Nobody's Soldier - bucky barnes, ch.1
chapter 1
summary: The Soldier rolled and got up on his feet. The mask lay forgotten on the asphalt. He turned around to face the Captain.
The blond man paused and straightened. Eyebrows furrowed, he seemed shocked.
“Bucky?” The man stumbled over the word, barely getting it out of his mouth.
“... Who the hell is Bucky?”
words: 2,504
warnings/includes: bucky character study, canon-typical violence, angst, blood & injury, PTSD, physical disability, memory loss, brainwashing
a/n: forcing myself to post this chapter so i can force myself to write more. i'm so excited for this bc this guy has been living in my head for too long with lots of headcanons so finally putting words to paper (?)
read on ao3
ch. 2
“Longing. Rusted. Seventeen.”
Gloved hands loosened the thick straps that dug into his forearms. Another pair ripped the mouth guard from between his teeth.
“Daybreak. Furnace. Nine. ”
The straps tying each of his legs to the chair were removed next. The metal around his head, touching the side of his face, is removed.
“Benign. Homecoming. One. ”
Cold, rubber-covered hands gripped him and shoved him up. He stumbled forward and caught himself.
“Freight Car. ”
He stiffened, ice crawling up his spine. A sharp inhale and, “Ready to comply. ”
------------------------------------------------------------
He was laying down on his front, hands steady and gripping the sniper tightly. The cold was seeping in through his leather jacket from the hard bricks below. His target was in the apartment opposite the roof, it was his final chance to complete the mission. The Winter Soldier does not fail.
His eyes remained trained on the window of the apartment, waiting for his opportunity to see his target. Suddenly, he saw a faint light turn on through the window only to turn off again seconds later but it was enough to gain his focus and confirm the presence of his target. Moments later he saw faint movement at the edge of a window with what vaguely seemed like an arm being raised. It was enough for the Soldier to determine the location of his target.
So, he pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. Three times.
50 seconds later, he fled the scene. He ran across the roof, away from the targeted apartment building. As he made it halfway across the roof, he heard glass shattering on the floor below him. And so the chase began.
He picked up the pace, feet slamming down on the rooftop as he raced to leave before any altercation with his pursuer. All he could hear was the pounding of his own two feet and the faint sounds of the person a floor below as they tried to catch up with him. It sounded like furniture being smashed and doors thrown off their hinges. The Soldier continued running and sped up as he neared the edge of the roof. He jumped onto the roof of the lower building in front of him and landed in a roll.
Glass shattered as his pursuer jumped through a window onto the roof. He heard a swish and he caught a red and blue shield with his left arm and he threw it back at his blond pursuer. The Soldier then disappeared.
------------------------------------------------------------
The Soldier had been fighting on the freeway for longer than he had prepared for. His targets were two alleged ‘superheroes’ who were putting up too much of a fight, making the Soldier impatient to complete his mission.
He tore his cracked goggles off his face and emptied his machine gun towards the Widow’s flitting form as she quickly weaved between abandoned vehicles. He jumped off the bridge, crushing a car on the street below in pursuit of the Widow while the other Hydra operatives dealt with the Captain.
Having lost sight of her, the Soldier cautiously weaved between cars with his machine gun at the ready. Faintly, he heard her voice meters ahead. He reached back into the pocket of his vest and retrieved a ball grenade and slowly rolled it beneath a black SUV where the Widow’s voice was coming from.
She wasn’t there. Now the Soldier was irritated.
A heavy force crashed into him from behind, kicking his gun out of his hands. Legs wrapped around his shoulders, and a wire coiled around his neck, choking him. Stumbling backwards, the Soldier tore at the Widow, but she tightened her legs around him. He continued backwards and slammed her into another car. He struggled to get her off, but just as he pushed her off of him, she slapped something onto his left arm.
Electricity surged up his arm, burning the nerve endings in his shoulder. The plated metal seized. The feeling was too familiar from similar weapons used against him but also from his handlers. He quickly reached over and pulled off the taser-like disk. For a moment, he stood there, slowly stretching out his fist to relax his stiff muscles. The Soldier then reactivated his arm, picked up his machine gun, and took off chasing the Widow once again.
She wasn’t far ahead of him, where she was shouting at bystanders to run. As she moved behind a car, he aimed and shot her. Her smaller frame crumpled to the ground, red hair trailing behind her. The Soldier ran closer to her to complete his mission. Just as he aimed his gun again, a figure rushed at him.
It was the Captain. The Soldier swung his metal fist at him, but the Captain blocked it with his shield. The metals struck and reverberated. The impact twisted the Captain’s arm, allowing him to kick the blond to the ground. The Captain skidded back and raised his shield to meet the Soldier’s incoming bullets. He kept moving as he blocked more and more bullets.
Now that they were close enough to lock eyes, the Captain threw a right hook at the Soldier and swung the shield, using the edge to target his exposed throat. The Soldier took the full brunt of the Captain’s fist but managed to block the shield, holding it aside. He was becoming winded from the fight, but threw punches at the blond’s unprotected side. He gripped the shield with both arms and twisted it, flipping the Captain and taking the shield off him.
The Soldier threw the shield at the Captain who dodged, leaving the shield embedded in the van he had stood in front. The Soldier grabbed his knife from his pocket and attacked.
The fight continued with the Captain blocking the Soldier’s attempts at stabbing and slashing him. The Captain managed to punch the Soldier, throwing him off balance. As he slammed into the van, the knife slipped from his hand. The Captain flew at him and kneed him in the chest. They continued tussling, with the Captain flipping the Soldier over his shoulder. The scuffing of their clothes and their labored breathing filled the little space between them.
The Soldier swiftly rose and grabbed the Captain by the throat, tightening his metal fist. They both heard the bionic arm whirring. The Soldier then threw him over the hood of a car and jumped after him, slamming his metal arm down.
The Captain narrowly avoided the flying fist. The two men were locked again in hand-to-hand combat with the Soldier pulling out another knife and the Captain grabbing his shield again. The fight continued for what felt like ages to the Soldier. They were too evenly matched.
Metal on metal clashed as the coloured shield hit the Soldier’s metal arm repeatedly. The shield hit the juncture of the Soldier’s shoulder and the Captain took the opportunity to grab the Soldier's head and flip him over. His hand caught the Soldier's mask.
The Soldier rolled and got up on his feet. The mask lay forgotten on the asphalt. He turned around to face the Captain.
The blond man paused and straightened. Eyebrows furrowed, he seemed shocked.
“Bucky?” The man stumbled over the word, barely getting it out of his mouth.
“... Who the hell is Bucky?”
------------------------------------------------------------
In the yellow lights of a damp underground room, the Soldier sat in a familiar chair. It was hours after his failed mission to kill Captain America and Black Widow and he was now back at the building he’s been based in for the past months. His shoulder was aching from being propped up as a Hydra engineer drilled and soldered the inside mechanics of his arm to repair the damage from Captain America’s shield.
A tingling sensation crawled up his shoulder like thousands of ants climbing up him. His eyes darted around the room filled with doctors in white coats. The sound of the drill was incessant in his ear, the constant buzz making his muscles twitch. The Soldier blinked, “Sergeant Barnes,” the familiar face of a scientist he’d seen before said. He rolled his shoulders back and tried to shake the memory away.
A train steamed ahead to the backdrop of snowy mountains. The tracks went on for miles over bridges and into tunnels. The Soldier inhaled quickly. A hand reached out to him from inside the train through a blown-off door. A familiar blond man shouting, “Bucky!” The scene changed in seconds. Biting cold wind rushed past him, whipping his clothes around. The snow-covered ground was getting closer and closer as he continued falling.
Pain spread all over his left arm. Strange hands grabbed his shoulders and more on his icy feet. A soldier in a fur hat flickered into his vision. That uniform was not like his. Isn’t this the enemy he was fighting? He looked down as he was being dragged in the snow. His blue uniform was stained red. His left arm… His forearm was gone. The flesh of his arm cut up, skin hanging loose in places. Hard, pale bone poked out from the mangled limb. Sweat beaded at the Soldier’s hairline and trailed down his neck. Were these his memories? Why was he remembering this?
“The procedure is already started,” that familiar accented voice echoed. He was strapped down to a cold operating table. His vision was hazy from the pain, barely making out masked-up doctors holding large needles. A high-pitched whirr filled his senses. Agonising pain he’d never felt before spread through him. They were hacking at what remained of his arm. He remembered trying to move and sit up, but there was a foreign weight pulling down on his shoulder. He raised his arms and saw it. The shiny reflective metal of the hand replacing his butchered left one. They removed what had remained of his arm up to his shoulder.
He clenched his new fist and relaxed it a few times as a doctor moved closer to him. The doctor moved to touch him. He grabbed him by the neck, squeezing his fist. A sharp stabbing pain, then darkness. Phantom pains returned all throughout his left arm, leaving his nerves frayed as if they had just taken the saw to his arm. “You are to be the new fist of Hydra,” the accented doctor says, smiling at him. “Put him on ice.” He was inside a metal chamber with no room to move and barely any space to breathe. A small window showed him the lab outside this chamber. In a split second, a scientist pulled a lever and ice spread around him. The temperature dropped rapidly inside the chamber. The window became frosted over with ice. With the biting cold spreading, so did the darkness.
Pain and cold, that’s all he felt, jerking out of the series of memories. Moments he’d forgotten and now wished he couldn’t remember. His ragged breaths surrounded him, heartbeat echoed in his ears, deafening him to the sounds of doctors tinkering about. He was still trapped in his head, reeling from the memories, when a cool, gloved hand suddenly gripped his scarred shoulder. The Soldier tossed the man across the room. Chaos erupted in the room, and doctors ran away from him, trampling over tables and dropping equipment. The barrels of multiple guns were pointed straight at his face. No one moved. The Soldier remained strapped down, catching his breath from the sudden loss of control. The armed men in the room surrounded him and remained on guard.
Moments later, a door swung open and an older man in a gray suit strolled into the room followed by more armed men. The man took off his glasses and signaled for the men to put their guns down. The metal door was shut once again. The Soldier felt these movements around but was still reeling from what he had remembered.
The suited man put his glasses away and moved closer to the Soldier, “Mission report.” The buzzing in the Soldier’s head drowned out all the sounds around him since he woke. He just stared in front of him, unseeing. “Mission report, now,” the man repeated, still unheard by the Soldier.
He moved closer to the Soldier and bent his knees, lowering to the Soldier's eye level. The man inhaled and backhanded him. The sound echoed in the sterile room as the Soldier’s head snapped to the side. Hair in his face, he slowly looked back at the man in the suit. He whispered, eyebrows furrowed, “The man on the bridge. Who was he?” He thought back to the blond man, Captain America.
“You met him earlier this week on another assignment,” the man responded, eyes trailing over the Soldier’s face.
The Soldier paused, then said, “I knew him.”
The man pursed his lips and reached behind him, grabbing a stool and sat down. The Soldier’s eyes met the man’s, finally focused and present. “Your work has been a gift to mankind,” the man stated, “You shaped the century. And I need you to do it one more time.” The Soldier’s eyes darkened and looked away.
“Society’s at a tipping point between order and chaos. Tomorrow morning we’re going to give it a push,” the man continued. All the eyes in the room were trained on the Soldier, watching him and his furrowed brows process the man’s words. The Handler stood behind the man, arms crossed, watching. “But, you don’t do your part, I can’t do mine. And Hydra can’t give the world the freedom it deserves.”
The Soldier looks back up at the man. “But I knew him,” he frowned. The man sighed, eyes darting over the Soldier. Abruptly, he got up and turned to the doctors still standing in the room.
“Prep him,” the man said to the doctors.
“He’s been out of cryofreeze too long,” one of the doctors stated.
“Then wipe him and start over”
The doctors sprang into action, pushing the Soldier back into the chair. The machine around him hummed to life while the screen by his head flashed colours. One of the doctors shoved a mouth guard between the Soldier’s teeth, and another tightened the straps on his arms. His breathing turned ragged in anticipation. The machine’s metal braces clamped down on his arms, and wide metal pieces lowered down to the sides of his head. He instinctively strained against the clamps. High-pitched whines filled his ears as the machine powered up. The crackling and popping of the growing electricity could be heard across the room.
The machine clamped onto the Soldier’s face, covering his right eye and left cheek. The electricity pulsed through his skull, burning and burning and burning. His guttural screams were muffled but still ripped his throat raw. He convulsed in place, constrained by the machine. His uncovered eye strained open, staring unfocused at the blurring ceiling. When will the pain stop? While his mind did not remember, his body did. His eyes rolled to the back of his head.
The darkness welcomed him home.
