Everybody's got a past.
But Anna Lewis doesn't remember a thing about hers.
One moment she was at home with her husband and baby, the next one she found herself in a dark motel room with a metal-limbed man who tells her she's a lethal assassin. Tha...
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April 18th, 2014
I didn't leave the motel room for five days since I woke up. The reason being that I needed time to recover. Not physically, the symptoms from the hibernation faded away the next morning. I needed time to process everything. Once I accepted I wasn't dreaming, I asked Barnes for more information. I could tell it was hard for him, he avoided some questions and never really gave clear explanations for the ones he did answer. Since he could speak Russian, he helped me read my file. Even if what it said was deeply unsettling.
I've always been a very rational person, but I had no way of knowing if what it said was true. Barnes told me that I am a Winter Soldier. That HYDRA manipulated my mind and turned me into an assassin. That they changed all my legal documentation to keep my true identity undercover. That they gave me the bionic arms and trained me to comply with their orders.
Still, I remembered nothing.
Barnes said I went on missions. That I killed people. Even so, it was really hard for me to believe how stained my hands were. I would never kill a person. Never. I don't even know how to fight. But then I look at the pictures in the file and my stomach drops. There are pictures of me carrying fire guns and other weapons.
I won't lie, I thought about running away more than once. I never tried, though. I didn't want to encounter the consequences of that action. Something told me that the other winter soldier wouldn't be happy about it. Besides, I had nowhere to go and Barnes had been relatively good to me. He still hadn't told me why he rescued me from the Triskelion. HYDRA, under SHIELD's name, were keeping me frozen in their facilities in Washington. Barnes took me with him the day both organizations fell. It was all over the news and his name was everywhere.
His full name was James Buchanan Barnes. A reporter in the TV said it. I tried to call him James once and if looks could kill, the one he gave me would have left me dead on the pavement. I never called him anything else aside from Barnes since then. I was safe as long as I did so.
But even if he looked scary, I could tell he wasn't actually a bad person. You'd think that because he's a trained assassin, he wouldn't be compassionate. But this wasn't his case at all. He came to check on me every few hours and made sure I was okay. I wasn't completely okay but under the circumstances, I couldn't complain. One thing I wanted to complain about was that he never smiled. It would have been okay if it was just that but he also made funny comments, from time to time, always taking me by surprise, and that really disconcerted me.
I was back to my prime physical condition after two days of rest. I never asked Barnes, but I desperately wanted to go outside. I knew what the answer was going to be. I also knew why it was a bad idea. The Triskelion incident was what everyone was talking about and HYDRA's secret files had just been released, so we'd be doomed if we exposed ourselves to the outside.
