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This is what the world looks like to a roach: an endless expanse of a flat, white landscape. Also known as floor. You know this because you're intimately familiar with the perspective of vermin. The floor is made from a synthetic material without texture covering the concrete ground, desperately trying to masquerade as marble with its irregular fine grey veins. Maybe the humans, with their eyes five feet above the ground, let themselves be fooled by it - but not you.
When the fake marble veins start to quiver and dissolve in front of your eyes again, you turn your face up, hair spreading out on the ground around your head as you look up to the lights, high, high up on the ceiling. There's the window you sometimes peer out of, when you've forgotten about the nondescript view again, and below it the bed that you sometimes sit but never sleep on. Because you rarely ever sleep. There's no place to hide because your body is so much bigger than your mind so you might as well stay where you are, even though from down here you're tiny and they're giants.
They, of course, are the doctors. Shrinks, you figure, because their job is shrinking the thing that is you, make you small so there's room in your head for them to pour in what they want there. What they want there is most certainly not you but you still keep growing back, an infestation they can never quite get rid of completely, so they have to shrink and shrink. They've already shrunk you to the size of a vermin but now you've been suspended to this room, where you wait for the other shoe to drop. You think, eventually, it will be a boot to squelch you.
The heavy door slides open and you see them upside down. The doctor and the nurse.
They greet you, unoffended and unsurprised by the fact that you neither reply nor get up. It's all the resistance you can afford to their tentative prodding and poking. Your eyes follow the doctor as she steps carefully around your stretched out limbs and sits down on the floor, at a safe distance - as if there was such a thing as a safe distance from you for anyone in the room. Unfazed, she gets to work, to find the small shoots where you might be growing back in your head just so she can pull on them like threads to unravel you again, weed your mind of the thing that wants to clamour against the shrinking.
You cooperate through the standard questions concerning your recent illness, which you think followed a failed mission. That you hardly sleep, even though they are not doing anything to (overtly) prevent you from it, they already know because they are always, always watching you. You reckon they are also monitoring your vital parameters, so they know better than you whether your heart and lungs work to their satisfaction. Still, she wants to know if and to what degree you still experience nausea, dizziness, headaches, or pains in your chest. You report on your symptoms, impassively, as she taps away on her shiny tablet. Sometimes they do this, withdraw a drug and observe, then inject something else. Or the same thing. It doesn't really matter.
Your nurse, all broad shoulders and carefully guarded expression, is leaning awkwardly against the wall next to the door, and all he does is look unhappy about your answers. You crane your neck to take the sight of him in from your place on the floor and he is impossibly, unnaturally tall, earnest face hanging in such lofty heights, you could build a sniper's nest in his blond hair. You must have seen him countless times before, you know this, but your memory can never quite capture this. You don't mind if you get to be astonished over and over. He meets your gaze and drops a smile on you that knocks the breath from your lungs when it hits you.
The doctor repeats the question you haven't heard the first time and you don't really give a damn and tell her so. She takes a note and asks you whether you remember your name. You squeeze your eyes shut because of course the correct answer is no, it's always been no. Once, you might have chosen the other answer but they scorched that option from the voting ballot so you never have any alternative to the tyranny of namelessness. They toss you the question every now and then, gleeful about their clever fraud, so you don't give her the satisfaction of replying at all today.
Her face betrays no dissatisfaction, however, as she proceeds to close the session and thank you for your time, as if you had any choice or anywhere else to be. Glaring at her is the only safe response you can muster. Her skin is dark but her hair is the colour of concrete, like the walls, and it's fitting that she is just as hard and unwaveringly persistent beneath the courteous surface. Still, it would take you mere seconds to smash her skull open against those very walls. Spill some colour through the grey room. Inspect the insides of her head, for a change. Your hands itch to do it.
But you won't, because of him.
The doctor takes her leave, leaving her patient under his supervision.
He tells you that your name is Bucky and his name is Steve. The first one slips right through your fingers but Steve, you try to remember that. "I keep forgetting," you say, unnecessarily. And then, "I'm sorry," even though you have no reason to be sorry since they're the ones who decided that you're not supposed to remember in the first place. It's messed up and confusing and makes your head swim.
"Don't worry about it." Steve flops down next to you on the ground, expelling some of the awkward tension from his body, now that it's only the two of you.
He smiles at you and cracks a joke as he hands you the pills. His name has slipped away from you again, but it doesn't matter. You might remember it later. And if you do, you're going to keep it for yourself.
You know all of this, it won't last long. There is always something that comes next: the palsy of an endless, white cold. Smoke and broken bones, a trigger pulled and a body dropping. That's the point of your existence. This interlude comes around every once in a while when the asset requires more than standard maintenance, tests need to be made, neurological programming refined. In your perpetual present of rooms like this one you've seen vaguely familiar faces shrivelling from youthful to age-worn, doctors and handlers being replaced by other doctors and handlers.
He tells you that this is different, that they want to help you. There is nothing considerably wrong with your physical or intellectual capabilities. You yourself would like to think so, at least. Even though you've lost a lot of weight since your illness and you tend to forget some things. Nothing that necessarily hinders the successful completion of a mission and that's the point of you, after all. "Help with what?" you ask.
"Help you recover," he replies. Recover what? You're not sure what he means but maybe it's still true: Maybe this is different somehow because there has never been anyone like him--and maybe that's enough. At least he seems to think so.
"What's the point of you?" you asked him the night he wiped your vomit off the floor. Or rather: one of the various nights, early on when you were mostly a whimpering, retching wakefulness. His ridiculous look of delight over you asking a simple fucking question was absurdly incompatible with the act of cleaning sick off the floor. "That's one hell of a question, pal," he said. "To be honest, I don't even know anymore." He got up to throw the paper towels in the toilet and came back with a glass of water. "For now, the point of me is to take care of you, ok?"
"Ah. You're my nurse." Your voice always sounds a bit raspy with your throat and vocal chord bitten raw by bile and screaming. The sound is unpleasant, rank and burned, not like the clean cold clinking of metal fingers closing around the glass, water sloshing over the edge quietly. Somehow the irony was still palpable enough for him.
He watched you drink with a hint of something at the corner of his mouth. "Technically no. But I guess I am."
Technically, you don't need any nursing. It seems bizarre and pointless, appointing someone to wipe the sweat from your brow while you're shaking apart in the grip of hideous phantasms. To speak calm words guiding you back from the precipice or spin stories of an improbable, shared past. It's not that you mind, not at all, but it puzzles you. He talks to you and he looks sad unless you reciprocate. You try to piece it together from what he's told you and you try especially hard to memorize these facts: This is my best friend Steve. He actually likes hanging around this shithole with me.
If there was one thing you could take with you, when you eventually leave this place, it would be him. But you've never been allowed to keep anything, so you'll enjoy it while it lasts. It lasts longer than you think.
He always comes bearing gifts: names, pills, smiles. You swallow them and they tumble down into the cracks inside you. It makes you thirsty for more than you dare ask for.
"You don't got any other patients to tend to?" you ask instead, nudging him with your foot from the other end of the bed. Not that he's tending to you, either, as he sits there, folded around his sketchbook, only casting you a sideways glance every now and then. You're content to watch, though.
"Nope," he says with a little grin, "I'm all yours."
So you wonder if that's the point of this pointless guy who is neither handler nor doctor, just this: To pour his presence into the black hole of your memory. You recognize him, but you never recognize him enough and it drives you mad. Sometimes his bruised and broken body crawls back out of that black hole, refusing to fight you. It's worse, in a way, than the usual terrors that plague you when you're alone, when you're unaware that sometimes you aren't.
His keepers' patience seems boundless. You were made for death but now you wonder if they changed their mind. Perhaps this confusion and the smallness between your temples is the point now. It's still better than the cold. These days the hands that draw blood samples from your veins and words from your mouth are warm and gentle, and yet you never forget that behind that door, somewhere, their machines are quietly humming, waiting for you. But you think that's alright, as long as the hand that feeds you is him because, god, you're hungry.
"Why are you doing this?" you ask him. Steve. He always comes back to squeeze himself into your narrow cage, although only one of you was made to be kept in a cage.
"What? Beating you at chess?" he says distractedly, scrutinizing the board before making his move.
"No. This," you say and he looks confused for a moment, so you gesture to the room, and yourself.
It agitates him but hell if you can imagine why. You can see him turning his answer over in his mind and hope he'll spit it out before you forget the question. His eyes follow the chess piece you slide toward him and he keeps his gaze fixed on it, even though he doesn't need to in order to know the positions. You envy his photographic memory. But basically you envy everyone with a functioning brain.
"I'm here because I want to be here, Bucky." There's an unspoken number of other things dangling from the edges of that answer and your imagination latches onto them like a starving leech. He doesn't have to say it, even if it would make for a stronger argument, and you can feast on the maybes. You literally cannot recall how many times you have questioned why he always returns to wade into the quicksand of your mind, stubbornly proclaiming that he is your friend. You may not remember having friends but you're almost certain no one likes their friends that much. So you suspect he's either oblivious or full of shit.
One of his gifts is a folder of old pictures and photocopied letters but reading makes your head hurt, so you stick to staring at a photograph of the two of you. "Now, I'm not saying I'm not him because I don't remember, right? But let's say your old pal Bucky is still swimming around in that fucked-up pottage up here." Steve frowns like he's dying to interrupt you, or at least object to that particular image. "And let's assume there are some FUBAR pieces of him that can be dragged up and salvaged." Some already have, you think: The way certain words roll off your tongue or the fact that you like dogs, even though the last one you saw, you killed. But more memories may very well not be among the remains and you're sick and tired of fishing for them because what do you really need that for, anyway.
"But if I never remember," you go on, "I'm still stuck with your ugly mug, aren't I?"
His face cracks into a smile. "Yep. You are. I don't care." You're still you, that's what he always says, and he's right, of course. You may be terror and forgetfulness but you're also someone that this stupid lunk can't stay away from.
You nod, satisfied. "That's what I thought."
The next doctor to ask you what you remember gets his arm broken. You could do worse things with your anger but you're well-trained in biting back. Now that they're so lenient with you, it's become a balancing act if there ever was one. But waving an inaccessible past from before the freezing white in front of you has a special kind of cruelty to it, especially now that you know who's in it. They never used to do this and they deserve much worse than broken arms for it. When Steve checks in, he asks what happened and frustration drips red into your eyes and makes you lash out blindly. It's a brutally short scuffle before he has you pinned down, his knee digging into your back, and the floor before your eyes is spattered with blood dripping rapidly from your nose. It's exhilarating because at least your body remembers this. It makes you feel less small. Violence, always, but also Steve and the way your bodies move around each other. A five second fight to make up for all the destruction you haven't caused since you got sick. It vanishes into a crack inside you in a heartbeat and leaves you aching for more. It's pathetic and it startles a laugh out of you. Steve lets go of you and huffs, "What the hell, Bucky?"
You sit up and wipe at your nose uselessly, leaving a smear of blood on the back of your hand. "You know, that's what I keep asking myself," you say. He snorts and looks on skeptically as you proceed to wipe your hair out of your face with the nosebleed hand. "Maybe it's time we got you out of here," he says, shaking his head slightly. You're not sure that's the right conclusion to draw from this mess but you won't complain.