"Get the hell away from me. I already told them it wasn't me. I didn't do it."
"Your excuses won't fool me, Barnes. They saw you." Of course they did, he thinks. They always–
"God, why's it so loud in here? There's only you, isn't there?"
"Why did you kill him, Bucky?
His voice rattles in his throat, a horrible, echoing noise in the little cell. "Tell me where I am." What is he, a child?
"Please, just answer the question. Then we can get you out of here."
"Tell me what I'm doing here!"
"We want to know why you killed Steve Rodgers."
-
He wakes up, the cold metal of a gun sunken into the skin of his forehead. In the absence of thought, he is up on his feet with his hands around the nearest neck, twisting. Whoever it is begins to convulse, tipping backward into the blood puddle on the floor.
"Stop it!" Bucky isn't one to engage with dead men... "Get out of here!" He slaps himself upside the head. A scream (from himself), gunshots, the back of his eyelids.
-
Can you feel me? he thinks. He thinks he thinks it, but it's so hard to tell sometimes. There's no thinking to this thought.
Can you hear me?
Oh no, that's not him at all. The feeling of someone else pushes against his skull. "Yes."
Your mission begins, it says. He stands and leaves.
-
"Bucky?" Who the hell is that? Not him, never him.
"My name is," He grapples with his tongue, for seconds, for a minute. "S143."
Steve feels the air pushed from his lungs. "No, not you, it can't be you, not this again."
"I'm here to follow my commands. Please, remain calm. This should be painess." His lifts a pistol from the holster on his hip. He hesitates, to pull that trigger, he hesitates for just a second. It will cost him dearly.
Sweet pain blossoms in the back of his head, and everything goes dark again.
"Barnes?"
-
"What the hell is this, Sam? He didn't even know me. It was different this time...he looked at me like he looked at the gun in his hand."
There's silence, shuffling, the creaking of an air conditioner unit.
"We have to help him."
"He tried to kill you, Steve. For real this time. No second chance."
"He hesitated, I saw it in his eyes. We have to try."
-
The world is so bright when S143 re-awakens. His mind is naked and raw, and the room is so silent that his ears ring.
"Mr. Barnes?" Someone leans over the bed.
"S143. I am S143. I am here to..." He trains off. What was he here for again? He just had it, but it rolled out of his brain like drops of water on a leaf. Weak. You fool.
The woman smiles. "Your name is James, and you're in a hospital. Her voice is soft and slow. She speaks to him like a mother to a child.
The Subject reaches for his gun, but metal fingers close on empty air. "Where is my painkiller?"
Her face stiffens, and her eyes go dark. "It's not safe for you to have it."
"When do I get it back?"
"When you're stable again." She smiles, but it's fake. Liar. She rushes out of the room.
The Subject–no, Bucky–pulls the velcro from around his arm and tries to sit up.
"What are you doing?"
Someone–his mission–is standing in the doorway.
"I am S143, please stay there while I-" His fingers grope for anything at all, and they close around a wire plugged into the wall. His machine sqeals as it comes free.
His mission bolts foward in a blur of blue, wrestling the wire from his hands as he tries to wrap it around his neck. He is so close. Bucky can feel the heat from his skin.
"Your name is Bucky, and you–"
Bucky doesn't let him finish. He jerks backward, off the bed and onto the floor. "Get away from me," he snarls. He isn't supposed to be feeling like this.
"No."
He reaches for Bucky, but the Subject twists out of his grasp and uses his other hand to shove his head against the bedpost.
"Don't follow me." He can't hear you, he's lying asleep on the ground.
The Subject jumps over the windowsill dressed in the hospital gown, falling the three stories to a parking lot below.
He's long gone by the time Steve comes to, bloody footprints on the blacktop.
