Eyes of Fire | Bucky Barnes

35

I remember all of them.

Some nights are worse than others. The memories come in waves, waves that push him under the surface and pummel him until his lungs ache and his eyes burn.

Memories of their faces. Memories of their choked pleas. Memories of tears that snaked paths down their faces as they begged for mercy.

Memories of himself, pulling the trigger despite everything, unable to find the line between 'this is wrong' and 'this is what they told me to do'.

He could feel his physical body gasping for breath, the room collapsing and head spinning. A living nightmare, the faint echoes of their screams lingering in his ears. Their last screams. The ones that fell upon his unhearing and uncaring ears.

He shoved the palms of his hands into his eye sockets and repeated his mantra, quietly, to himself.

"My name is Bucky. My name is Bucky."

He never knows how many times he repeats it, just that his heart isn't pounding as hard when he's done. These kinds of memories can't just be forgotten like they didn't happen, like they didn't matter.

The cries of the innocent still haunt him. He was never allowed to know their names, couldn't even get his hands on any of the files until much, much later.  Without names, things were easier. He didn't have to think about them any more than he already had while mapping the path of least resistance to their deaths.

But when they had names, that was a different story. Once they had names, they had lives. They had families.

Never learning names... it made things easier in the long run. No names, no worries.

But when it comes to his own name...

He remembers bits and pieces from Before. Him and Steve going to Coney Island to pick up girls (it was mostly him doing the 'picking up' because, well, Steve was Steve and he was him), Steve wincing as he cleaned out a cut above his eye from a fight he never should have been fighting, the curve of Steve's smile when he told him that.

Funny, he thinks, that all of his memories from Before are of Steve. Funnier still that Steve is the one who gave him his name.

Bucky. 

He was born James Buchanon Barnes. But that's not who he is, at least not anymore. He is Bucky. Just Bucky. Not James Buchanon Barnes. Not Subject 8. Not The Winter Soldier. He may have been all of those names in the past, but that's not who he is now.

Bucky.

He'd heard others speak of 'the mortifying ordeal of being known', but never understood. How could something so inherently comforting be mortifying? How could the thing that he unknowingly longed for be something that others avoided.

To him, being known was nothing and everything.

He'd gone decades, nearly 100 years being both known and unknown at the same time. Known as The Winter Soldier. Unknown as literally any other part of him. The Winter Soldier was a monster. A monster made out of the shell of James Buchanon Barnes. A beast that Hydra had spent years meticulously crafting and perfecting, chiseling away at every last bit of James Buchanon Barnes until all that was left was a hollow skeleton of his old self with a blind compliance to the enemy.

But when Steve had said his name, something had sparked again. For the first time that he could remember, he felt something. Familiarity. Comfort?

He didn't know it at the time, but he knew now that that feeling was home.

His name. Bucky.

Home.

"My name is Bucky."