It occurred to Bucky as he contemplated the way Steve had explained his repression, that maybe he was scared to remember. Maybe, some part of him deep inside didn’t want to remember. Maybe the things he knew in his subconscious were so terrible, he had decided without his own consent that he would be better off without them and had constructed a dam for himself to hide from all the terrible monsters that lurked in his thoughts. Bucky stared up at the ceiling, lying on his bed, his arms behind his head, and considered this. He absolutely hated that it sounded plausible. That he would withdraw from it all, that even as he tried to stay and fight, he was really running, running and running and jumping this entire time. And he realized, as he thought this, that he was even scared of being scared.
I think you’ve been doing this for a long time, Steve had said. It’s just active now, taking things from you, instead of just holding things back. Bucky cringed and squeezed his eyes shut. He had been doing this for a long time. He hadn’t even begun to think it was strange that he hadn’t remembered anything new lately, but he supposed it was. How was he supposed to get these things back now? How was he supposed to tear his own dam down?
As an exercise in dam-breaking and because he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it, Bucky closed his eyes and took a deep breath and tried to remember Natasha. He pictured Hydra, however much he hated to, and he pictured being the Winter Soldier again. He tried to see her face with him, tried to pierce a hole in that portion of the dam, slowly, carefully, trying somehow to see inside. He was rewarded with a blistering headache that forced him to stop due to the sharp severity and the expected violent shakes, but he found he could smile in victory, if just in the slightest, because in his head, he could see a flash of red hair and he heard himself say it, say Natalia. And that made the pain worth it.