The Avengers x Reader Inserts

sever | bucky barnes

a/n: a quick drabble idea that's been in my drafts for ages on tumblr that I finally got around to writing! 

summary: Bucky is forced to kill you, his former fiancée, relatively soon after his brainwashing as a means to sever any and all ties to his former self. 

word count: 986

Bucky's grip on the silencer tightened with an unhinged force of strength he hadn't ever known before. He could hear the metal plating cracking between his fingers, the pale whiteness of his knuckles a tell-tale sign of the turmoil churning in the caged confines of his conflicted mind. His sights were trained on a woman he couldn't recognize through the haze of HYRDA's erasure of his past life, the target he'd been assigned to eradicate; a woman with (h/c) hair carefully rolled into an updo at the nape of her bared neck. There was a delicate wave to the hair that framed her face, leftover from her overnight pin curls.

But there was something about the smell of the garden she was tending in the moonlight, the overwhelming aroma of golden gardenias and peace roses, something that burned in the back of his mind that HYDRA had yet to expel.

Longing.

The static voice in his earpiece, though only a menacing whisper, could have been as loud as the bells suspended above a monastery. Louder than the phantom voices that echoed in his ears; louder than the soothing voice of a woman telling him that she loved him, that he was a good man, that he better promise to come back home to her after the bloodshed was over.

But it hadn't ever ended for him, had it?

Not in the way the yellow telegram last spring must have led you to believe.

Rusted.

The shine of the blue moonglow on her hair was like the flash of a searchlight grazing over the sea in a storm, calling out to ships made victim by the violent waves. Something in this woman's countenance, the way she moved and carried herself, the way her delicate hands inspected the damp petals of the flora, the sound of a warm hum that leaped from her lungs to the tune of a big band number he hadn't heard in more than a year's time. . .

The shape of her fingers as they cradled the curved handle of that tin watering can, the oddity of her bare feet in the dewy grass. Something about her muddied knees and that pair of dungarees hugging her hips made him want to crush the weapon still poised in his now-trembling hand.

But who was she? Who was this searchlight, beyond who he knew as his current target? He knew he'd seen her before, there was too much that was familiar about her, too much that he was drawn to.

Furnace.

Bucky's vision blurred over and he winced at the piercing pain in his head. The voices of his past were drowned out by the raging roar of a fire and the deafening blow of an explosion, the sound of his own screaming. Heat lapped at his neck and chest, invigorating the sweat in his pores beneath his unmarked uniform. He felt his forehead grow hot like a fever had suddenly washed over him, heavy and thick.

Something white-hot began burning through his veins, straining the muscles in his neck and arms as he clenched his jaw through the pain.

Oh. That was right.

He'd seen her photograph in the file he'd been given.

That's how he knew her.

Daybreak. Seventeen.

Had the Winter Soldier ever even been seventeen? Had there ever been a time before now, before this moment, before the erasure of James Buchanan Barnes' existence?

Had he ever felt daylight on his skin or basked in the warmth of a rising sun?

He felt no golden warmth now, no voice of comfort, no hand to pull him back.

Benign. Nine.

Two minds in one body, two destinies peeling the flesh from his soul.

If he were really Bucky, the man whose memories trickled in the back of his mind like condensation in a melting pot, he wouldn't be here. If he really wasn't a HYDRA operative, his thoughts wouldn't be so swarmed with torture and contracts like hornets in a hive.

He could feel the tight straps of his operating chair winding around his wrists as he steadied his aim on the curve of the wide steering wheel, as though he were back in the dungeon confines of his master's laboratory. As though the heat of the blood in his mouth from biting his own cheek was merely the sensation common to an assassin and not a man fighting the impulses of someone else's programming.

Homecoming.

There had been a dance in school before the world had caught fire; before the concept of freedom had become a complete mockery of self-imposed will. She'd worn a red dress with a matching pair of slingback shoes. She had (e/c) eyes and sweetly crooked teeth. She'd been his first kiss, and at one point, before he'd been stripped of himself and left bare to the bone, he'd hoped she'd be his last.

And in some sickly poetic misinterpretation, she had been.

One.

The flames under his skin burned hotter, his hair growing damp with sweat. He sucked in a sharp breath, blinking in the fog of his mind and the faint taste of fading cotton candy on his tongue.

But there was no memory of that now, no thought or word or softy hummed song that could bring him back. James Barnes was dead. He'd died falling from a train. Plummeted into a snow-capped ravine. Had he ever even lived in the first place?

The Winter Soldier didn't know, nor did he recognize the silhouette of the woman standing in her garden with a stray cat winding between her legs. He'd never seen her before.

But some part of him didn't want this. Some part of his protocol hesitated with what semblance of free will he had left, slowing down the finger enclosing around the trigger.

He didn't want to see her die. He didn't want to be the one to do it.

Freight car.