Haven [Marvel | Bucky Barnes]

Chapter 18

Bucky was rather uncomfortable, but really, he was resigned to that. He'd been through infinitely worse and suspected worse might still be in his future. He could live with discomfort. The restraints clamped around his forearms were almost comical they were so bulky, while the equally ridiculous harness-like restraints over his shoulders and across his chest held his torso a little too straight for comfort.

He knew, over the top as the restraints appeared, that they likely made the people outside the portable containment cell feel safer, more secure. He could almost have laughed at their naivety. But he didn't have the will. Part of him insisted that this was where he deserved to be. Another part admitted that, locked up like this, was the safest place for him to be.

As soon as that vendor in Bucharest had run at the sight of him he'd known it was time to go again. Then Steve had been in the tiny apartment safehouse he'd been staying in and he'd thought he was done.

But then Steve had tried to help him. At the time he'd barely thought further on it, having fallen back on years, decades really, of combat training and survival instinct with the sole desire to get away. He'd just wanted to run.

Now, sitting locked up in a glorified reinforced glass and metal box, he had lots of time to think. The pieces of his mind had, for the most part, slipped back into place, though there were still times when his mind seemed fluid, things not quite where they should be, leaving him confused and disoriented.

But he remembered what Steve had meant to him. And he remembered with a cruel, frigid ache in his gut what he had nearly done to Steve...what he had done to Steve. It was that moment the memory of actually shooting his best friend surged to the forefront of his mind, followed closely by the vivid memory of those last few seconds before the superstructure of the Helicarrier had given way, sending Steve plummeting into the river. His stomach roiled violently. There were few memories that made him hate himself more...he did his best not to think about the most recent addition to that already impossibly long list...

He also knew why his oldest friend had done what he did in Bucharest, likely sacrificing his own freedom in an attempt to do it. And he knew that, knowing the outcome, Steve would do the same again.

Only Bucky didn't deserve it.

He leaned his head back against the headrest, swallowing a resigned groan. The steel and polymer was cool and hard against the back of his head but it didn't bother him. Not really.

He was too tired. He was tired of fighting. He was tired of running. He was tired of jumping from safehouse to safehouse across Europe. He was tired of hiding. He was tired of waking up everyday and knowing that he was likely to have to do one or the other. He was tired of hunting down those who threatened everything he cared for most, no matter that his drive to do so hadn't dimmed. He was tired of searching for the missing pieces of his past. For a way to contain or even neutralize the Winter Soldier programming imbedded in his brain. He was tired of the faces and the voices and the images running through his head, never letting him rest. He hated what he remembered; what having those memories meant; what they meant he was. But he was resigned to bear it.

What other choice did he have?

A flicker of bitterness that they'd taken him alive surfaced at that thought.

Outside the cell a man was talking to him, or trying to at least. Bucky wasn't the least bit interested. His life—or what meager facsimile of a life he'd had these last few months—was all but over. What point was there? They were going to pin the bombing on him. It was ironic, when considering all that he'd done, all the blood dripping from his hands, that it was because something he didn't do that would result in him spending the foreseeable future in a glass cage.