December // A Winter Soldier Story

16

ｄｅｃｅｍｂｅｒ ２４ｔｈ， ２０１３

２７°

ℬ𝓊𝒸𝓀𝓎

It is four in the morning, and Bucky is tucked in a hidden street corner in Washington, D.C., trying desperately to keep warm despite the winter raging all around him. The winter raging inside of him is hard enough to keep at bay without the frigid outdoor air assaulting his skin, as well.

He's been searching for Steve for hours. He's looked in neighborhoods, stores, restaurants, near and around office buildings, everywhere, but he hasn't had any luck. The only place he even came close was a museum, where an entire exhibit had Steve's name and image plastered across the walls, but Steve himself was nowhere to be found.

Stupid, Bucky thinks to himself. How could I be so stupid?

He knew he was coming to a large, highly secure city with nothing but a name on his lips and a feeling in the back of his mind. How could he possibly have expected to find a man he wasn't even sure existed in a city with a thousand people?

He pulls the sweatshirt from Lea's house closer, breathing in the scent that is just barely still clinging to the fabric. He feels like it's the only thing keeping him going at the moment. As he breathes back out again, he can see his breath in the air before him; a thin, white cloud that dissipates just as he takes in another breath. He hates that each time he breathes her in, he must breathe her back out again.

It is in this way -- this methodical, focused observation of his own breathing -- that Bucky falls asleep, his head resting on the brick wall behind him. And it is in this moment that his nightmares begin.

He imagines that he is moving around inside his own head, and it is empty. Darkness is suffocating him. His footsteps echo as he clambers around, searching for a way out.

He can see nothing, but feel everything. This causes panic to build up in his stomach, because he doesn't know why he can't see, and he doesn't know who to fight, and he doesn't know why everything feels so wrong. Was it always like this? He can't remember.

After a moment, he realizes that he can also hear. The sounds are faint and distant, but they're there. Guns rattle in the distance. A voice he doesn't recognize mutters something in Russian -- it sounds tired, forced. The screaming in the background doesn't stop, just changes voices every now and then. He listens closely to see if he can make out any words from the jumbled mess of noise he is hearing, and he realizes he can hear two clear phrases, repeated over and over again: maybe she's got a friend, followed by good morning, soldier.

The last phrase stirs something in his mind. A spot deeply rooted in the middle of the empty space he is standing in pulses each time the phrase is uttered, with a color that is somehow both a deep black and a blood red all at once.

But this is less intriguing to him than the first phrase, which, when uttered, sends light shooting throughout the darkness. As the light pours in during the brief speaking of the phrase, Bucky's eyes find the exit. Every time the light pushes out the darkness, he runs, as fast as he possibly can, to the way out.

But every time he runs, he seems to get further away. Because the second he hears good morning, soldier again the shadows return, melting the light and shoving him stumbling back towards that deeply rooted spot that pulses red and black. His left arm -- the metal one -- is being yanked towards the spot even harder than the rest of his body. The red star on the shiny material begins glowing brighter than ever, until it is so brightly red that it's white and hot and blinding him.

Both phrases melt away and suddenly all he can hear are screams, so many of them, from so many different people that he doesn't know. All senses are drowned out in the blood curdling terror of what he assumes are his victims, from the past and the future alike. He cowers in the corner of his own mind, his hands clasped desperately around his ears and his eyes screwed tightly shut in a frenzied, wild attempt at holding himself together.

His life is an endless story of pain, with a long trail of bodies, horror, and blood staining the ground behind him. His nightmare paints him an exceptionally clear picture of this, so much so that he wakes up screaming in the same way his victims had in his dream — terrified, hopeless, and alone — before refocusing from his blind panic and realizing where he is. Freezing on the streets of the nation's capital just one day before Christmas. His last scream echoes off of the buildings rising up around him, but no one comes to see if he is alright. No cars stop, no people turn around. This cold, lonely reality hurts him more than the nightmare ever could.

He has no Lea, and no Steve, to comfort him tonight. So he swallows his screams and the hot tears that are threatening to fall, and pulls his sweatshirt closer against the harsh winter wind, deciding that he's not going to be able to sleep again tonight.

He'd rather brace himself against the cold than subject himself to the horrors of his mind. At least he knows the cold is real.