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He was falling. Steve had been so close but the pipe broke off and he was screaming but it felt like nothing was leaving his mouth. It was happening so quickly and so slowly and he knew that it would take so long to hit the ground. Steve was getting smaller. Almost like he was Before.
At least Bucky would die swiftly.
Would he die? Or would that shit they shot up his veins stitch him up as fast as he falls apart?
He closed his eyes, not wanting to look at the white-blue sky or Steve’s face or the black-spotted, white mountains or the train.
Pain, sharp pain as he fell through trees. Maybe a groan is swiftly knocked out of him.
Peaceful death.
________
He could hear voices . . . and felt frozen numb. He felt like he was being spun dizzy but he wasn’t moving. He couldn’t feel much else but that weird dizzy feeling.
The voices were distant and fuzzy but distinctly foreign. He tried opening his eyes but was immediately hit with nausea and double the vertigo.
He didn’t know what the men were saying, only that there were three of them at least, and that they were standing right behind his head. He was freezing. Is this heaven? Was that the voices of angels taking him where he needed to be? They sounded so different from his other angel.
He needed to finish dying and let them handle it.
________
“Soldier.” Slap. “Enough rest. No more. Wake now!” Slap.
The voice was heavily accented. He heard the slaps but couldn’t feel them. Still couldn’t open his eyes. Still frozen numb.
“ Soldat! . . . “ followed by unfamiliar words. He knew that one. Sounded so much like being yelled at in the training camp.
He tried shifting but it was useless. The nausea and vertigo made him feel a hundred pounds heavier, from his legs to his chest to his eyelids. He couldn’t do anything.
Bright, searing pain set alight his entire body, vaporizing the ice left in his veins. White, like the light of heaven, shining through his mind. He tastes wet metal. Blood. When the heat zapping through him ceases, he feels numb in more than just his body. His mind feels heavy, muddy, and slow.
“Do you want another?”
He opens his mouth to respond but everything feels too heavy–his bitten tongue, his lips. Wetness runs down his chin. It might be drool. It might be the blood he tastes. Instead of a coherent answer, he makes a gurgling grunt.
“That sounds like ‘yes’.”
It happens again.
________
H is muscles were sore from all the fighting and tensing he had done. Now, he was strapped to a table.
“This will not hurt,” said the squeaky doctor with the stupid glasses. “Actually . . . it might hurt a bit. Quite a bit. But don’t make a fuss, please,” he requested conversationally.
Bucky saw him putting on gloves. White plasticky gloves like the ones Steve’s doctors wear. Steve, back in Brooklyn, safe and sound. Now the doctor was picking up a line that was connected to a bag of murky reddish liquid. Connecting it to a needle. Drawing closer to Bucky . . .
Bucky tensed, thrashing away as much as he could. But strapped down seven ways to Sunday, it only aided in him roughing himself up against the straps.
“Oh, come now,” the doctor said impatiently.
Very suddenly, Bucky realized how inevitable this was. There was nothing else he could do. They could torture him, kill him, do anything to him and there was nothing left that he could do. He couldn’t fight his way out of this.
He squeezed his eyes shut and started praying to God that he could still be saved. Before he got to finish his prayer, the needle was stuck into his arm. For a while, it was fine. Bucky believed that they were drawing his blood, which made dread fill his stomach. Were they really gonna bleed him out? Slowly and- Oh God.
It burned. It burned so bad. A steady stream of fire flooded his veins. He felt it flow through him, through his heart and through his limbs and he was going to die. He screamed and was hit in the gut by a baton. There was a prick in his other arm and it didn’t matter because he was burning and dying.
It could’ve been minutes or hours or days or months that he laid on that table. The only way he could tell that time was moving and that he was still indeed alive was the movement of people in the dingy, dirty room. Eventually, the burning stopped, but he became numb and heavy and useless. He opened his eyes and the line and bag were gone, along with everyone that had brought him in there. No soldiers, no doctor. No equipment . . . everything was gone.
He was told that if he was held captive he needed to recite his name, rank, and serial number. He didn’t remember why, but he remembered being quizzed on his number at least once an hour during training. In a daze, he began chanting:
Barnes; Sergeant; 32557038.
Barnes; Sergeant; 32557038.
Barnes; Sergeant; 32557038.
“Barnes; Sergeant; 32557 . . .” He heard footsteps enter his room and groggily stopped chanting. After a few long moments . . . maybe minutes . . . why was time moving so slowly? the person approached.
Blue eyes that looked like home. Everything else was so blurry and out of focus, but those eyes were so clear. It couldn’t be real, because Steve was at home. Or at least far away from here. He couldn’t be here. This was an angel answering his prayer from earlier–days ago?--and was here to escort him to his death.
“Bucky.” But that voice sounded like home as much as those eyes looked like home and how was he here, gloved hand on Bucky’s jaw?
“Steve?”
“Bucky,” replied the angel in a breathy voice that sounded like Steve’s relief. But the angel was so tall, so big, nothing like the boy he knew.
It felt like he was underwater because everything was slow and sounded distorted and looked blurry. The straps were being ripped off of him and now he was positive that this wasn’t . . . couldn’t be . . .
“Steve . . .”
Soft, firm hands sitting him upright. Dizziness drowning him.
“God, Buck, I thought you were dead.”
Bucky glanced over the angel. Over Steve. His Steve. Too tall.
“I thought you were smaller,” he slurred.
And then they were running and Bucky was dizzy and Steve was halfway carrying him but they had a job to do, they were on a mission, and Steve was an angel.
_________
He was bleeding out. Surely this time was it. He was bleeding out because he lost his arm. It was gone. He didn’t know if it happened when he fell or after, hasn’t been coherent enough to notice until now, but it didn’t matter because it was gone and he would finally die this time.
Except he wouldn’t. He wasn’t dying. There was so much blood pouring out of the wound, the place where his arm should be, how is he moving his fingers if his hand is gone? and the blood was all over his side and he was so sick but there was nothing in him and he wasn’t dying .
“Heal faster, Soldat. ”
And it was so absurd, such an insane thing to be ordered, that he started laughing. He would, if he could. Or he would kill himself sooner. He laughed, unable to stop himself. Heal faster. Die quicker. He wished desperately for either one but everything he observed while he was awake made him want to die more and more. He was dead anyway, he died when he fell off the train. Steve wouldn’t be saving him this time. His angel couldn’t save what he thought was already gone.
He was punched this time. He kept laughing, unable to take control over his brain or body enough to turn it off. Turn it off. Heal faster.
They pulled the helmet device over his head again and the lightning in his veins came back.
__________
“The angel . . . with the blue eyes. Can he take me now?”
Bucky’s lips were loose. Was his name Bucky? That’s what the angel called him. But he was only ever called Soldier or Soldat here, and they referred to him as ‘Asset’ when speaking to each other.
He wanted to go home with the angel. Go to heaven and be with his mama again. But he was starting to forget what his mama felt like or looked like. He was starting to forget the details of the angel, only that he was strong and had blue eyes and was gonna help him quit hurting.
They said unfamiliar words to him but sounded so angry that he tensed in preparation for an attack.
“No need, gentlemen.”
That voice was familiar, but from where? The men around Barnes lowered their batons. The man with the little round glasses approached, and seeing him hurt the Soldier’s head so badly. Where was he from? Was he a memory or a foggy, half-drugged up dream?
“Good evening, Asset. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other.”
Oh. It was real. A long time . . .
“I see you’ve lost something that might be of quite some importance. So I came to help you with that.”
Lost his angel. Help find his angel?
“What angel?”
The doctor looked around, alarmed. One of the guards said to him, “Soldier has been babbling like idiot about ‘angel’ all day. Something wrong with electrotherapy. Probably corrupted memories of wife or sister.”
But that made the Soldier’s head hurt worse because he never had a wife and his sister’s hair was brown, her name was Rebecca and her hair was brown and her eyes were green, not sky blue, ocean blue, home blue.
“Ah, no matter. We will get that fixed while I’m here, too.”
________
Whenever the Asset remembered, he hurt. It hurt his head to remember. If the memories made his performance falter he would be punished. If he was out of cryostasis for too long, it made the memories of the Soldier that died more frequent. It was confusing and painful and he would rather just be reset–get the shocks and be put in the freezer–than feel those memories.
But he saw his angel. On the bridge. Nothing about the Soldier that died remained in the Asset; the Asset was a blank canvas, a weapon, no more than a human attack dog. But when he saw those eyes, he felt nostalgia hit him like a bullet and nausea rush over him like a tidal wave. He needed to tell someone that the Asset was malfunctioning and would need recalibration. Until then, the mission would continue.