Recollection ★ Bucky Barnes

The Meaning of Freedom

"Yes," he answered impatiently. "Can you do something for me?"

"Of course. What do you need?" Maria didn't seem to care what it was or what it could be. She felt as if she owed him.

"Send that picture of Marlena to Steve's or Natasha's phone, please," Bucky told her, his voice cracking slightly when he spoke Marlena's name. "There's something on it I need to see."

Maria sighed and Bucky listened as she typed away on her computer. "Are you sure about that, Bucky?"

"Don't ask questions," Bucky instructed. "Just do it, please."

Maria didn't respond, and, instead, sent the picture to Natasha's phone. Bucky could hear the iPhone beep from the living room, and before long he could hear the sound of her footsteps headed towards the dining room.

"Thank you," he said into the speaker. "Stay on the line, please."

"Bucky," Natasha called as she made her way into the dining room. "Please tell me why Maria just sent this picture to my phone."

Bucky sat the house phone down and looked up at Natasha, wasting no time at all in grabbing her phone out of her hands. Natasha gave him an estranged look but sat down beside him, waiting on him to explain why the picture was on her phone.

"There's something in it I need to see," he grumbled as he tinkered with the screen. He was growing dangerously frustrated with the small device. He was attempting to zoom in on the picture in order to focus his attention on the wall inscriptions rather than the girl he loved laying dead on a bloody cot. "Where the hell is the zoom?" he barked as he tapped away on the screen.

Natasha sighed sadly and took the device from him, placing her index finger and her thumb onto the screen and spreading them. She moved the picture so nothing but the wall was being displayed on the screen, and Bucky gave her a grateful—yet sad—smile and took the phone back from her.

His eyes met the screen once again, and there he saw the inscriptions the document had been referring to: it was the word freedom carved into the stone wall in Russian.

He could recall engraving the symbols into the wall of his cell shortly after Hydra had brainwashed him over seventy years ago. He remembered being told that freedom could only come from a world ruled by Hydra, and at the time he wanted that freedom, but he knew enough now to know that those words were far from the truth. Marlena had taught him the true meaning of freedom without him even realizing it—his love for her was his freedom, regardless of whether she was still here or not. It only gave him more of a reason to want to destroy what was left of Hydra.

"I know exactly where they are," Bucky said, wiping a tear from his eye. He handed the phone back to Natasha and she shoved it in her pocket the moment she took it from his hands.

"Where, Bucky?"

"Russia," he answered as he stood up from his chair. "They're hiding in one of the facilities where I was trained as the Winter Soldier."

"And you're sure?" Natasha questioned.

Bucky nodded and grabbed his jacket before moving towards the back door. "Maria's still on the line. Talk to her and see if there's any way she can get me some sort of transportation. I need to leave as soon as possible."

"You know you're not doing this alone, Bucky," Natasha said as he grabbed Marlena's car keys from the hook by the door. "Steve, Sam, and I. . .we're doing this with you."

"Then you better find a jet big enough to accommodate the four of us," Bucky said as he hurried out the back door.

He unlocked Marlena's Jeep and hopped inside, wasting no time at all in taking off down the crowded Washington streets. It was becoming harder and harder for him not to break down into tears, and sitting inside Marlena's vehicle, with her smell still lingering inside, made it all the more difficult for him. What made matters worse, though, was the fact that he now had to deliver the news of her death to her mom and her brother.