Edelweiss || Bucky x Reader

Chapter Thirty Seven

1945
Day 795

The men clear a path to an enormous machine in the room's center. It's arms stretch out from the seat at it's core. They shove me into it and hold my terrified frame to the back while cold metal clamps around my arms. Zola steps forward, clipboard in hand.

"Open wide." He grins as one of the doctors forces my jaw open, a rubber guard pushed between my teeth.

My movement is limited, so the most I can really do is turn my head side to side in a panic, watching everyone back away as sounds of mechanical whirring grow closer to my skull.  Just before the noise becomes unbearable they jolt to a stop.
Silence fills the room, apart from small scribbling sounds, shuffling, and a few nods. I hear a click.

Then my mind is set ablaze with searing hot electric fire.

Just above the crackle of electricity and my own muffled screams, I hear distant voices that sound like ones I've know forever. They grow slowly stronger.

"Buck, he wants to take me dancing."

I...

I remember this

"What's the problem with that?"

My first date. I was 14.

"I don't know how, and I am not asking Steve."

An echoey laugh, just a shell of what it was when it really happened.

"Well come on, I'll teach you."

I feel the phantom touch of his hand on my hip, his fingers interlaced with mine. How right it felt... how right he felt. Then the disappointment that gripped me when my date rang the doorbell.

A suddenly sharp surge of electricity tears the memory away.

In the distance, a teen girl says, "I want to be alone."

Words she's said too many times to count, but these... these are different. This is what I had said to Bucky after my mother's funeral.

The memory, I... I feel it.

How cool the breeze was on my wet face.

How softly he had said "No you don't."

And how I ran crying into his arms because no, no I didn't.

I think I didn't.

I didn't...

...didn't what?

No, no no wait, hold on,

I remember, I do, hold on, I...

STEVE.

Steve.

Steven Grant Rogers. Rogers.

I am Y/N Rogers.

I am.

I am-

The ability to form a coherent thought finally escapes me. It feels like my body is on fire and every hair is being picked at the root. It goes on so long, I can't even tell when it started. It's a new kind of pain, one I can't identify. It's invasive, violating, unpredictable, and most of all out of my control, which is almost worse than the pain itself.

Then, just a suddenly as it had started, it stops.

My ears ring and head spins as Zola steps in front of me. He shines a small light in my eyes, says something, and jots down a note on his clipboard. Hiccups built up from tears I didn't get to cry steal the air I've been deprived of.

What just... what just happened?

And though I haven't come close to recovering, the Machine starts right back up again.

...

1947
Day 1,539

The crackling stops, bringing an end to the day's torturous session. I slip into waiting arms. The man lays me on the cool floor as I use up my energy gasping for breath.

"Hey, hey, that's alright." He says, accent choppy and comforting words unnatural. "Here, breathe this in, uh... doll."

His voice makes me tense, but the word... the word makes me feel ok.

My eyes flutter shut from exhaustion as soft petals brush up against my nose and lips, sweet vanilla sent filling my head. It relaxes my limbs. Not my mind. Like a sort of daze, but not quite the way you'd imagine. Instead of a high it traps you and shortens your leash even further.

Like everything else here, it's wrong.

"Yeah," He chuckles. "Yeah, just like that."

The vanilla begins to turn sour as the headache sets in. My hands twitch and I feel the flower's poison taking over.

"Now stand." He says.

I don't want to, but I do.

"Walk with me."

And my feet start to move. I don't have a say in the matter.

He leaves the room without looking back, knowing that I follow. We pass the one room with real sunlight in it. The garden, though that seems too nice a word for it, is where they grow these flowers. A skylight some 50 ft up allows them to bloom. I only see the sea of white petals for a moment through the window in the door.

We walk several minutes more before stopping. The door opens into another plain room, though larger and better lit than the one with the chair. A man sits in the middle. He is bound to a grey folding chair, a bag over his head. He whimpers as if he had been crying.

"Today..." The soldier says intimately close to my ear as he produces a handgun, closing my fingers around it. "You become something more."

I tilt my chin to look up at him, begging him to reconsider with just a look.

He smiles.

His hand turns my head towards the target.

"Kill him."

My arm raises. I don't have the strength to fight it, but I try.

I'm sorry

I look away as the bang echoes around the room. My eyes clench shut.

"Look, flower." He says proudly. "See what you could have been so long ago? See what you are now?"

"I'm not a killer." I whisper to the floor as a droplet forms in my lashes.

He turns my head to the dead man in front of me, his covered head slumped forward and his brain splattered on the wall behind him. A clean hole has been left in the center of the burlap.

As the soldier takes the gun from my hand, barrel still warm from the heat of the bullet, he says in the same soft tone;

"Yes you are."

And he's right.

I am.