Chapter Text
“Hey, Sam! There’s another one behind you!” Bucky slammed his fist into another hydra agent’s face while yelling to Sam, the adrenaline of the fight flowing through his body.
They were on another mission in the middle of the woods. They had gotten a call that some hydra agents got bold and resurfaced, and they were called to take them out. Sam spun around and knocked out another agent.
“Got 'em!” Sam yelled enthusiastically with a smile on his face. Sam and Bucky were the perfect team. Sam got a thrill from the fight, had skills and contacts from his Air Force days, while Bucky had strategy and experience (unfortunately) from his Winter Soldier days.
“Yo, Buck! There’s one getting away! I’ll be back!” Sam activated his metal Falcon wings and shot up into the air.
Bucky knocked the last guy out and looked around his surroundings as Sam shrunk from his sight.
These woods felt familiar to him, but he didn’t know why. There was something . . . eerie about being here. He couldn’t quite place it, so he started to walk around. Maybe if he saw something or stood in a certain place or heard a certain noise it would jog his memory.
He looked around as he walked, keeping his ears and eyes open and alert. He soon could see a road and mentally set it as his destination. When his feet hit the pavement, he felt the memories flood back to his mind.
He felt it.
This was the place where he, the Winter Soldier, murdered Howard and Maria Stark.
Bucky’s head started to hurt and ache. He tried so hard to replace those memories or better yet, completely erase them from his head. And now they all came flooding back overwhelmingly. He immediately regretted straying from the bulk of the woods.
“No . . . NO.” Bucky couldn’t take the pain. He stumbled off the road and tried to shake the memories from his head, but they weren’t easily shaken, he quickly learned that from the previous years. Suddenly he heard something in the woods. He spun around, trying to get his mind to focus right, a task that was earlier said than done. He tried to locate the source of the sound, but he wasn’t even sure what he heard. His brain wasn't focused on it at the time.
There it was. Some leaves crunching.
Someone else was here .
Bucky spun around and saw a hydra agent about ten feet away pointing a gun at him. The man had short sandy blonde hair and greenish eyes from what Bucky could see. He was a bit of a stocker dude but he stood tall with confidence.
“Ah, the famous Winter Soldier.” The agent sneered, those green eyes looking him up and down.
Bucky shook his head in disgust at the mention of the name. “That’s not me anymore.”
“Aha, we’ll see about that.” The agent smirked and narrowed his eyes.
“Longing,” The agent began to recite the words that Bucky never wanted to hear again in his life.
“No.” Bucky whispered. Not again, this isn’t going to happen again.
“Rusted,”
Bucky knew he had been recovering well with Sam by his side but that doesn’t make the fear go away completely. Those words haunt him and he dreads the day that someone uses them again. Some nights it keeps him up, because all he hears are those stupid words.
“Seventeen,”
He had already been disoriented and in pain just by being here, in this spot that he tried so hard to forget. Now, this is the perfect cherry on top.
“Daybreak,”
“No! Stop!” Bucky started to run towards the agent, but he threw something near Bucky and it exploded in a cloud of smoke, causing him to stop in his tracks. Smoke bomb. His mind started to fog over, both from the smoke surrounding him and the words from the agent.
“Furnace,”
“No! Stop! I won’t- I can’t- NO!” Bucky’s head was throbbing and his lungs felt like they stopped taking in air. It was hard to think and breathe and he couldn’t make sense of the situation anymore. He fell to his knees in despair. He felt so helpless, and he hated it.
“Nine,”
Bucky was losing himself more and more with every word. He couldn’t let this happen. He couldn’t let himself hurt anyone else.
“Benign,”
Bucky was trying so hard to hang on to himself, to hang on to the little sliver of hope that maybe he could break this cycle finally.
“Homecoming,”
But it hurt too much, he couldn’t take the pain. That small sliver of hope quickly slipped away and left him alone again. His head throbbed, he was losing his perception. But this is also what Hydra wanted, they made it painful so he couldn’t fight back, so he wouldn’t want to. That was their way around it, so he would give it to the pain and he could be their weapon.
“One,”
Bucky’s mind snapped. He had lost this fight. He felt the Winter Soldier breakthrough and he was shoved to the back of his own mind, in the back shadowy corner he knew all too well.
“Freight car,” The agent walked into the cloud of smoke and into the Winter Soldier’s view. He had a big smirk on his face, as he knew he finished the vows and they had worked to his delight. His voice rang out cold and harsh.
“Are you ready to comply, soldier?”
“Ready to comply.”