Drown Out My Dreams

Chapter 1

He was already awake when the alarm clock on the bedside table began its tired buzzing, signaling that it was once again time to roll out of bed. Time to stop the stream of fragmented memories masquerading as dreams; to stop the frantic writing of each abstract shard, each time he woke, and trying to string them together. He was lucky to get a couple hours of real sleep a night, and they usually came just before the sound of the alarm.

Rolling onto his left side, he reached with his right hand for the buttons on the top of the small, black digital clock. His left hand was useless for such fine, deft maneuvers, but in a fight it couldn't be beat. That had been its original purpose by those who had attached the damn thing to him all those years ago, but he had turned his back on all that. He was done with their kind of fighting and vowed that he'd never do it again. That was why he had run; that, and the memories of a face that haunted every step he took. The face of a man who he'd been ordered to kill, a man he wanted to kill, but who had insisted that they had been friends. And that one phrase, those six simple words, that he'd spoken as they grappled in the bowels of that hovercraft:

I'm with you to the end of the line...

He didn't experience déjà vu, not in the way that others described it. But at that moment, when the man named Steve Rogers, had spoken those words to him, he had come as close as he imagined he could.

Giving his head a gentle shake, he tried to focus on the present as he sat up, the springs of the ancient mattress groaning under his shifting weight. He grabbed the top notebook from a stack on the end table beside the alarm clock and opened it to a spot near the middle. The pages were written in his own hand; he glanced over what made some sense, and paused to read and reread portions of text that had eluded him since they'd been written. Or since the last time he'd read them- he couldn't be sure of one over the other. After four pages, the writing stopped and he allowed the notebook to fall shut in his lap.

He had nothing more to add to the abstract ramblings today.

The illuminated red digits on the clock reminded him that he had roughly two hours before he had to leave. Placing the notebook back on its stack, a shadow of the man who was once called James Buchanan Barnes rose from the rickety bed to begin his day.

His "day" was actually night; his alarm had sounded at 6:00 p.m. Work was hard to find in this little corner of the world, and even harder when you had a bizarre prosthetic arm that would give away your identity (or at least one of them) if the wrong people saw it. He had to be careful about moving around in public, especially during the daytime. All the same, a man had to eat and pay for the roof over his head, so he had taken to accepting no-questions-asked work where he could get it, and his current gig seemed to be working out pretty well. Sure, it wasn't the most scrupulous work- what with the under the table pay and the fact that his employers and coworkers didn't even know his real name- but it paid the bills and it was relatively easy; all he had to do was stand around and look imposing for several hours a night. Every now and again he would have to get tough with a drunk or high patron, but usually one good shove from his well-concealed metal arm had them kissing pavement for the night and would put and end to the issue. It wasn't much, and of course it could always have been worse...

* * *

"Cum vă numiți?" The sleazy man in the gaudy, brightly patterned shirt had asked him as they sat in worn vinyl and metal office chairs on either side of a beat-down desk in the back office of Club Sânziană three weeks before.

What's your name?

"La ce vã trãbã?" He had replied warily. He knew that that the job he'd applied for was a don't-ask-don't-tell, and paid cash under the table for each shift.