RP: Bucky & OPEN Who: Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier and OPEN When: 6 August Where: Arrival Room
If you get lost, the best thing to do is go back and retrace your steps.
He wasn't sure whose voice it was that spoke those words in his head. He wasn't sure who most of the voices were inside his head, pieces of memory set adrift, shards of a lifetime broken so long ago the shape of it was lost. But, he remembered the words of advice. And, as he had no orders, it was at least something to tell him what do to.
So, he went back.
First, to the bank vault.
By the time the chair was sitting in pieces around him, some of the hot, furious emotions that had been building in him since the fight on the helicarrier had drained out of him. The sudden drop in adrenaline left him sitting on the jagged tile floor breathing heavy and no better off than when he'd started.
The confusion within Hydra in the wake of Insight's loss and the Secretary's death made it easy for him to slip from hastily abandoned safehouse to hastily abandoned safehouse. He collected cash and weapons, stuffed a backpack with those and a change of clothes, and made his way out of the country.
He went to Europe.
Siberia would have been a good place to find some of the pieces of what was done, but the thought of going back to that place caused a strange frozen sensation in his gut that he couldn't identify. It wasn't a feeling he could identify. Feelings were...forbidden?
So, he went to Europe. He retraced the steps of the man the Captain and the museum said he was. He went to the Alps, to the bottom of a ravine from which he had vague impressions of memory, flashes of blood and snow, Russian soldiers. A voice in his mind yelled a name. Bucky. Who was Bucky?
From there, he went to Kreischberg...or what was left of it. The work camp had been destroyed when the Captain liberated four hundred prisoners, but time had also taken it's toll with several decades interspersing themselves between that night and the one that found him standing amoung the ruins trying to find anything that could possibly be a piece of himself. Not without you. The words echoed in his mind, a voice that had once belonged to a man he didn't think existed any longer.
A flash of fire overtook reality for a moment. Storm blue eyes squeezed shut as he shook his head to clear the memory.
But, when they opened, well, he definitely wasn't in Kansas anymore.
Not that he'd been in Kansas. He didn't know what that thought meant.
Nor was it the first time he'd awoken in an unfamiliar place in what seemed like the blink of an eye. He didn't think he'd been caught. He still had his backpack on his shoulders. And he was still standing as he had been in Austria. So, it wasn't Hydra. But, the world had changed. The world he'd known had fallen into the Potomac...both worlds. And, now, he was...somewhere else. His left hand reached for the pistol at his back and he moved carefully, feet gliding soundlessly on the floor, toward the strange contraption in the center. If it was in any way connected to the chair or Hydra, he would rip it to pieces and burn this place to the ground.