Lost And Found

There is a difference between being gone and being lost. Gone means somebody isn't coming back. Lost means somebody is still out there somewhere, waiting to be found.

For seventy years, the world thought Bucky Barnes was gone. He wasn't. He was lost. And this is the story of how it happened.

It was the winter of 1945. The war in Europe was almost over. Captain America and the Howling Commandos had been chasing down the last of HYDRA's hidden bases, one by one, freeing prisoners and dismantling Arnim Zola's network of weapons. They had a tip about a special cargo train — one carrying Zola himself across the snowy mountains of the Alps. Steve, Bucky, and the team decided to intercept it.

The plan was bold. They rappelled down from a high zip-line onto the moving train. Steve in front, his round shield strapped to his arm. Bucky and Gabe Jones behind him. Wind howling. Train clacking along a narrow bridge over a deep mountain gorge.

They fought their way down the cars, kicking open doors, exchanging fire with HYDRA agents. Then a heavy soldier with a wrist-cannon opened up the wall of the cargo car. Steve was knocked to the floor. Bucky grabbed Steve's shield and returned fire. The blast hit. The whole side panel of the train tore loose. The wind ripped Bucky off his feet.

For one impossible second, he was holding on by his fingers, dangling from the broken edge of the train. Steve scrambled along the outside, hand outstretched. Their fingertips touched. The metal groaned. The handhold gave way.

And Bucky fell.

Steve screamed his name into the wind. The train roared on. Bucky tumbled through hundreds of feet of empty mountain air and disappeared into the white below.

That is where the world's version of the story ends. Sergeant James Barnes, killed in action, 1945. His name was carved into a memorial. Steve Rogers wrote a quiet letter to Winifred Barnes back in Brooklyn. The Howling Commandos drank a glass of whiskey in his memory. The war ended a few months later. Steve crashed a plane into the Arctic Ocean. The 20th century rolled on.

But Bucky was not gone. He was lost.

Here is what really happened down at the bottom of the ravine.

The snow had been falling for days. It was deep — soft, deep, and merciful. Bucky hit it hard, but not as hard as bare rock would have been. The early Super Soldier Serum Arnim Zola had given him back in Azzano was still humming in his blood. It was not as strong as Steve's serum. It was not even meant to work. But it was enough. It kept his heart beating. It kept his brain alive. It would not, however, save his left arm, which had been crushed in the fall.

He was unconscious. Half-buried in snow. Bleeding into the white.

A HYDRA search team found him sixteen hours later.

They were dressed in heavy gray coats with red insignia. They moved through the gorge with dogs and lanterns. They were not surprised that he was alive. They had been told to look. Arnim Zola, riding in a sleigh some miles back, had not given up on his most interesting test subject.

They carried him out on a stretcher.

When Bucky opened his eyes for the first time, he was in a long, cold corridor underground. Pipes running across the ceiling. Lights flickering. Men speaking in a language he did not recognize. He tried to ask for Steve. His mouth would not make the sound. The world kept fading in and out like a wobbly radio signal.

The next time he woke, his left shoulder was wrapped in heavy bandages, and something underneath the bandages was very, very heavy. He looked down. He saw metal. He saw rivets. He saw a thing that was supposed to be his arm, and it was not his arm. He did not scream. He did not have the strength to scream. He just stared.

The doctors had built him a prosthetic out of dark gray Soviet steel, bolted directly to his shoulder. It was strong. It was crude. It worked. It hurt all the time.

This was not the worst thing they did.

HYDRA understood, by then, that Bucky's body could be put back together. His mind was the harder problem. He kept asking, in English, for Steve. He kept saying he was a Sergeant in the 107th. He kept trying to escape. So they decided to remove the part of him that remembered.

They built a special chair. It had restraints for his arms, and a curved metal piece that lowered over his head, and four humming electrical leads that touched his temples and his jaw. When the chair turned on, it made a low buzzing sound that you could feel in your teeth. The electrical pulses didn't hurt, exactly. They just pushed. They pushed his memories down. Down. Down. Into a deep, dark cellar of his own mind, where he could not reach them, and where they could not reach the world.

After the chair, he did not remember Steve.

After the chair, he did not remember Brooklyn.

After the chair, he did not remember his mother, Winifred, or his three little sisters, or the smell of his kitchen on a Sunday morning, or the day he had sat on the funeral home steps and said, "I'm with you to the end of the line."

He did not remember his own name.

HYDRA gave him a new name in Russian. They told him stories about who he was, none of which were true. They gave him a black mask. They gave him a black coat. And whenever any memory tried to come back, whenever he asked the wrong question, whenever he hesitated for too long during a mission — they sat him back down in the chair.

Bzzzzzt.

Gone again.

Far away, on a quiet street in Brooklyn, a telegram arrived at Winifred Barnes's door. She read it twice. She set it down on the kitchen table. She did not cry until much later. For the rest of her life, she would catch herself wondering, especially at night, whether the telegram had been a mistake. It was. It really was. Her son was not gone. He was lost.

That is the important word for this story. Lost.

Lost like a coat dropped behind a couch. Lost like a library book misshelved one row over. Lost like a single sock in a long row of laundry. Still here. Still real. Just waiting, very patiently, in a place where nobody knew to look.

For seventy winters, Bucky Barnes waited in the dark.

And someday, somebody was going to come down those stairs with a flashlight, and shine it into the corner, and say, "There you are. We've been looking for you everywhere. Come on home."