Chapter Text
James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes was someone who drew attention to himself naturally. Whether it be his charming looks, or his Brooklyn drawl people swarmed around him like he was a beacon of light on a stormy night. Bucky was always surrounded by people, whether it be his mother and three sisters, a pretty dame from down the street or the sickly blonde who tried to pick fights with people who could probably break him in half by breathing too hard.
There was no shortage of people who were around Bucky at any given point and yet Bucky was a solitary person. He had no problem entertaining the little ladies that wanted to prove that they had enough moxie to go against their parents by messing around with the sweet-talking men on the town, or to save little Stevie from another fight in the back alley but it still felt like there was this wall that separated him from the rest of the people around him. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that attachments meant that he would get hurt in the end, people around him were dying for all kinds of reasons and Bucky never knew who was going to leave him next. Sure, he loved his ma, his sisters, and Stevie (the stupid punk had to make himself at home in his family, his ma practically adopting him after Sarah Rogers died) but he never felt like he was at home here. Maybe it was the times getting him down, but he felt like there was something greater for him, somewhere—a place where he would belong.
Being poor was a tricky thing, it taught Bucky how to get by on less than his sisters as he gave up small portions of his food so that they could eat, but it also taught him that death was inevitable. He watched as his sisters withered away one by one before the war even stuck. Each one of them becoming frail and weak to the point where there was no hope left and they passed in their sleep looking close to skeletons. Every goodbye became easier than the last. The first time he said goodbye to one of his sisters Bucky was a mess for several weeks afterwards trying his damn near best to find any extra money he could so the others would be able to get medicine if it happened again. He worked himself ragged, taking up odd jobs to the point where he passed out from exhaustion. While he was recovering another one of his sisters got sick, and the money he made couldn’t even cover the check up from the doctor. The second time he said goodbye he cried and cried but some part of him felt numb, little Stevie hugged him while he wept talking about how he got how Bucky felt (Bucky was too far gone to realise how much Steve was crying as well, she was his sister just as much as she was Bucky’s). When his last sister died; he didn’t shed a single tear, he didn’t feel anything. It was like the void that existed previously consumed him whole and made him forget what it felt like to be alive.
Then the conscription came in 1942, Bucky was assigned to the 107th where he left behind his ma and the sickly blonde who was the closest thing to a sibling he had left. The 107th was a unit of snipers, Bucky was one of the best. A sharpshooting sniper who was one of the best in the squad, a mix of deadly precision and apathy (he was still reeling from the deaths of the only people he held dear). He fought courageously in the war only to be captured with his squad by Hydra. The time he spent there was foggy at best but what he did remember was waking up to little Stevie rescuing him, except Steve wasn’t so little anymore. Bucky’s apathy was washed away when he got his head on straight after they brought him back, he had a renewed sense of purpose to fight along Steve in his quest to protect the innocent (even if the serum was a risky choice that could have gotten Steve killed but he was a stupid punk who never did listen any of the safety talks they had). The two of them salvaged the rest of the unit and created the Howling Commandos to battle the Red Skull’s forces. Bucky never felt so alive, he felt like he was fighting for that place where he belonged, and he was almost there. He would reach it with Steve, ‘til the end of the line (it was embarrassing how many times Steve liked to remind him of the promise, but it was their thing nonetheless).
Of course, right before he could find his place where he thought he could belong he fell off the damn train to his death.
That was the death of “Bucky”
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The Winter Soldier was forged in cold winters, desolate and merciless. A true reflection of the person it was. The Winter Soldier was not a person, per se, it was more a weapon in a flesh wrapping. Some weapons were made of metal and other materials so in the same way it was made out of flesh and bones. It’s body was once that if a regular humans but through upgrades and regular maintenance it became Hydra’s most prized possession. The person whose body it was using was long gone erased through the forging process that the handlers deemed effective. The person was stripped from the body it was inhabiting through electrical currents that were sent directly to the asset’s forehead, the constant electrical shocks erased the person who had the body originally and laid down a blank canvas that the handlers used to create the asset. Equipped with the enhanced abilities and a metal arm, the asset was the best weapon that Hydra created; one that was bred to be ruthless and brutal in it’s tasks. The asset carried out every order that was given to him, as it was in it’s best interests. Weapons need to be useful to be kept in commission, once the weapon did not perform well it would be decommissioned or punished and remade again. The punishments varied but the worse was the chamber and memory wipes.
The chamber and memory wipes was used on the asset after it made the mistake of thinking it was human (trying to find a place where he it belonged), this sentiment was left over from the human in which it’s body belonged to. The asset sometimes thought that the person was still in the body locked away, but there nonetheless. The asset was instructed to train the little widows, baby spiders who were to be taught how to use their bodies as their most dangerous weapons. They were little girls and the asset felt bad for them, trained them ruthlessly. The most promising widow was Natalia, she made some in the asset ache, almost like there was this hole in his it’s chest that she could help fill (not completely though, Natalia didn’t even know who she was anymore). There were no sparks between the asset and the widow, it was more of a fragile human connection in a world filled with robots. They snuck off after a couple of years training together finally trying to explore this feeling that was foreign to the two of them. The asset didn’t know what to call it, but it was something, the whole in it’s chest lessened in it’s ache but it never did quite stop its throbbing. They were caught though, and the asset should have seen it coming how thinking it was human would cause problems.
The asset was put in the same chair it was forged in every time the person who owned the body before him bled through, the current wiping it’s mind each time leaving behind a blank slate to be used to carry out any order. In addition to the constant memory wipes the handlers deemed that the asset should go into the chamber to eliminate any further attempts at being human.
It was years of this, being woken up to complete a mission to be wiped and frozen again. The months bled into years and the asset lost all concept of time.
Until the person who own the body before saved the man in the colourful costume.
That was the death of “The Winter Soldier”
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The person that existed was neither “Bucky” nor “The Winter Soldier” it was a weird amalgamation of the two of them, trying to find a way to reconcile all the memories filtering through his brain at once. There was so much memories rushing into his head at once and although he knew it was his own, he felt no connection to it. They were like snapshots of a life lived by someone else that he was watching through a film. The lenses were gray and there was nothing that stood out to him, he remembered a sick little blond and a feisty red head but that was the extent that his memories made any type of sense.
There was no time to try and sort through the emotions and snapshots where there was so much happening around him, he some how awoke into a world where there was Gods and aliens and a war in which he was the center of. The event were foggy to him at the moment but there was a bombing and a strike team. There was too much happening at once that he just went with whatever the blond in the too tight outfit was telling him, all while he called him “Bucky”. He had a vague idea of who this person was to the person he was before, this was his sickly Stevie who was now a superhero? The brief memories attached to this person seemed to suggest that they were trust worthy so he followed the walking American Flag as they navigated the fights.
This led them to the bunker in Siberia where the weight of the memories that he had recently discovered weighted down on him. This man wrapped in an iron death machine said he had come to help them. That he was on their side an Steve allowed him to come near them so he went along with it, then it happened. A video was played and he knew in that moment that maybe he should have died the first time he tasted death. The man looked shaken as he watched his mother and father die right in front of him as their murderer stood in the same room as them, not even two meters away from him. Even if it felt like it was someone else’s life in his memories he still wept for the man who was blazing in all his glory as he witnessed that tragedy again. He wasn’t sure at wat point he had stopped listening too stunned to realised what was happening all around him when he heard the man question Steve about the video they had all just watched. Steve had known?! The person he knew would never had done that… then again he wasn’t “Bucky” anymore so maybe Steve wasn’t Stevie anymore.
The man of Iron lashed out at Steve and after that he could barley remember what happened after that, like his body had switched into autopilot. When he had regained his sense of self he was in a warm place with the rest of the people who stood behind Steve in the war. There was so much happening at once that he decided to go back into the chamber until he could become someone who was not just a mesh of different people who had died previously, when his triggers could be removed completely so he was neither “Bucky” nor “The Winter Soldier” anymore and maybe removed the aching in his chest as well.
When they put him back in the chamber, that was when the amalgamation of the two personalities died without ever getting to develop.
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When he awoke, there was too much at once and at the same time not enough. The lights were dimmed; and the room was silent except for the harsh whispers of the people around him. His skin was cold and pruned from being in the ice for however long he had been under. When he awoke he expected to see Steve waiting for him but instead he saw the young princess waiting for him to readjust himself to being awake. They gave him a week to readjust to his surroundings and catch up on all the current events before they told him that they found a way to remove his triggers with the help of a doctor in the United States who was willing to lend them their technology. The entire three months that they worked on the trigged he was kept away from the Rogues as it would be detrimental to his recovering mental state.
During that time, he read up on the events that happened while his memory was still foggy and was horrified by the things that were done in his name. He was thankful for Steve and all he did (the little Stevie from who used to sit at their table during dinner and talk about his sisters like they were his own) but there was so much wrong with the situation from the Rogues side. He used the three months to try and understand the situation from both points of view and understand the man he took so much from.
When the three months were up; and he was declared free of his triggers he felt the best he had felt in a long, long time. He worked hard under the realization that he didn’t need to the person in the memories he had, they were his but they felt like a film he was watching. A life someone else lived. Of course there was the guilt that weighed down on his soul, but if he let that crush him he would never be able to atone for his sins. Upon finishing his rehabilitation, he decided that he was no longer “Bucky” and “The Winter Soldier” so he preferred to be called James. It was a safe name. There was no lingering memories attached to it, no blood on the name. It was safe.
The name was safe but the Rogues weren’t. Ste—Rogers (he wasn’t the same man anymore, they were practically strangers… It’s cruel but no less true). Rogers insisted that his “Bucky” was in there somewhere. That all he had to do was REMEMBER. Rogers didn’t understand no matter how many times James asked him to address him by the new (safe) name, he kept calling him “Bucky”. He toke every chance he had to try and bring up memories from three lifetimes away, trying to force James into “Bucky” the type that would call him punk and have his back always. Rogers couldn’t accept that sometimes James slipped into Russian to think, or that the Brooklyn might come out sometimes but didn’t mean that it was here to stay.
Natalia was worse, he thought. She was someone he might have liked once (it wasn’t love, James could see it now. It was an arrangement where two broken people tried to hold each other close enough to remember what it felt like to feel whole), but there was none of that now. She looked at him with skeptical eyes like she expected him to snap at any moment and kill them all, but sometimes when she let her guard down just enough she looked soft (as soft as she could manage without becoming insincere and in that moment James feels bad). He remembered bits of their time together, but it was mostly how deadly she was. There was nothing about her that put him at ease anymore, whenever she was in the room; he was on alert constantly surveying the room under the guise of indifference that he adopted after being reintroduced to the group.
The rest of the group were annoyances at best, a group of outcasts being held together by their hatred from one man (the very man who the world stood behind at the moment, James had done his research and knew the facts unlike the group of grownups acting like petulant children) They spent their days bashing the man for his past while they tried to tell James that his didn’t define who he was. The irony of it all left James reeling as he tried to rationalize their behaviours. It got so bad that James asked to be isolated like he was when he was removing his triggers. The time he spent away from the Rogues allowed him to befriend the royalty and the people of Wakanda who offered their beautiful country to them.
After two weeks of being alone news came that there were pardons that were being granted to the Rogues that allowed them to go to the United States as long as they signed the Accords. Attached to his copy of the Accords there was a note:
Hello Barnes,
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything on pen and paper so bare with me okay?
I’m sorry for what happened in Siberia, it was an emotional moment and there was so many fucked up things happening at that time that I just snapped. Well I’m sorry I hit you, I’d deck Rogers again if you give me the chance. I’ve reconciled with the idea that you were the gun that killed my parents not the person. You are just as much as a victim as my parents were. So no hard feelings Winter Wonderland (I love nicknames get used to them! Unless they make you uncomfortable then tell me)
Since B.A.R.F (the name is awesome mind you) worked and you’re free of the triggers and your know the shinny pardon you’re holding come find me when you settle into the compound and we can cry and braid each other’s hair and get to know each other for the people we’ve become.
See ya!
Tony Stark (You Know Who I Am)
James stared at the letter in shock and wondered how could this man be so kind after all he’s taken away from him.
Maybe in the compound he could find a friend who didn’t look for the ghosts he’s left behind and try to fill the gaping whole in his chest by finding a place where he belongs…