A Birdie Lost in Time | Bucky Barnes

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The soap had long rinsed away when she finally turned the faucet off, leaving her body dripping and shivering from the cold, but she let her mind remain in its state of idleness as she reached for her towel and started drying herself off slowly.

She was gathering her hair to the side when her fingers brushed over a scar on her shoulder, but rather than recoil, she found herself tracing its smoothness in some strange form of curiosity.

She knew she had scars. That one, she was pretty sure, was from her mission in '76 when a bullet grazed her. Or it may have been from a sparring session taken too far.

Her fingers crawled across her skin, trying to determine which it was, but another met her fingers and it threw her off. The one she was feeling now was long; too long for either of those injuries.

It was then that she was struck with a realization: she hadn't seen herself in a decade. Not really. Not more than a glance.

Her eyes automatically dropped downwards, but she wished they hadn't. The mottled skin of her left leg was enough to bring a grimace to her lips, but she still scanned the rest of her skin for old injuries.

The sight was slightly jarring considering she never thought to look at herself when she was in Siberia, and she certainly was never given a mirror. The only time she would have looked at herself was to assess a wound, but they were never something to be... acknowledged past tending, so she'd forgotten about them.

In truth, her time as an operative didn't leave her with many scars; it was rare that someone was able to injure her, let alone injure her enough to leave marks.

But her eyes fell onto the scar that snaked up and around her bicep. It was jagged, not one long, spiraled line, but jaunted straight ones that connected sloppily...

It was the time before she became an op that was visible on her body.

She was moving forward within a heartbeat, pushing the curtain aside as her breathing quickened. She knew that wasn't the only scar they'd given her during her months of torture, and as she approached the mirrored wall adjacent to the showers, she finally saw those marks.

Burns in the shape of lighter heads and cigarettes, lines tracing her left side ribs, the X that was etched into her upper thigh.

She turned before her mind could advise her not to, and immediately nausea rocked her. The top of her back was a mess of scars, and now that she could see them, she could almost feel the knife carving through her flesh as it had a decade ago. The Russian's jeer's echoed inside her mind, the words she didn't yet understand spilling from his lips in frustration as he tried to pull answers from her.

She traced the marks with her eyes, watching them dip and lurch. Then she noticed familiar shapes.

Letters. Cyrillic letters.

"No," she groaned, "no, no, no."

He couldn't have written something into her skin. No.

The nausea worsened as she stared at her back in horror, feeling as if the Russian's lips were pressed against her, whispering sick words across her skin.

She didn't know what it said; she could barely make out the letters between the lighting and angle, so she spun, hurrying back to the stall where she pulled on her clothes and practically ran out of the shower room.

Her speed didn't slow much as she made her way through the halls, not thinking as she stopped at a door and threw her fist against it loudly.

When it opened, Bucky's eyes were pressed into a glare, but they filled with worry at the sight of her. "What's going on?" he asked, searching behind her briefly before looking back to her.