milliways_bar | (no subject)

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"Go. Go! Take this journal and write down everything you can remember. It will help, I promise you."

"Princess--"

"Do not argue. Find somewhere quiet, where you won't be bothered."

"The kids aren't a bother."

"They are also not quiet."

* * * * * * *

It's been a long time since he's been here, enough that if pressed he couldn't actually say how long. He hadn't exactly meant to come, either, but he'd been thinking about finding somewhere out of the way when he walked out of Shuri's lab, and there's no question that Milliways fits that description better than anywhere else.

About ten minutes later, Bucky Barnes is settled in at one of the quieter booths in the back, the journal open in front of him. (A close observer might notice that each page is subtly embossed with the logo of the Wakandan Design Group.)

He's holding a pen in his right hand and tapping it against the blank page. From time to time he sets down the pen and picks up the cup of coffee waiting beside him instead. A swallow or two later, he repeats the process, swapping cup for pen.

His left hand is immaterial to the whole process, as it's entirely absent. A series of gauze bandages are barely visible under the collar of his shirt, and his left sleeve is neatly pinned shut over where his arm used to be.

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"I see..."

He writes this down, too, and ponders the pages now covered in notes. "Is he still alive now, seventy years later? If he is, does he know you're still alive too?"

Edited 2021-02-27 22:08 (UTC)

"Yeah. He is. And he does."

He huffs out a breath that's somewhere between wry exasperation and rueful laughter.

"It was... complicated. But we sorted it out."

This may, in fact, be the understatement of the century.

John chuckles, wry himself. "You're not a man of many words. Leaving out the details just makes me more curious."

"The details are why I have that notebook in the first place," Bucky informs him, dryly.

"Remember the assassin part? They called me the Winter Soldier. He was one of my targets. HYDRA sent me to kill him."

"And I'm writing down everything you say."

The smile falls from his face at Bucky's explanation. "And that's where the controls came in, yeah?"

He nods.

"They wiped my mind," he explains, as simply as he can. "Over and over. After every mission. Reset me like you would a machine. Gave me new targets."

"One of them was Steve. I didn't recognize him. But he recognized me."

John sits still for a moment, then mutters, "Fuck," and writes this down.

"He recognized you, and then--?"

Edited 2021-02-27 22:58 (UTC)

"Reinforcements showed up. I disengaged. Returned to BaseOps."

He doesn't notice how he's falling into the cadence of giving a mission report.

"I didn't recognize him. But it started a chain reaction, somewhere down deep. I asked command who he was. Told them I knew him."

"They wiped me again and retargeted me. Steve was trying to stop the Insight helicarriers from using satellites and AI tech to kill millions of people. They sent me to stop him."

John's brows furrowed at the cadence of a mission report.

He can only nod, encouraging Bucky to continue.

"I failed," he reports, and tastes again the coppery taste of blood, of fear and despair. "I've never been so glad to fail at anything in my life - well, later, that is."

"He wouldn't give up. Risked his own life trying to bring me back to myself. To help me remember who I was. Refused to fight me. I nearly killed him. But I remembered."

"He fell out of the helicarrier into the Potomac. I went after him. Pulled him to the riverbank, made sure he was okay, and left him there."

He downs the rest of his coffee and waves to a waitrat.

"And then I disappeared for two years."

John asks softly, "What did you do for those two years?"

His pen moves only as an afterthought.

"Hid, mostly."

He passes his empty cup down to the waitrat as explanation. It takes the mug and scurries off again.

"Went after HYDRA where I could. Started taking them down - secret installations and the like. Met up with Steve here - he used to come here - and once he cornered me, I explained why I wasn't going to come back, out there."

He winces a little at that memory. "He didn't like it, but he agreed. He -- I left some stuff out, though."

"Anyway. It was all going okay --"

(Narrator's observation: it was not, in fact, going okay.)

"-- until the bomb went off in Vienna and they blamed it on the Winter Soldier. Steve got to me first, but..."

The rat returns with a much larger mug and Bucky interrupts himself to accept it.

"Thanks."

"But?" John says.

"But without enough of a head start to get away."

He takes another large swallow of coffee.

"Which meant that when they brought me in, the guy who framed me in the first place managed to get to me. And activate my controls."

His tone has turned very, very flat with self-loathing.

"So I nearly killed Steve. Again. And a lot of other people, before he was able to snap me out of it."

John writes, then pauses to contemplatively tap the pen against his temple.

"Princess Shuri asked you to to record your memories, yeah? Do you think she thinks the controls have something to do with your memories of Steve?"

He shrugs. The pinned sleeve on the left shifts a bit with the movement.

"Some of them do. It's the others that are harder to pin down and rip out. I think that's part of what she's hoping for."

"And here I thought I could help," John says with a wry huff.

"But if Steve is so important to you, the other controls probably refer to things that are just as important." He flips back through the pages. "The day you were captured, the day you joined the Army, the day you met your sweetheart--" He glances up. "Assuming you had a sweetheart."

There's no way a man this good-looking didn't have a sweetheart.

"Just to name a few possibilities."

He shakes his head at the last.

"Not for a long time," he says. "And she - they didn't know about her, when they were programming me. They wouldn't have wanted me to remember her, either."

Something flattens in his tone.

"In fact, they sent me to kill her, too."

"I take it you didn't," John says.

"Not for lack of trying."

John studies him. "Did all of this take place before Vienna?"

"No."

He thinks about that, then adds,

"We were already -- things had ended a long time before Vienna, though."

"I see." He looks through the pages again. "I'm sure there are other things that they might have used -- moments in your life that were life-changing, for good or ill."

"Must be. It's just a matter of finding all of them, I guess."

John hands Bucky the notebook. "I've written a few things in all capitals, as they struck me as of greater importance. Maybe start with those."

The pages are covered with his tidy, tight handwriting. Words like "107th" and "Brooklyn" and "POW" are written larger than others.