CRUEL INTENTIONS, bucky barnes

seven

July 3, 2014

Abandoned Warehouse

Brooklyn, New York

Bucky pried himself off the cool cement floor with a quiet groan. The sheen of grime and cold sweat across his entire body made him shiver. He turned his head minimally from side to side, still waking up from the scarce sleep he'd found that afternoon.

It was dark outside. The only light was what leaked through the broken windows close to the high ceiling. He was puzzled, unsure of what had awakened him. He didn't remember dreaming, but then again, he rarely did. When the dreams came, they were vivid and full-force. However, by the time he opened his eyes and pawed a piece of paper from his bag, they were usually gone, just wisps of dust in the wind. Less than a memory.

He startled at the sound of a cracking explosion and jumped to his feet, muscles tense and nerves fried. In a flash of pointless embarrassment, he looked up and saw the remnants of colored sparks fading into the night sky.

Fireworks.

Something seemed to tickle the back of his head, no—the back of his brain. A tingling sensation that he could never pin down in words, no matter how many times he tried.

A shiver ran across his sweaty skin despite the humidity. He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around himself, trying to focus. A flash of color across the backs of his eyelids nearly sent him reeling off his feet.

Red, white, and blue. American flags, cheering, a warm embrace, a cool drink. Music, jazz...

He tried to zero in on the fragment of a memory. With a sharp gasp, all he came up with was the crystal-clear imagery of war, gunfire, and assassinations as more fireworks went off outside.

Bucky kicked his backpack with a short grunt.

The last three months had come and gone in a miserable blur of fear, exhaustion, and self-preservation. All he wanted was a piece of himself. Just one memory of his own. Just one that completely belonged to him.

To Bucky Barnes, not the Winter Soldier.

He slowly lowered himself back down to the floor and pulled the limp backpack into his lap. One of the tattered notebooks that he'd thrown in there weeks ago slid out. Mindlessly, he flipped through the flimsy pages. There wasn't much there. He'd been getting so irritated lately that he was beginning to feel like trying to write things down was useless.

All he had were pieces of names, incomplete words, and vague descriptions of places he thought he was remembering. It was exhausting to try to piece together the things in his head and then try to decide what was real and what had been put there by someone else.

Fireworks were still going off, but Bucky tried to ignore them as he ran his fingers over his own half-cursive handwriting. The words looked as if they had been written all at once, but he remembered clearly how long it had taken him to get down a simple sentence.

Water.

Bridge. The man on the bridge. I knew him.

Bucky shook the memory out of his head the same way he did when he'd written it down. He could still feel the sting of Pierce's blows on his face, the electricity coursing through his body. Things were spotty after that.

The man on the bridge. A bridge.

Water.

A brook? A bridge over a brook?

The man on the bridge. The bridge over

Bridge. Brook. Bridge.

The words ran together until they were halfway down the page, most of them scribbled over and crossed out. Bucky remember throwing the notebook aside and taking a break for an hour, his eyes starting to feel like they might fall out of their sockets.