Waking up, gasping, with his body covered in a cold sweat seemed to be the new normal for James Buchanan Barnes. Maybe the brainwashing of HYDRA had been wiped out - although that theory had yet to be fully tested - but the nightmares would never leave him. It was his penance for the deeds he had done as an assassin and it was a price that he seemed to have to pay nightly.

His best friend, Steve Rogers, loved to remind Bucky that he hadn't been himself at the time but that didn't seem to matter to the former assassin. It didn't change the guilt that clung to Bucky like a second skin. The nightmares came no matter how much Steve tried to tell his friend that he wasn't the villain. Some of those nightmares were worse than others but they had become oddly comforting in their own way. They were, after all, the one consistent thing he felt he had anymore.

Bolting up in bed, Bucky gasped as he tried to catch his breath. His head was swimming with so many visions but they seemed to start to fade a bit as he opened his eyes. His heart hammered in his chest as his hands - one made of flesh and one made of vibranium - clutched tightly to the threadbear blanket that his legs had become tangled in.

Outside of his apartment, thunder rolled, although Bucky had missed the lightning flash that had come before. His room was dark save for the faint pink light of the neon sign on the roof of the building next door to the one where he was staying. The sound of rain on the window muted the sounds of the city outside but if he strained, he could still hear cars on the streets below as people went about their night.

New York City - the city that never sleeps, Bucky thought as his breathing evened out. How appropriate.

This was home or it had been once, a lifetime ago. Now it all felt a bit foreign to him. Nothing really looked like it had when he had been growing up and yet there were things about the city that seemed like they had never changed. The feeling of disorientation still stuck with Bucky more than he would have liked. It didn't help that these days he didn't see Steve, the only person in this world who could understand some of what he was going through. It left Bucky alone in the world while he tried desperately to get his head right.

Bucky had been grateful for his time in Wakanda, of course. They had worked hard there to untangle the mess left in his brain and it appeared to work for the most part. He had even found peace there for a time, content to live a life away from all of the things he had known. He had been an outsider but it had been something of a fresh start for Bucky.

But all good things tended to come to an end.

War found him again and ever the soldier, he had willingly fought when Steve had come for him in Wakanda. The price, though, had been high. Bucky and others had disappeared for five years, lost in 'the snap' or whatever people had chosen to call it. Coming back had been easy enough for Bucky. It wasn't that different from being woken up from cryo sleep again after all. Then Steve had made a bone-headed decision - something Bucky had fully expected, of course - and now he was lucky if he caught up with the old man once a month.

The return hadn't been anything Bucky hadn't experienced before though. He was used to losing chunks of time, used to the world moving forward while he was stuck behind. None of this was unusual for him, which just made the nightmares worse. It had been a reminder, something that woke up parts of Bucky's brain that he had hoped to compartmentalize. The memories weren't horrible all of the time but it didn't make the nightmares every night any better.

A flash of lightning bathed the room in a bright light as Bucky let go of the blanket he had been holding in a death grip. Slowly he was coming back to reality, shaking as much of the pain that tonight's dream had dredged up in his scrambled brain. His heartbeat had slowed, his breaths had evened out. He kicked his legs free from the mess of the blanket and sheet he had become tangled up in before shifting to sit on the edge of the bed.

It creaked with every move but Bucky hardly noticed the sound anymore. One glance at the digital clock to his right let him know that it was 3:05 AM. He didn't bother with the lights as he moved toward the chair in the living room area of his studio apartment. It was a small space and in four long strides he had crossed the room. A heather gray t-shirt had been haphazardly tossed over the back of the chair and he grabbed it now.

Bucky was pulling it on as he shuffled toward the bathroom. His bare feet made nearly no noise as he walked. He moved through the apartment with a level of stealth that he had previously reserved for his missions. Now it was merely a holdover from that time, a hard habit for the former assassin to break.

The bathroom door was already open wide and Bucky reached in to flip on the light, blinking a couple of times as his eyes adjusted to the light. In the silence, he used the bathroom and moved to the sink to wash his hands. His hair, recently shorn short again, stuck up in several different directions. He eyed the reflection that stared back at him and he realized that he barely recognized the face he saw.

With a sigh, he splashed some of the warm water on his face. Sleep wasn't likely to come to him so he knew that he might as well try washing away some of the sweat and the sleep. With another scoop of the water, Bucky was wetting down his hair, letting the water drip down the back of his neck. He quickly raked his fingers through his hair, trying to tame it a bit, although it didn't do much good.

He sighed again, still staring at his reflection. There were dark circles under his eyes, evidence of his lack of sleep lately. The man who looked back at him from the mirror looked tired in every sense of the word; he looked broken and like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Flashes of memories soon filled his mind and he looked down, gripping the sink tightly. He closed his eyes, trying to will away the memory of another victim.

I'll never be free.

As he heard the porcelain sink creak under his grip, Bucky quickly let it go. He didn't want to have to fix it again. After the third time he had gone to the hardware store for a replacement sink, he vowed to not break another. The only problem was that this one - the fifth replacement - was clearly cracking. At least fixing it would give him something to do.

Bucky had already painted his small studio apartment twice. He had replaced the kitchen cabinets and then he had repainted them as well. He had made a point to buy furniture that he would have to put together himself (if only because he didn't have the space to build any furniture himself) and he even helped his neighbors with a leaky kitchen sink and later with replacing their toilet.

As long as he kept busy, he kept the demons at bay so Bucky found ways to keep himself busy as often as possible.

He often felt like whatever had been done to unscramble his brain, had opened the floodgates instead. While he was grateful that he had been deprogrammed, it didn't change the fact that he was remembering things that he didn't always want to remember. Some days the flow of memories was easier to deal with than on other days though. He didn't mind so much when it was childhood memories but that was rarely the case, especially when he slept.

Bucky couldn't busy his mind with trivial things when he slept and his subconscious used that against him time and time again. Sometimes the nightmares were clear memories, reminding him of the monster that he had been. He might see a mission from start to finish, realizing by the morning that he had viewed it all with such a detached coldness. While that had been necessary for his survival, it wasn't who Bucky wanted to be anymore. 

It was when his mind let the memories bleed together that Bucky had the hardest time. There were times when his childhood friends made appearances in his nightmares, his brain morphing what should be a happier time into some kind of personal hell for him to deal with come morning.

Tonight it had been that kind of a dream, half rooted in his life before he was made into a killing machine for HYDRA. It didn't help that he was half-sure he recognized the person he had been sent to kill in his nightmare. There had been a moment when he had been so sure that he knew the person who he was choking the life out of but he just squeezed tighter, waking up a moment before the life faded from the person's eyes.

Now that he was awake, Bucky couldn't say what the victim had looked like nor did he seem sure why he recognized them. It could have been anyone from his life before whose face had bled into the hellscape that was his time with HYDRA. The more he tried to make sense of it, the less any of it made any sense at all.

For some reason this nightmare had done more to rattle him than any he had had in awhile. Most faded from his thoughts by the time his feet hit the floor. This one was lingering in its own way. If he tried hard enough, Bucky thought he might even be able to remember the face of his nightmare victim.

Something told him that it wasn't a road that he would want to travel down though.

He shuffled to the kitchen, knowing that sleep wasn't going to be an option, and he started a pot of coffee. He yawned as he added the water to the machine. Physically Bucky was awake or as awake as a person could be after only a few hours of sleep. Mentally he was exhausted.

That was a feeling he was growing accustomed to since it seemed to be one of the few things that he felt with any consistency these days.

He began to tidy up - if only to keep his hands and his mind busy - as the aroma of freshly brewing coffee filled his tiny apartment. He picked a notebook given to him by Steve and stared at it a moment. The pages inside were blank, waiting for Bucky to fill them. Steve told him to start jotting down his dreams and his memories but Bucky still didn't know what good that would do. There were some things that he just didn't think were worth holding on to where those things were concerned after all.

Bucky set it aside, shaking his head at himself. It couldn't hurt. Stop being so stubborn.

He knew that every excuse he had to not do this could easily be put aside. Bucky knew the notebook and the words inside of it would be just for him. He had done it before when he was first trying to come to grips with his new reality. He kept those notebooks in a box in the closet, only bringing them out on very rare occasions. He debated pulling them out but Bucky didn't know if he wanted to relive any of that right now. Tonight had been so odd that he wasn't sure a trip down memory lane would be a good idea. Still even as he moved back to the kitchen, his mind wandered to the notebooks.

He filled a mug and sat at the table, glancing down to see the empty notebook sitting there like it was waiting for him. Bucky would have laughed if he had been in a better mind set. He took a tentative sip from the plain white mug. He burned the tip of his tongue on the hot liquid but hardly seemed to notice.

Bucky reached for a pen and opened the notebook to the first page. The blank, clean sheet of paper felt somehow intimidating to the former soldier. He took a deep breath, pen in hand, and decided to go for it. It couldn't hurt to get what was floating around in his head down onto the pages of the notebook after all.

As soon as he started writing, he was surprised by how easily the words came to him. The face that tonight's dream had been so oddly vivid which might have helped. He was surprised when he looked back at everything he had been able to write down. It had been jotted down so hastily that he didn't remember writing most of it but as he reread it now, it felt like someone had ripped his heart out of his chest.

"Rebecca," he softly said.

The name fell out of his mouth before he realized he had spoken it aloud. He hadn't thought of any of his siblings in so long but he remembered with complete certainty that Rebecca had been his favorite. Just two years younger than him, she had idolized Bucky and she had been so broken-hearted when he told her that he was joining the Army. She had taken it harder than their mother, crying the day he had to deploy. It had broken his heart to see her that way and Bucky's eyes teared up even thinking of it now.

It had been her face that he had been looking at in his nightmare. It had been Rebecca's slender throat that his hand had been wrapped around. It had been her life that he had ended with such coldness. He hadn't thought twice about the pleading look his sister had given him as he tightened his grip more and more until she took her last breath.

His chest felt tight and his breathing became sharper. It hadn't been true but that didn't make it hurt any less. Bucky closed his eyes as he pushed the nightmare from his vision. He tried to pluck out the gentler memories of his sister, working his way back from the last moment he recalled seeing her. He flitted from memory to memory, his pulse slowing as he did so.

The last image Bucky focused on was of Rebecca at sixteen. He had been bouncing around in the mess that was his brain before but this memory came to him clearly. It was a true and happy memory that he didn't mind lingering on as he tried to settle his racing thoughts. Rebecca had been all done up for her first date. Bucky had done his damnedest to intimidate the boy taking her out and he could recall her voice in perfect clarity telling him to lay off the guy, something that had made both Steeve and Bucky laugh at the time.

With Steve as such a fixture in the Barnes household, it was a wonder to Bucky that Rebecca and Steve had never gone on a single date. Of course he guessed that the two had only seen each other as siblings. Still Bucky knew that the two of them together would have made sense in another lifetime. It wasn't like he could ask either of them now. He wasn't even sure where to find his sister and that was only if she was still alive.

Bucky closed the notebook, sliding it away. He worried that the words on the page might trigger another panic attack if he kept staring at them. He reached for his coffee, his hand steadier than Bucky had thought it might be given the way he felt. The mug was still warm to the touch and the coffee inside of it was of a drinkable temperature now. He took a long drink as he tried to decide what to do with his day, settling on fixing the bathroom sink and maybe trying to find out what happened to his sister.