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It was cold. He was cold. Who was he? He was... he was... he was cold.
He wanted to be warm. To be warm he had to move. He had to stand up. Was he lying down? He tried to move an arm. The floor was pressing on it. He was pressing on the floor? The floor was cold. What was it? It was hard. Sharp. No, that was the wrong word. Sharp meant pain. Meant daggers in his head. The floor was not sharp, but it hurt like sharp. Cold, hard.
Where was he?
There was a floor. It looked gray. There was something else. Something else he could see. If it would just... stop moving. He tried to stand up. The floor was in his way. He had to go... he had to go up. Up meant legs. He knew how to work his legs. Rotate the ankles. They always let him know how to use his body. Why were they not letting him know this time?
Rotate the ankles. Tense the calves. Push up from the bottom of his feet. Push. Push. Push!
Upright! He was upright. It didn't feel like a good idea, being upright. His head was supposed to be the topmost point of his body but it didn't feel that way. He needed to know if his head was in the right place. They could have moved it, put it somewhere else.
He reached up to check his head was still there. His hand skin felt too rough. He didn't like it. He couldn't move his hand away. It wanted to stay on his cheek. He wanted it gone. With a surge of effort, he peeled his hand away from his face. He still had a face. Good. And it was generally in the right place.
Standing up was hard. He needed to lean against something. He staggered forward. The series of muscle movements worked without him thinking about it. That was good. His body knew what to do even if he didn't. That was how it should be.
But had he received any orders?
There were no voices. He couldn't hear anything else but him. Where was he? Was this a mission? But then why didn't he know what to do?
No, no it couldn't be a mission. He'd left HYDRA. He'd left HYDRA, and they hadn't followed.
There was something he had tried to find. Something he needed. Needed to stop the... the brain. Keep his brain still. He hadn't managed to find it. Not before it had ran out on him. On his body.
And now he was alone. No one was going to give it to him. He had to find it now. Had to find it to keep himself together. He was going to fall apart if he didn't. His arm would drop off, and then his legs would split, and then his face would slide off his body and stay on the floor, and then there would be nothing he could do to stop himself from being cold.
He couldn't go back to the cold.
Someone would have to have it, someone nearby. That was how this worked. He was supposed to find them.
They should have been here with him, but they weren't, which meant he had to find them. The men who held the syringes. He knew how to track, how to follow those who didn't want to be found. He didn't want to be found by them but he could... he could... he could find them. Yes. That would work.
There was a large shape which looked sort of like a door. He tried to open it. His hand crunched the doorknob into shreds. It leaned open anyway. The world outside was brighter. Too bright to see anything but shards of white.
It was only an obstacle, and he knew he couldn't let an obstacle defeat him. If he did, they wouldn't give him what he needed. Pain would come, and by intention. This was how this worked.
He stepped outside. There were noises, beeping of car horns and raised voices. They were so loud, tearing and piercing at him. The world was around him and it was fighting him in every sense. He wanted to lurch away, wanted to hide, but hiding had never worked before and he needed to get better, needed to.
He had to be in a city. Not DC. He wouldn't have stayed in DC. America? He couldn't tell. He couldn't tell what language the voices were speaking in. Were they even voices? If he tried to speak he didn't think he would be able to make a sound.
Come on, come on. He had to move. Had to get it before everything got worse. Everything got worse if he wasn't fast enough, he knew that. Get it together.
Were people looking at him? Watching him? Stupid question, there was always people watching him. He was never alone. They were watching him now, watching him struggle, just because they found it funny...
No, no, he'd left. He'd left them behind. This was a city he'd never been to before. He hadn't been assigned here. This was just him. Just him walking across the street. Just him.
He moved forward, ungainly into the open air. Something beeped, a loud blaring sound of noise that struck like daggers. Too bright, too much. He needed relief. Part of the road was clad in darkness. He headed straight there. Once there, he sank to the floor. His head needed to be low, just for a minute. He squinted out at the world. Shapes were clearer now, but they hurt. All the bright colors pierced his eyes. It was better before, when he was only in the gray. Like the calmness of the ice, he liked it for a moment, but he always knew the cold would get under his skin and then it would not be so peaceful anymore.
There was a noise. He turned around. Someone was speaking, a thick barrel like shape of a person. That couldn't be their body, could it? Bodies didn't have little... things dangling off it. Tears in the skin without blood. No, no. That was their coat. Their body was underneath, where all the flesh and blood was kept. He could hear it now, if he tried. The heartbeat, pulsing.
They were still speaking. He knew this language, but he had to try, had to push through to understand it.
"I don't know," he croaked. Honest. They always wanted him to be honest.
Was this man Hydra? Had they sent him? No, it couldn't be. They never looked so unkempt. Never were seen without a gun. Those sticks of charged electricity. This man had nothing. Did that make him more dangerous?
More words came at him. He managed to find one, figure it out. "Hospital."
He shook his head violently. Hospital meant authorities. They wouldn't give him what he needed. They'd take him outside and shoot him in the head.
"No hospital," he said.
The coat figure moved forward. They smelled strongly. It wasn't good. He wanted them to go away, with their strong smell. They smelled like rot and decay. They smelled like a dead body already gone. They smelled like that, but they were still moving, and it wasn't right.
There was something underneath, something sharp. Something tangy. Something familiar.
He leapt forward. One arm out, he grabbed them and pushed them back against the wall. He had to be careful, always careful. If he broke them, he wouldn't get anything. It was always harder to control his body like this, but it didn't matter. They punished him for it anyway.
"Where is it?" he said.
"What?" The figure said. They were squirming in his grip, one hand pushing against his arm. They weren't strong enough to get him to move. Of course they weren't. Nobody was. Nobody except for -
"The drug," he said, "You have it. It's on you. Give me it."
"Jesus," the figure gasped. "Get off and I'll give it, if you just let me go - "
He reluctantly released them, but still kept them caged tight to the wall with his body.
The figure rummaged through their coat. The scent grew stronger with every movement. Finally, they brought it free from their many pockets, and held it out. A tiny syringe, unmarked. It smelled right. It smelled strong.
He took it, and curled his fingers tight around it. He wouldn't break it. Wouldn't dare. He needed it.
He stepped back and the figure fled. They would call for someone soon, so he took no chances. Adrenaline pushed through the haze and forced upwards. He clambered upwards and lay on top of the roof, flattening himself down. He held the tiny syringe upwards. It looked easy enough to work. He pushed up one sleeve, tried to match a vein and plunged -
Had he done it? The liquid was all gone, he must have done it. He could feel - he could feel something. Not nothing. But it wasn't strong enough, it wasn't taking him over in the way he needed. He was still here in this body that felt wrong, that carried aches like a brand across his shoulders, where the world was upside down.
He snarled and threw the syringe over the roof. It smashed into a hundred tiny pieces, the sound piercing at his too sensitive ears. He couldn't take it.
He needed something more.
A hospital could have it. He couldn't admit himself, of course. He'd have to steal it. That should be easy for him, but the amount of people posed a challenge. He didn't want to kill anyone. These were just civilians. Civilians who may recognize his face and pose a fight. He had to be sneaky.
He should make a plan. He could make a plan.
It was just so hard to think with this drilling insistence in his head. He had to get the right drug right now, or he was going to melt through the floor and join with the core of the earth. Nothing else was more important.
He tracked his way over the rooftops. He didn't like the floor, didn't like the way he was exposed walking on the path like everyone else. Tiny shivers kept rolling under his skin, his hair standing up on edge. Sometimes it felt like the world was moving under his feet. An edge of roof would shift as he moved to grab it, and the only thing that kept him from falling off was his fast reflexes. He sank down and pressed his face against the roof of a some kind of art warehouse, cold stone against heated cheek.
Someone down there was making noise. A dog barking, and a man yelling. Trying to get them back. The dog's barks scraped at him like sandpaper and he just wished they would shut up.
This had to end. The overpowering sensation of feeling everything. Otherwise he was going to dissolve, dissolve into the roof and never come back out. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the sky. Had it gotten darker? How light had it been before? He'd been able to see before, and he could see now, but it was different.
Fuck. He should know this. He should be able to tell what time of day it was. But he could barely see, and the light was blinding, and simultaneously it was too dark to see more than a meter, and at that point he had to shut his eyes because pins were pressing into them.
With his eyes closed, the world twisted and dissolved and submerged, until he was no longer sure he was real. He couldn't make himself open his eyes. Open his eyes, become real, and the pain would come. He was only painless when he slept. When the ice came over him and he was nothing. This was the closest he could get.
He stayed like that for a while before he could open his eyes again. Now it was darker, and that was real. Night, or perhaps evening at least.
The noise of a siren pierced the air. He scrambled for the edge, nearly rocketed over it before he stopped himself. Siren meant hospital. He just had to follow it.
There it was, the hospital. It was large, many windows lit up and glowing, multiple ambulances lined up in the parking lot. That meant a lot of people, a lot of civilians. People who couldn't hurt him but could easily contact people who could.
It would be dangerous to go in there. A risk he couldn't calculate, couldn't adjust down out of the red. He shouldn't need to do this. He should have been strong enough to shoulder this himself.
The clawing feeling across his body told him otherwise.
He went for it.
He stole scrubs from a van marked 'laundry', wiped off the grime as best as he could, covered up his arm in gloves, and strode right in. The confidence was what made this work. Everyone was too busy to question him, too busy to pull him aside to check. Infiltration was only hard if they had been warned about him beforehand. No one would have told these people to prepare for him.
All the smells here were so pungent, a chaotic mix of fragrances that fought for balance. Nausea rose in his chest. Everything was so overwhelming, and harder now that he had to present himself as normal, as okay as a civilian doctor would be. It was hard, but he could pinpoint what he needed and let that lead him through the building. He knew vaguely that it had to be in the toxicology department. There he would find what he needed.
He found the door. It was surprisingly quiet. There must have been attention needed somewhere else, but he didn't second guess his good luck.
His feet slapped against the linoleum floor as the florescent lights beamed down at him. Everything here was so bright and blinding, like they could sterilize the bacteria away just by exposing it to enough light. He was like a bug in that regard, feeling carved away by being far too visible.
But it was worth it. What he needed was here, somewhere amongst these stacks of shelves. He didn't know what it was called, didn't know any of these short hand codes that covered the walls on laminated aid sheets, he only knew what it felt like. The smell of it, the taste of it, the burn in his veins when it sat there for too long.
He started with the first cabinet. It would take a while, but he was not leaving here without it.
The door creaked open and he froze. He slowly stood up, closing the door while twisting himself around to guard his weaker right arm.
A man in a white coat entered and he relaxed. Just a doctor. No one he recognized from before.
The man looked up at him and he stuttered to a stop, mouth gaping.
"Is there a problem, sir?" he said, pressing force into his words in an attempt to get it through the man's head that the best thing he could be doing right now was leaving.
The man recovered himself, hands shifting to tug nervously on his lanyard.
"No... no, I think I just - you must be new, correct? I'm Dr Mishaw. I apologize, I hadn't heard of any recent transfers. Do you need any assistance with anything here...?" The man trailed off, but there was something wistful in his eyes that didn't match his words.
He found himself curious about that look, and despite the logical thing to do would be to send Dr Mishaw out of the room, he wanted to understand that look.
"I'm looking for - " what was he looking for? how did they phrase it? The words were slipping away from him, but perhaps if he said - "Severe, high class injectants," he fell on.
Dr Mishaw looked at him for a moment, slightly puzzled, but shook it away, stepping forward and leading him to a cabinet.
"I think this is what you might mean?" Dr Mishaw ventured.
He opened the cabinet and saw many trays of lined up vials of liquid. They certainly looked right, and the labels meant nothing to him, but he was sure it was in these kind of receptacles the drugs had been delivered to him before. This was it. He glanced up at Dr Mishaw, who was watching him with that strange wistful look.
Dr Mishaw caught him looking and winced.
"Sorry, I don't mean to stare, just... you look very familiar. Have you heard of James Barnes? The war hero?"
He had to swing his arm back to his side to stop himself from crushing the cabinet beneath his fingers. It always came back to him. That name. He kept forgetting, forgetting himself, forgetting how people would have known him. Knew of him. That face in the museum. He couldn't make himself associate with that name. It felt too wrong. sat within him like poison. No, he was just a body craving the next release. That was all. He wasn't a hero, nothing but.
And yet he'd pulled Captain America from the waters. He hadn't followed through. He hadn't killed him.
He couldn't deny it.
"Yes," he said, short and clipped, hoping Dr Mishaw would read it for discomfort and move away from the topic.
Dr Mishaw continued on in the same softly rambling way he had started. "Well, my grandfather met him, when he was with the 23rd unit. It was only brief, but he said Barnes was a good man."
Of course. He should have sent Dr Mishaw away. They had a connection to man and surely they would see him, surely they would look at him now and see all the ways that he was wrong. His craving for the drugs that lay before him grew stronger.
"A good man, but haunted by the war nonetheless," Dr Mishaw continued. "They all were. War is a horrible thing, don't you think? My apologies, not to get maudlin - "
"What do you mean, 'haunted'?" he asked. In all the literature he'd discovered they'd rarely mentioned that. James Barnes was a hero sidekick, the trusted friend that stuck thick and thin beside Captain America. His legacy had been one of trust, loyalty, and dedication to the cause.
He found it hard to relate to anything in those papers. It had been like reading about a stranger, but apparently once, that stranger had been him.
"Well, as you know, many people came out of these wars with associated traumas, it was not an easy thing... but my grandfather always told me that the heroes too held their own tragedies. We shouldn't idolize them too strongly. They were all people struggling to pull it together, just like the rest of the soldiers." Dr Mishaw gave him a wan smile. "James Barnes was one he remembered the most strongly. My grandfather went into psychiatry after what he saw, after he saw how many veterans struggled. He told me he wished he could have talked to Barnes after... but, well. You know how it ended."
He swallowed. He knew that end very well. Still dreamed of it, haunted and out of context. That fall was the end of Barnes, full stop. Nothing good had come after. But apparently, it had started before all that. Perhaps it had been clinging to him since birth.
That through-line, that sense of shared pain, it connected him more strongly with Barnes than any biography had been able to do before.
He let the cabinet door swing closed.
He felt disturbed, a ghost passing through him. He wanted to sit with this feeling, this reality and pick over it. Understand it. Or stop it. Shut it down completely with the liquid substance he held in its tiny glass vial.
"Thank you, Dr Mishaw," He said. "That's all."
Dr Mishaw gave him a little nod and moved away. "See you around the wards."
"See you," he said curtly. The door swung shut, and he stood there for a few more seconds, hearing Dr Mishaw's footsteps carry him away. Silence lay behind. Then, and only then, did he move. He swung himself out of the window, dug his metal fingers into the wall, and pushed himself off the building. He landed with a roll, the vial carefully protected in his human hand. His metal one was far too prone to twitching uncontrollably. He couldn't break it. Could afford to.
He found himself a roof suitable for him to lie back on for a suitable amount of time, where he wouldn't catch attention if caught in a drug induced haze. He itched to be under that sensation again, to stop feeling his body with such detailed intensity.
Was that how Barnes had felt, too? Would he have wanted something like this, something that could disconnect himself from his body?
Barnes was a hero. He'd died to save people, died to protect Captain America. America's dream of a soldier. Nothing like him.
But he couldn't get Dr Mishaw's words out of his mind, couldn't stop thinking about what that meant. He'd assumed that this him, the now him, was impossibly distant. He hadn't felt anything at all from the museum photos, other than disturbed at the resemblance. He knew, logically, empirically, he was that person. He'd saved Captain America. Dragged him out of the water because of the strength of that feeling.
He wasn't the man on the posters. Wasn't the man on America's greatest team, sold and marketed and repackaged - even as a teddy bear for the kids. That wasn't him.
The person Dr Mishaw described was a real person. A person he could understand.
He stared down at the vial. And now what? He was going to wash all that reality away?
He couldn't take this. Couldn't take this dissolution of himself. His body ached and the world felt no more real than it did a few hours ago, but he couldn't help but feel anchored to the weight of reality by what Dr Mishaw had said. He couldn't ignore it.
He couldn't keep ruminating on it either.
The drug would stop him thinking about it.
He had to do it. No matter if he didn't want it.
He squinted at the writing, indecipherable and meaningless to him besides. He unscrewed the vial, that tiny thing that mattered so much. The vial lid opened and he got a whiff of the contents.
It smelled like... salt. Salt? He held it outstretched and stared at it. This wasn't... this wasn't anything.
Dr Mishaw had given him the wrong substance. He'd done it intentionally. Must have. He ran back the expressions Dr Mishaw had given him, ran back the moment. Dr Mishaw hadn't trusted him, but had been compassionate enough to give what he thought must have been a seedy drug user enough time to talk.
He smashed the vial against the roof. The scent of salt filled the air. It was just salt water. That was all. He didn't have the drug, and he knew he couldn't go back in and retrieve it. He could find another hospital, find another drug dealer, find something that could replace it.
He wasn't sure he wanted to.
Maybe it was a relief. Maybe he wanted to sit back with that image Dr Mishaw had painted for him of that human Barnes, and not let it get flooded away by substances he didn't understand.
Maybe he wanted to sit in the reality of this, and not get washed away to the false freedom of nothing-hood.
The image of Barnes was stronger now, and that... that was more interesting to him than the drug.
He laid back out on the gravel, and stared up at the sky.