The man with the gloves [bucky barnes ff]

2 - James

Lost. Is one way to describe James. His life hasn't been easy. He's been fighting and hurting, he got abandoned and despised his entire life. Growing up James was always expected to be the strong man, a good soldier and an extraordinary fighter - not showing any weaknesses. But if you get your bones broken again and again only for them to heal and then get broken again, you fall into a hole. A dark lonely hole where you question if life is even worth living.

James been there. The thought of ending his life. But he couldn't. Because someone thought that he was worth fighting for, someone believed in the good in him and choosing the easy way out would mean that he was wrong, and he was never wrong about anything.

It's been a couple of weeks now since Bucky - that's how his friends used to call him - lost the only person that ever cared about him and he's been feeling lost ever since.

He's been crashing at random motels, working at construction sites or doing off-the-books manual labour jobs. He even had some savings which helped him move into a small apartment in Brooklyn. Nothing fancy, an one-room furnished apartment, but that's all he needed. James isn't used to fancy things anyways.

"Fuck.", he curses when he accidentally drops the boiling pot of hot water on the floor. He got distracted by his thoughts again. After cleaning up the mess he made, he sits down on the cold floor. He's tired. He's so tired. All he wants is to sleep.

Is that too much to ask for? Sleep?

But whenever James closes his eyes he sees pictures of the people he killed, he hears their voices begging for mercy, their screams and their cries for help. He sees their eyes as they slowly lose light the second he ended their lives. Even though he wasn't himself when he did those monstrous, cruel things, it was still his cold metallic hands that killed those people. He was a puppet, forced to do things he would've never done before.

A tragic story of a once good-hearted soldier who became a brain-washed assassin, a murder and a monster. That's what he saw when he looked in the mirror. A monster.

Someone who deserves to be punished, tortured and abandoned. Someone who doesn't deserve happiness, a good nights sleep, not even a warm bed to sleep in. Why does he live? What did he do to deserve life? Many great heroes died; they sacrificed themselves for a higher purpose. Those were indeed heroes, good men and women, people who deserved to life with their families and loved ones but James didn't.

The man takes out a folded picture from the pocket of his hand me down jacket. A military dog tail - his name engraved on it.

James B. Barnes.

Or how his friend would call him - Bucky.