. It is a lie but it is also true and he shouldn't be able to lie so he tugs on the hair in punishment. The Soldier hears Steve's intake of breath, quiet but sharp, and flinches.

"You want to go home," the man who had wings repeats. He hasn't moved. "Where is that, Bucky?"

His legs cease to hold him up and he is huddled on the floor, hair in a dark curtain over his eyes, forehead almost resting against his knees. "Ice." His voice is choked. "Dark." But he's never gone into the tank in such a state. "I am erratic." The English words he needs flow smoothly now, words he must have learned from the doctors even though his mind cannot retrieve the context. "When the asset is erratic, the asset is a danger to itself and to others and must be recalibrated. The asset must be wiped, must be—you said." Through his hair he can see Steve's shoes, lingering not close to him but not nearly far enough away. "You said to let them help me. Why won't you help me now?"

This must be a game. Handlers are allowed to lie to their assets if they wish, if it is necessary or if it amuses them. Steve was there from what the Soldier thinks was the beginning of Barnes's time with HYDRA. He must have condoned it. This is all a game, from the helicarrier to the present. A joke or a test of his loyalty and if it's the latter, he's surely failed.

But there is no laugh in Steve's voice when he says, "Bucky, I don't understand what you're talking about."

"The first time they took Barnes to the chair." He thinks it was the first time. There is no laugh in the Soldier's voice either, but assets aren't meant to laugh, even at jokes. They're also not meant to cry, but that is in his voice and he is rigidly awaiting a slap as a rebuke. "And he—I was испуганный and trying to get away and you told me to stop fighting. You said 'Trust me, Bucky.'"

He can see the cell again, hear Barnes's words coming through his mouth. Get me out of here.

He hears Steve's voice in reply. I can't.

"Buck—"

"I didn't like it," the Soldier says, and his body feels as if it is sliding into what the medics called shock.

He had never been unhappy with HYDRA, not that he could remember, until they sent him after Steve on the helicarrier. In the flashes of past missions he can pull to mind, he didn't feel happy, but he didn't feel anything. The only sparks of emotion were contentment when his handlers were pleased and apprehension when they were not. Assets have no feelings of their own. He'd thought his dislike of the missions and the chair were new sensations brought about by Steve's attempts to awaken Barnes.

But sitting in that cell, starving, aching, and exhausted… "I didn't like it."

And Steve had known he hadn't.

His hands clamp onto his own legs, bruising, so that he will not stand up and attack Steve.

Through his hair he sees Steve sit on the floor as well, and the Soldier closes his eyes so he will not have to meet the man's gaze. "Bucky," he says, and the Soldier's mind will never cease to spin at all the feelings Steve can put into that name, "Buck, I wasn't there. When HYDRA had you, I was in the ice."

It's the same lie from the Smithsonian and the Internet. The nails of the right hand dig into his leg through the fabric of his pants, teeth grinding. He raises his head. Assets are not meant to stare at their handlers this way. It is a sign of defiance and it is to be severely punished. But the Soldier doesn't care. There is nothing else in his life he has ever been sure of but he is sure of this and he will not play whatever game this handler wants to play with him. "You said you wouldn't leave me. In the snow, before HYDRA took us."

"Bucky," says the man who had wings, but the Soldier carries on. Whatever the man has to say does not matter. Nothing matters but the memories.

"They set my bones and you were there. We watched them cut it away." He tilts his head toward the metal arm, but his eyes do not leave Steve's. "You told me to get in the chair and I умоляла you to save me and you said you couldn't. You let them put me in ice. I remember."

He thinks a friend who would do those things is a bad friend. Steve had said he would never hurt him. The Soldier's eyes are leaking again. This is called sadness. He preferred it when he didn't know the names of these sensations. They were easier to push aside.

Steve went very white at the mention of the Soldier's arm, which was an accomplishment as he was already white before. He looks as if he is bleeding out. His hand is pressed over his mouth and his eyes are shining in a way that suggests they may leak.

"Do you know what a hallucination is, Bucky?" the man who had wings asks.

He falters, though he does not look away from Steve. "Pictures…pictures in the head while sleeping."

"That's close. When you're sleeping, they're dreams. A hallucination is sensing something that isn't there while you're awake."

"I do not follow."

"You fell alone, Buck." Steve is still so pale. The Soldier wonders if he did more damage to the man than he realized when he pushed him into the wall. "I looked for you after you fell, I did, but—God they must have already had you—and I wanted to keep looking, I would have frozen to death searching, I would have—you fell in some of the most inhospitable conditions on Earth—I couldn't find you and—"

"But you were there," the Soldier says.

"I wasn't. Bucky, I'm sorry, I wasn't."

He is programmed not to argue. The asset's design is such that if someone in a position of authority tells him the sky is green, he will rename what he thinks of as blue to match the information he is given. But he can't cast this aside, even if his next words make him shrink in on himself as he waits to be punished. "I remember you were there."

"You had a traumatic brain injury," the man who had wings says. "We have some of your files—they talk about it there. Hallucinating after that kind of damage isn't unheard of, and with the drugs they were giving you—"

"But I remember." He does not intend for his voice to break on the final word.

Steve lifts a shaking hand as if to reach out to him before lowering it back to his lap. "Bucky—"

"You said you have his files?" Howard Stark asks from the doorway. The Soldier does not know when he came in. "I say let him see them."

*

There is a photograph of him in the file. He stares at it for a long while before he reads any of the words. He's never seen a picture of himself before. Pictures of Barnes, yes, he's seen dozens of those, but the image of himself sleeping in the ice is, to his knowledge, the only photograph of himself in existence.

He looks content, sleeping. He misses that.

There are many things within the file he remembers, details he did not mention before they went to retrieve it, such as the time they tried to bribe him to behave with oranges. There are details he hadn't remembered: it says that he recalled his name after the first wipe, but lost it permanently after the second.

There is no mention of Steve, no reference to any other captive.

The document could be falsified, but the Soldier can see no point in such a game.

So his strongest memories are not real. The very memories that persuaded him to abandon his mission are the products of a broken, drugged mind.

Barnes may have laughed at that, but it would be the kind of laugh that becomes a cry.

He feels Steve's eyes on him and closes the file. "I don't know you."

"Bucky, that's not true."

"All the things I thought I knew weren't real. Everything I remembered…" He shakes his head. The left hand is squeezing his right wrist, and it will turn black and purple with bruising, but the ache of it will be a welcome distraction. "What if everything I remember is a lie?"

"You remembered I can draw," Steve says. "That was right."

"I can't tell the difference." The memory of Steve with a pencil feels exactly the same as the memory of him at the chair.

"That's what I'm here for, Bucky."

He imagines consulting Steve for every small glimpse of a memory he retrieves. Did a young girl ask Barnes about his tights? Did you throw up on a roller coaster? He thinks Captain America has better things to do with his time. "He isn't coming back, is he?"

"Who?"

"James Buchanan Barnes."

Steve does not touch him. Instead, he offers that blanket of Stark's, the heavy one that Sam had retrieved while Steve found the file. The Soldier unclenches his fingers from his wrist—there are white marks on his skin that immediately flush red—and takes it, draping it around his shoulders. "Bucky, listen. You could never remember anything else about your life—you could remember just things that never happened—and I wouldn't care. Because you're still my best friend. You were my best friend when you were shooting at me, you think that's going to stop now just because you don't know things?"

But how to be a best friend is one of the things he doesn't know. The Soldier's gaze drifts to the broken plaster that Stark had told him not to worry about. He thinks a best friend should not have thrown Steve into the wall.

Я хочу домой, the Soldier thinks, but he doesn't know what is left of his home or how he would get there.

Re: And I Am Always with You, Part 34

[(Anonymous)]

...I officially have a love/hate relationship with this fic...

Re: And I Am Always with You, Part 34

[lauralot]

As do I.