Respect | S. Rogers [1]

11 | JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES

February 1945

Maida Vale Bar, London

Rosemary snapped out of her trance, the sense of displacement she always felt after it quickly settling in her mind and body. She gripped something in her hand tightly. Glancing at it, she recognized a pencil, the awareness of herself and her surroundings quickly followed.

She looked down to the new sketch in her book with a dumbfounded expression.

It was her.

She was sitting with handcuffs behind a metal table wearing clothes she didn't identify. Rosemary noticed she was skinnier and had a faint darker tone under her eyes indicating lack of sleep, her body didn't commonly form purple bags under her eyes when she didn't sleep so that meant she had been awake for a long period of time before that drawn situation. The drawing showed the back of a man sitting across her wearing a uniform. 

SSR agent, most likely from the army. His clothing items weren't too visible but she concluded he must have a high rank.

Was she captured by the SSR in the future?

She heard a booming laugh from outside the door and reminded herself that she had work to do and forced herself to go back to the main room of the bar. When she stepped into the crowded space she noticed that there was a small group of people that weren't as happy and drunk as the others, well, more of the former.

Rosemary neared her fake boss who was talking to another worker near two agents with sullen looks. She listened in closely.

"It's a pity Sergeant Barnes died on that mission." She almost dropped the glass of beer she was serving. She slammed the drink in front of a customer and started heading back quickly to the room she came from, ignoring the insult the man threw at her.

Before entering the small chamber, she overheard someone talking. "I heard he was friends with Captain America." The loud noise of the door she closed drowned on the loud noise inside the bar.

The pain in her chest was different from the previous ones she had had. The others felt as if someone was pressing their hand on her, this... this was as if someone was inserting needles in her heart, hurting a specific area with tiny but excruciating jabs.

Bucky is dead.

It took her time to notice that the blurry eyesight was because of tears pooling in her eyes. The memories she had of him were swimming in her head and her thoughts were turned to possible scenarios of his death making her natural capacity to breathe harder.

Bucky is dead.

Is this what loss feels like? She had been robbed of her life and childhood, she lost the right to have choices other than to be who she was in Hydra, she lost a part of herself the first time she killed, but she had never actually lost someone.