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.
His eyes trailed to the bottom of the page, something like a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
Four words written in perfect print. He'd taken his time. It wasn't rushed like everything above it, trying to get it down before it disappeared. No, this had stuck with him. It still did.
Brooklyn Bridge.
Brooklyn, New York.
It was the last thing he had written in two weeks, which was how long it had taken him to find a covert way to get to New York. Initially, after leaving DC, his plan had been to head west, as far as he could go. Somehow he just knew that in that general direction, he could get out of HYDRA's reach.
He was squatting in Arkansas, waiting for sundown, trying to meditate the Winter Soldier out of his mind. It never worked, but sometimes he could grasp memories, the real ones. Just pieces.
It was with a jolt that a vision of blue water, a city skyline, and a magnificent bridge came to him. By the time he opened his eyes, it was fading. And by the time he could grab a pen and paper, it was all but gone. He spent a day and a half trying to get it back, and finally he had ended up with a name.
He had felt drawn there, like it was somewhere he was supposed to go.
Go back to.
The thought scared him, but it kept coming back to him.
He'd been to New York before, more times than he probably even knew, on various types of HYDRA business. Usually in the back of a van, restrained. More often than that, he woke up there out of a cryosleep.
This was different, whatever memory he was grasping at. He had come back to Brooklyn... returned there. Like it was somewhere he belonged. If he knew what it felt like, he almost thought he could describe as...
Bucky's train of thought stopped there, his back immediately straightening. Before he thought about doing it, his hands were shoving his few belongings back into his backpack. He threw it over his shoulders and stood, still not sure why he felt the need to.
His eyes scanned the darkened warehouse, the fireworks outside going off at a more steady pace.
Movement. He'd heard movement, or sensed it, before his mind had even fully caught up to itself.
"God dammit," he murmured, drawing the pistol from the back of his pants.
He tried to slow his breathing, but his chest continued to heave. He had become careless with checking rooftops, dark corners, and watching his back. For some reason, he'd started to believe that three months was enough.
It would never be enough.
He couldn't think, he didn't know what to think. Was he surrounded? Was it a single agent, a handful? Could he take them out if he stood his ground?
Bucky started to move forward, but his next train of thought stopped him cold, and he began to wonder.
What if it was a single agent? Just one. He wasn't worried about any of them. Anyone that had survived the fall of HYDRA, he could take out. They would have been the agents that weren't targeted by S.H.I.E.L.D. or the government because they weren't seen as a threat. The ones who were too afraid to truly stand up for the "cause" in the face of serious legal implications.
Bucky nodded to himself, trying to reinforce the thought that he knew he could take any and all of them, especially if they thought they had the element of surprise.
All except one.
With a trembling breath, Bucky turned his head to the darkened corner behind him.
Nothing.
He glanced at the windows above him.
Nothing.
But he was so far inside his own head that he was convinced he could smell her perfume, hear her voice, a faint whisper.
A mouse skittered beneath his feet and he jumped, but immediately settled back. The fireworks were working up to a finale. Though he was uneasy and unsure of whether or not he was actually being watched or followed, he knew now would be the time to move. His near-silent movement would be muffled by the explosions over the East River, and he could make a getaway.
He'd stayed in Brooklyn too long, nearly a week. It was a stupid decision and a mistake he wouldn't have made if there wasn't something tugging at his insides. But it was time. As he slipped away into the night, he knew that it wasn't just in Brooklyn he'd stayed in too long.
Bucky had caught glimpses of shadows following him over the past months, glimmers of firearms on the waists of passing strangers. They were catching on and they had been for a while. He knew there couldn't be many of them left, but he also knew she had the power to get her hands on the resources she would need. Even if that meant disposable recruits that had been indoctrinated off the streets of small towns in the deep South.
He wouldn't let them close in on him. He wouldn't let her close enough to try anything she had up her sleeve.
She was reason enough to flee the North American continent, even if it meant he'd be killed by someone else along the way.
Bucky didn't know much about himself. He couldn't remember some of the most important things that would have made it easier to survive on the run. But he knew enough. He had enough memories of HYDRA, of torture, of death and destruction, to last him a lifetime.
It was enough to keep him running. Enough to keep him out of Savannah King's grip.
And so he ran.