Lost + Found [Bucky Barnes] ✓

Chapter 23

While Chloe works out the details with Steve and the others, Bucky heads straight for the training room. He's furious - absolutely livid - that Steve would even consider allowing Chloe to do this. Yes, they have her sister, but no one even knows who they are.

He tried convincing Steve that it was Hydra. All signs point to them. Sure, they were 'destroyed' and exposed with the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D., but he knows that's a load of bullshit. Hydra adapts. Evolves. Cut off one head, two more will take its place. Who knows which head this is, which asshole decided that he or she wants to destroy the world, but it doesn't matter.

Bucky isn't going to let it happen. Not this time. Not to Chloe.

He stops in front of the door to the training room, hand outstretched, and lets his gaze land on his finger tips. His hand his shaking with rage, adrenaline and anger coursing through his veins seeking an outlet, and he's got a feeling that a few rounds with a punching bag won't do the trick. Not today.

Hesitating, he sucks in a deep breath as memories flash through his mind. Disjointed and fragmented glimpses into his past as the Winter Soldier, the other self he's tried so desperately to forget, swim through his head. He thought he could fight it. That he could move on from being the machine, the weapon, the...thing they created.

He was wrong.

Even after Tony did him a favor and tore off his arm, forcing him to relive that pain a second time, he knew he couldn't escape it. Yes, the arm was gone. It helped him cope. Helped him separate himself from the man they made him to be. However, he can't fight the truth.

His arm was never the weapon. He is.

The deadliest assassin in Hydra history. James Buchanan Barnes. Hell of a moniker to lug around for half a century.

Exhaling slowly, Bucky curls his fingers into a fist as he squeezes his eyes shut. More memories jolt through him. Falling from the train. The snow. Blood everywhere. A Soviet soldier dragging him back to Hydra.

Year after year of misery and pain and torture.

Death. Death. Death.

Before he's even aware of it, he's punched through the wall next to him. It crumbled beneath the weight of his fist, the hole larger than one you would create with a sledgehammer, and he forces himself to exhale.

There are gaps in his memory still. Places where his mind has yet to fill in the holes or simply refuses to remember out of sheer horror, but he never forgot the day he received his arm. He was barely able to function, but fully aware of what the doctors did to him that day. Forced to watch as Zola and his colleagues removed the remnants of his arm and replaced it with that monstrosity. The fusion of metal and flesh and bone sending his body through wave after wave of excruciating pain, ripping him apart internally and forcing him back together until he was screaming in his mind for it to stop.

He begged for death to take him on that table. Anything would've been a sweet release compared to what they did to him, to the agony he endured, but he was not that lucky. Arnim Zola welcomed him to Hydra like a prodigal son returning home, completely aware that his patient was conscious and would suffer through the entire process.

Sergeant Barnes, Zola told him, grinning proudly at the prospect of his accomplishment. The procedure is already started. You are to be the new fist of Hydra.

Pushing away the memory, he forces it back to the recesses of his mind and heads away from the training room, completely forgetting the havoc he wreaked on the wall. No, his mind is on one thing right now as he strides quickly through the Wakandan facility. Staff members hurry to step out of his way, no one eager to collide with the man who has the makings of destruction etched all over his face.

Bucky rounds the corner to the medical bay, stopping in sight of the glass chamber that held him less than a few weeks prior. He'd hoped to avoid this. To find rest - or at least some semblance of it - while the world continued to spin on without him. He was tired of leaving nothing but carnage in his wake, tired of reliving the horrors of his past, tired of feeling like he couldn't trust himself not to fall back into the monster Hydra made him to be. When he went under the last time, he told himself that - when he woke up - everything would be better. Maybe then he'd find peace.

He passes through the room swiftly, avoiding the few lab technicians working at their stations, and enters the next open area. A woman in white spots him from across the room, her smile a bright contrast against her radiant dark skin, and he fights back the urge to run in the opposite direction.

This is a safe place, he reminds himself. This isn't like before.

"Mr. Barnes," the woman welcomes him warmly, stepping toward him. "What brings you here?"

Bucky's jaw tightens as he hesitates, then he opens his mouth to speak. Volumes of meaning rush out of him as it sinks in, and the room nearly topples around him when he utters two short, gruff words.

"Do it."

*****
AUTHOR'S NOTE

Ahhh, a Bucky-centric scene. You're welcome. *Insert evil laugh*

(P.S. DOUBLE UPDATE!)

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