Secretive - Bucky Barnes

Epilogue || For the Villains

[Nova]
I cannot look straight ahead anymore when I walk out of the dark toilet cabin, the broken lights outside doing nothing for better illumination, when I stand in front of the washing sink. Cannot look straight ahead into the mirror that shows someone, a ghost from what the person once had been.

I stopped looking into the mirror hours after I got in. Stopped looking into it when hours turned into days, days turned into months, months into years. If it was not for them keeping track of everything so carefully, for them writing down my every step, I would not even know the world I live in anymore. Not no the day of the year. Not know the month. Know nothing.

When I hear their screams on the left, their bittersweet laughter on the right outside the room, I know I cannot stay away any longer. I have to do what is told to me, have to move along whatever line they are drawing, whatever way they are designing for me because this is the only way out. The only way to live.

Although, it is barely living, the state I am currently in. Body dragging from one point to the other, sometimes trembling with no one to see. »Keep her on the minimum needed for her to live.« They said the day they took me, and so they did. Leaving my senses at the bare minimum, my will, my love, my faith. Being drained day for day, drained of blood and power and hope and whatever life is worth living.

Only a single fact keeping me going.

Sighing, I dry my shuddering hands, the golden veins sticking out like branches from the moon pale skin in front of almost black background, making the white sting my eyes, before letting the grey towel fall back to the hanging state it has been before, like I would never had touched it in the first place. Like a ghost had touched it.

One inhale more I permit myself, knowing a new day began, knowing I have to figure something out. A new day after so many, and I still feel the lack of his presence in my mind like someone ripped a limb from me without anesthetization.

One more glance down to the hands that are not mine and yet they are, one more exhale before intending to move.

They say it is going to be alright. If it is not good, it is not the end.

Maybe this counts for the heroes of this world, if they exist, that is.

But it is definitely not counting for the villains.

And then, for the first time for so long, I start to feel something; something, when I see both my hands dissolve into small, black dots, like ashes, just worse. Panic.

The moment slips through my fingers, and there is a plain nothingness greeting me, like I had never existed at all.