Bucky's Diary

December 18, 1943

Catch Me When I Fall – Arc North & Sarah de Warren
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Dear Diary,

I'm having nightmares. They seem unavoidable and I'm still not all that great at this whole journaling thing, but I'm hoping writing about it helps.

The horror I feel when I'm asleep and the undoubted helplessness I sense being rendered useless to myself is unbearable.

I get this strange sensation and it's always the same. Always like I felt when that machine finally turned on at the facility with Dr. Zola.

I screamed for a while, as I recall, until everything went dark. Though, this darkness was warm and living. I was aware in that time of the pain my body was fighting. I let it go, as I didn't want to die, no matter what was waiting for me on the other side.

After a bit of unconscious, warm, dark, pain, there was a change. A change that I still find hard to explain and difficult to remember entirely. It's almost as if it occurred outside of this current reality or, perhaps, to someone else entirely.

The darkness gained a new quality and shed its old ones. It was cold and painless and completely black. I couldn't envision my body, or anything else for that matter, and I couldn't sense anything other than thoughts that felt endless. It was simply nothing. Nothing at all.

When it all came back - the warmth, the unconscious pain, the less-black darkness - I fully understood that something had, in fact, occurred.

I died.

The machine, whatever the hell it was doing, brought me back to life with that same, insane electricity and immense voltage that had killed me to begin with.

Some nights when I slip back into that warm pain of remembrance, I worry if I'll accidentally grow cold and painless... completely dark and without sensation entirely anew.

Then I wonder... what if that isn't so bad? What if, in the end, that coolness is better than anything I could possibly have waiting for me in the real world? I'd never bring it upon myself, but I just think about how, if I were to remain there and never resurface, maybe I wouldn't mind it all that much.

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Steve and I had lunch together separate from the rest of the infantry. He had to ask Philips for the okay and, well, I guess the colonel had to give him a little bit of something as a thank you for saving the entire 107th.

We decided to sit in the woods on the ground at the base of a tree.

"So," he started, not having touched his food yet.

I was nearly done with mine. "So, what's new? Talk to me. Tell me everything."

"Well, I was recruited for Project: Rebirth by Dr. Erskine," he started. "I was moved to Camp Lehigh in New Jersey where I met Peggy Carter, they evaluated me, and... well, they did the procedure."

"You said it hurt... how bad was it?" I asked.

"Pretty damn bad, but I wasn't about to give up in the middle when I had already gotten so far," he answered. "It felt like everything in my body was stretching more than it should have been able to. When it was over, though, there wasn't a single person in that damned room who wasn't looking at me."

I exhaled. "Yea, I bet Peggy was drooling all over you."

"Well, yea, but the Doctor was shot after the procedure was finished because there were some people trying to get their hands on the serum that had snuck in. There wasn't much time for all that, as I had to chase them through the whole damn city to get it back," he explained.