"You have no idea how hard it was to be strong. You have no idea how hard it was to act that it never bothered me, when I was fucking dying inside. You have no idea how it felt to bury all this pain inside of me and never talk about it ever again."
I think most of the person I used to be died all these years ago and now I just felt hollow. I wanted to feel again. Anything would do, I just wanted to feel again. I wanted to know what it truly felt like to be free, what it felt like to not be afraid of your own shadow.
I think I lost myself all these years ago. I lost my mind, my heart, my feelings. I lost everything and now I'm struggling to find any of these things. I spent most of my days stuck in a dark room trying to remember my past or training with Soldier to forget anything I've ever known.
All the words they said to me, the names they called me, they hurt. Never as much as the way they treated me, all the torture and the beatings, no, but they still hurt. Every time they spoke, I felt like I was being stabbed with a knife and if it wasn't for the fact that I knew it was impossible, then I would have checked myself over every single time to see if there was a knife stuck in me somewhere.I was made to keep my mouth shut. Made to stay quiet but taught to be quick-tempered.
My head hurt, my body was aching and my lungs were burning. I was struggling to open my eyes, they felt so heavy and I was trying to figure out why. Shots, pain, fighting, blood, Rogers, screaming, water.
Soldier! I shot up and gasped for air like I hadn't been able to breathe for hours. My lungs felt like they were on fire as I breathed in the cool air. My hand was massaging my throat trying to soothe the burning sensation.
"Easy there," I heard his voice from behind me and I turned around so quickly that I felt like I could pass out, "I mean it, take it easy." he said as he rushed over, seeing the fuzzy state I was in.
I closed my eyes for a second to try and shake the dizziness I was feeling, when I opened them again I saw Soldier standing right in front of the bed with a look of concern covering his bruised face.
"What happened?" my voice sounded hoarse.
"You don't remember?" he asked and motioned me to scoot over, which I did, giving him the space to sit down.
"I remember the fight on the helicarrier and I remember screaming for you as I fell through the glass into the water." I said as I looked down at my fidgeting fingers.
"Yeah, I pulled you out, but you had lost your consciousness." he sighed, but something inside me told me that there was more to it so I turned my attention back at him, waiting for him to continue "I didn't know what else to do, Darkness." he stood up and walked over to the window.
It was at this moment that I paid more attention to my surroundings. This place, this wasn't Hydra. It was an apartment. It didn't have much going for it, but it wasn't the worst either. Wait, what am I talking about? I can't be here.
"Where are we, Soldier?" I asked, tearing the blanket off me to stand up.
"Somewhere." was the only answer that I got.
"And where is somewhere?" I walked up to him to look out of the window but he turned around to face me before I could.
"Does it really matter?"
"Yes."
He looked down at me for a moment before turning his attention back at the window, "Brooklyn somewhere. I didn't know where to go."
So dead. We were so dead. What the hell was he thinking? Brooklyn, where even is Brooklyn? I knew nothing about America, so how was he supposed to. Why did he bring us here, we are assets, we aren't meant to be out of the base when we weren't on our missions.
"What about Hydra? What about mister Pierce? They are going to kill us!" I was trying to contain my anger.
He seemed to sense my stiff exterior and the anger boiling inside me, because he turned around to look at me once again before speaking, "Pierce is dead. Hydra has fallen." What?
I was trying to gather all the information he had just given me. How did that happen? Surely someone had to still be alive? But then again I wasn't dead and I wasn't back at Hydra, so what now?
The only thing I had always known and been sure about was my life with Hydra. And now everything had fallen apart in just a couple of seconds. I was always being told what to do and how to act, but now I wasn't really sure how I was supposed to go on without it.
There was a part in me that felt some kind of relief in knowing that we were out, the part that remembered what Hydra had done to Soldier to make him forget, the part that was scared of them. But then again there was this bigger part in me that felt petrified of what we were supposed to do now. The world knew our names, we weren't just ghost stories anymore. I didn't know about Soldier, but I was definitely a better ghost than a human being.
"What about us? What are we supposed to do now?" I asked after a couple of minutes of just standing in the silence, looking at the ground.
"Now," Soldier pushed my chin up with his index finger so I was made to look him in the eyes, "now, we are going to live."
YOU ARE READING
Never be the same (Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier)
Fanfiction"What he did to you was monstrous," they kept saying that, but they weren't getting the sentence right, "They. They did it." I said back, my drained voice close to a whisper. "Okay, then, what they did to you was monstrous," they tried again, "And n...
