Joy ride (part1): Stealing

route

Steve drops him.

Like a sack of hot potatoes. Which, honestly isn't anything new, is it? Something James should have expected. He'd already used his one get-out-of-jail free card sometime back in the nineteen-forties. That's likely why Steve had dropped him the first time: off a train and into a frozen lake.

The sensation of falling hasn't stopped; wind is still whistling in his ears, still cutting cold on his face, sucking hard at his eyes. James stands around waiting for that sudden stop, hitting hard ice followed by cold splashing water. Yet he's inside a warm room with windows :quiet and still.

Will he even notice when he hits rock bottom? Had Bucky had reacted the same, after falling off that railroad bridge? Did he lay around stunned, still tumbling in his mind? Begging for someone to pick him up, snatch him up like a bauble that caught their eye... An abandoned toy, ready for his next life. Unresisting even when it turned out to be the ones that'd found him had been, again, Hydra.

It would be like Bucky. Because Bucky is a fucking idiot. He'd probably just lain around like some damsel in distress, waiting for rescue. James bets Bucky died from sheer drama, but the body didn't get the memo, and that's why James had to be created. Created to house in the shell that spent a month or three at the mercy of Zemo's abandoned underlings. A procession of faceless doctors and scientists that James only remembers as a fever dream; one he only wakes from at the bang of a gun.

Something bangs here too, in the real world, but it's just Shuri knocking on her self-designed cryo pod. An icy-blue sleek thing reclining at a thirty-degree angle. It looks more like a bobsled than a freezer. There'll be no port-hole because the removable top is translucent, see-through soft blue. There'll be no bars, and he won't have to work to lift his head to see what's going on around him.

Lift his head; squint out through the bars. No energy left, no arm. Trying to rearrange his aching body; can't. See who fired that gun? Wonder when the lab got so dark, because they'd usually be bathed in light and surrounded by lab assistants day and night.

At the third bang, he finally noticed that lone soldier, making his way past all the cages. Putting a single bullet in every unmoving experiment. And James remembers thinking to himself: 'That there, is a stand-up kind of Nazi soldier.' Because unlike the Hydra research team, that guy at least remembered to put their guinea pigs out of their misery. The nameless thing he was could only muster mild annoyance that he could not remember the man's name when it was his turn.

He'd have liked to thank him properly.

It's the Russians that rescue James, right after that first memory where he likes to think Bucky ends and James begins. The Russians have already dug two bullets out of his head, because apparently even that Nazi soldier had doubted one would do the job; had wasted a second, extra bullet on him. For all the good it did. His left, rotting arm had finally been removed; amputated right below the elbow. And that was something that surprised him, because he seemed to remember the Hydra scientists confident he would at some point...grow it back?

When the confused mess that will be James one day asks; sure, so sure that someone else was supposed to rescue him. Would come to rescue him. That Captain America would come, just for him, the old Russian officer tells him, with heartfelt sympathy: "That's why you should not put your faith in one man, comrade. Better to trust to the party and their ideas."

And James Buchanan Barnes doesn't know his own name; doesn't know where he came from, or even why or when. But he'd known Captain America. And now, he learns the Captain is dead. That he is alone. That the Americans are in little hurry to get him back, the broken, ruined mess he is. But their Russian allies take him in. Nurse him back to health, make him whole again. He makes new friends; lots of comrades; and he loves them.