July, 2014.

South of Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom.

I enjoyed dreaming. People disagreed over why we dreamed, but I was of the camp that we dreamed to sort information. My mind had a lot to sort through on a daily basis, so when I was rudely woken up I got a little angry.

"Gail," Bucky said urgently. He never bothered to whisper; there was no one else in the Aberdeen house. "Gail, I have a question."

I opened my eyes to see Bucky half kneeling on the edge of the bed, half standing on the floor. He had left the table lamp turned off, mercifully, but it only made the blue numbers of the alarm clock stand out more.

"It is 2:08 in the morning, Bucky," I informed him groggily. I didn't bother to lift my head off the pillow. "Primetime for questions."

"I remembered something," he told me. He had never broken his habit of staying up late to keep watch. I had begun going to bed earlier so I could wake up at three o'clock and Bucky could get some sleep before I left to go work. It was a convoluted system, but he was stubborn and we both survived on five hours of sleep.

"I assumed as much," I muttered. "Can I see?"

Bucky passed me my old notebook, and I held it low over my face. I couldn't see anything but dark shapes.

"Want me to turn on the lamp?" he asked. Before I could answer, he had pulled the cord on the lamp base and the room was lit up. Our blackout curtains made it seem a lot brighter, and I dropped the notebook over my face. I could practically feel Bucky smirking as I groaned. "You aren't a morning person, are you?"

"I'm not a 2:10 in the morning person, no," I said from under my notebook. I might as well have called it his. I rolled towards the wall and slowly lifted the notebook off my face. I really didn't want to. I groaned some more, and tried reading some of what he had written.

I'm sitting at a dinner table with my parents and three other kids, but all of their faces are blurry. My father has a beer bottle and my mother is trying to feed a baby. The kids are my siblings, but I don't remember them yet. I can't remember their names or their ages, only that I'm the oldest. Whenever I think about them, I hear different voices saying stuff like "That's the oldest Barnes kid" or "That's George Barnes' oldest boy"

I think there had to be at least one boy and one girl, but I don't know.

My name is James Buchanan Barnes. I was born in Indiana in 1917. My father was a soldier and his name was George. I was the oldest child out of four. My best friend was Steve Rogers (Captain America). People think I died in WW2 but I was taken prisoner and turned into a monster. I killed people for them, and they kept me frozen for most of seventy years. I'm in hiding with a woman named Gail. She was a government agent like Peggy Carter.

The last paragraph was familiar to me. Bucky ended nearly every entry with a list of what he had remembered. Once he began writing things down, a mental damn seemed to have broken. He spent a lot of his free time writing in his notebook, which was almost full now.

"What's your question?" I asked.

"Who are my siblings? What are their names?" he said in a rush. He took the notebook and began flipping through it, pointing at pages in no particular order. I sat up in bed to watch. "I keep seeing them. Sometimes I can picture them."

"Buck, I can't tell you that," I grumbled.

"I know you can," he argued.

"I can, but I won't. You know that can compromise what you remember next," I reminded him. He shut the notebook and glared at me. "Don't give me that look."

"Every time I ask for just a little bit of information, you tell me it could compromise what comes next," he told me gruffly.

"Because it's true," I said. "Memories are shit, Bucky. Being given enough information can create new memories or change the way you remember old ones. That's why it's so important for you to write everything down for yourself without my influence."

"I remember I was born in Indiana, but I don't know where. I know I was born in 1917, but I have no idea when. I have siblings, but I don't even know if they're brothers or sisters or both," he groaned. "This is really frustrating, Gail."

I took a deep breath and tried to smile for him.

"Are they coming in clearer now?" I asked.

"Mostly," he answered shortly. "Sometimes things get jumbled. But I can usually get it figured out."

"That's good," I told him. "You'll need another notebook soon."

"Yeah, probably," he agreed. He lifted himself off the bed and roughly turned off the lamp. It shook on the nightstand, but it settled into place again without falling over. "Go back to sleep. I'll see you in an hour."

My eyes couldn't adjust to the darkness quick enough to see him leave, but I heard him sit down at the dining table. The chair he preferred had taken to squeaking every time he sat down.

It wasn't the first time he had asked me to clarify something for him in the two weeks since he'd first started writing. He usually came to get my confirmation about a particular memory because he knew I wouldn't tell him anything he hadn't already written down. He also knew that no amount of begging, threatening, or bargaining would convince me to do otherwise.

~

"Aye, Barb. Have you seen my glasses?" Gerald asked. I flipped a page in the book I had nabbed from his office and started reading the next line.

"Top of your head," I answered without looking up. He laughed heartily, and I assumed I was right.

"Don't know how you do that, Ms. Boyd. Every time," he chuckled. Gerald was a happy, trusting man of about sixty. His little store sold everything a small town citizen wouldn't want to drive too far to fetch. Basic foodstuffs, toiletries, household goods. I had come to learn every name in the town, as well as their family trees, occupations, and extramarital love affairs. They knew me as the American woman with dual citizenship trying to travel the world who happened to live with a hermit and who knew exactly where everything was located in the store.

Small town life was surprisingly paradoxical. I waited with bated breath each morning for a woman named Mrs. Connoway to come in and tell me about her daughter living in London, but I hated when she pried into my personal life. With such a limited population, keeping tabs on people was easy, but people were so few and far between they would never notice a new, possibly malicious, face amongst their ranks.

"You been reading that page for a good ten minutes, girl. What's on your mind?" Gerald asked suddenly. He placed a cup of coffee in front of me, and I sat down the book.

"Little fight with Jaime last night," I told him. "Nothing too bad, though. We're doing fine."

"Good to hear. Still not sure what I think of a man who lets his lady do all the earning. Not right for an able bodied man to be sitting at home all day," he told me. "Although he seems to be good at tinkering with little machines."

"Trust me, he's bored out of his mind," I told Gerald. I took a sip of my coffee, trusting it was the perfect temperature. Gerald never brought me fresh coffee; he let it cool for a few minutes.

"Well, you know Arty is trying to find a good man to work the night shift on the loading bays at his place," Gerald pointed out, and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. There was a corkboard filled with community announcements against the wall behind him. I could easily see the flier he was alluding to. "Think that boy o' yours could handle that work?"

"One-handed probably," I mumbled. I slid off the bar stool I was using and unpinned the paper from the board. "I'm gonna take this for Jaime."

"It's been up for a week. If no one else has taken it, then no one wants it," Gerald reasoned. I folded the paper up and slipped it into one of my pockets.

"I need to grab a couple other things too, before I head back out to the house," I told him.

"Help yourself," he said. He went back into his office, muttering about losing the keys to his desk drawers. I told him they were in the cash drawer of the register and walked out into the sales floor. Everything was arranged in simple aisles no taller than shoulder height. I wandered up and down, cradling a couple things in my arms as I went.

There was a small collection of office supplies, mostly the sort of things children would need for school, and I knelt down to get a closer look at them.

"Oh this is perfect," I told myself, finding Bucky's next notebook in my hands. My comp book had been the typical black and white pattern, but this one had cartoon versions of the Avengers on the cover. Captain America was front and center with his shield. It was childish and a little funny, but Bucky needed to have his humor jumpstarted every now and then. I grabbed a box set of pens in a rainbow of colors and some arrow shaped Sticky-notes, and stowed them behind the counter.