Honesty ♧ Bucky Barnes

A Terrible Plan

"I think that you can help me."

The Soldier's eyes were trained on the small woman in front of him, who was looking from him to the book to the door with such frequency he was surprised she wasn't giving herself a headache. So this was 'Jefferson'. He had to admit, she wasn't anything like he had been expecting. The name 'Jefferson' had struck an image in his mind of an older man, a stereotypical scientist or psychologist, a person he could trust to get his memories back.

Certainly not a 5'2" woman with an unruly bush of blonde hair, eyes the colour of tree-bark and, he raised a single eyebrow, no pants. In the light of the room, he could see a strange pattern on the bare skin of her toned legs. A cross-hatch of healing scars, each varying levels of thickness and length, ran from her knees to the top of her thighs, which were covered by the hem on her black sleep shirt. She looked like she had been in a car accident of some sort. He glanced back up at her and realised that she had noticed him staring. She shuffled uncomfortably and held the small notebook up, trying to remove the focus from her legs.

"When did you write this?" She asked him, her voice clear.

He glanced up at her through thick lashes and shrugged his shoulders, rubbing his jaw with his metal hand, wincing slightly at the scratching burn. He needed a shave but unsurprisingly that was the last thing on his mind at the moment.

"I can't remember. There's a lot of stuff I can't remember writing in there."

She raised an eyebrow at his admission and began to flick through the notebook, looking at its contents intently. Something in the Soldier clicked. He shot up from the couch and snatched the book out of her hands, looking down at her with an expression of fury, his metal fist clenched tightly by his side. He heard her breath catch in her throat at the unexpected movement. His heart was beating fast, he was a lot closer to her than he had meant to be, his chest inches from hers. He came to his senses and took a step back and saw her body visibly relax as he moved away.

"Sorry," He muttered, his voice low, slightly embarrassed with his extreme reaction. "It's private." There were things in that book that he didn't want to know himself, let alone letting a random girl he'd just met read them.

Jefferson exhaled a long sigh and raised an eyebrow.

"So you need my help?"

The Soldier nodded at her and placed the notebook carefully back in his backpack, next to countless others. His memories had been wiped but occasionally things would come back to him. When they did he would jot them down in one of his notebooks.

He could fill a library with the atrocities buried in his subconscious.

"I found that written in my notebook. A few days after the last time I got wiped." He admitted, not meeting her eyes. His body was tense. "D'you know what it means? D'you understand it?" He asked.

She nodded her head, her eyes travelling to his backpack then back to him. They weren't just brown, they were a deep brown, so dark they were almost black.

"Yes. I think so."

He let out a long sigh that he didn't realise he had been holding in and he felt his whole body finally relax with the sensation. She knew what she was doing. This hadn't all been for nothing. He was going to remember again, finally. He had been nameless for too long.

He glanced back up at her and quirked an eyebrow. She was looking at him with a strange expression on her face. A mixture of pity and disbelief that went straight to his gut. There was something that she wasn't telling him.

"What's wrong?" He asked, his voice hard. She let out a burst of air from her nose and looked at him with confusion.

"Do you really not remember me?"