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[b]March 19th, 2005[/b]
[b]11:47pm[/b]

Bucky Barnes opened his eyes for the first time in decades and recoiled as the blinding light made it almost unbearable to keep them open. After a few seconds the distress began to subside and his eyes darted around as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. He was in a hospital room of some sort though given there were no doctors, no charts, he could only presume it was an infirmary of some sort. Wherever it was the place was sterile and silent all for the sound of a man puffing on a cigar at the foot of Bucky’s bed. The man looked up at him and blew one last mouthful of smoke out before stubbing his cigar out on the side of Bucky’s bed. The man’s brown hair was peppered with grey and his chin was thick with stubble, across his face was an eye patch that Bucky presumed could only be covering some grievous wound, and it was clear from the way he carried himself he’d seen combat.

Bucky looked at him, his face awash with confusion. “What’s going on? Who are you?”

The man slid his stubbed out cigar into one of the many pouches along his blue and white uniform and reached out to shake Bucky’s hand.

“Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD.”

Bucky went to shake the man’s hand but felt a violent resistance against them. He looked down to find his left hand handcuffed to the bed and in place of his right arm was a shiny metal prosthesis. His tried his best to recall what had happened to his arm but found his memories lacking and instead moved to shake Fury's hand. The arm moved as naturally and fluidly as a normal one to Bucky's surprise.

“How long?” Barnes spluttered in a weak, gravelly voice that barely resembled the one he remembered having. He sounded and felt older than before. “How long have I been out?”

Fury shuffled uncomfortably in his seat at the question, taking a glance out of the window beside him, before looking back at Bucky. “It’s been sixty years.”

The words hit him like a sledgehammer and suddenly Barnes could feel the air escaping from his chest as the implications of all that lost time began to dawn on him. Bucky thought of all the people he’d ever known, all the girls he’d ever kissed, even the enemies he’d made. They were all gone. Time had taken from Bucky everything that made him who he was. Steve’s face flashed through Bucky’s mind as he wondered whether it was possible that he was still alive. That super soldier serum coursing through his veins had made Steve impossible strong and faster than any man Bucky had ever seen. There was no way Steve was gone with Erskine’s formula running through his veins.

“Steve,” Bucky as he stared towards Fury hopefully. “Where’s Steve? I want to speak with Steve.”

Again Fury shuffled uncomfortably and Bucky shook his head in anticipation of the worlds that were about to come tumbling out of Nick Fury’s mouth.

“Steven Rogers is dead.”

Another sledgehammer blow to the chest though this time Bucky slumped down in his bed in anguish. Steve Rogers was the closest thing Bucky had ever had to a brother and he was gone. They’d fought together against impossible odds and come out the other side more times than Bucky could count. Barnes knew Fury was telling the truth but there was no part of him that was willing to accept it. Steve was the greatest man Barnes knew, he was Captain America long before that serum touched him, and to live in a world without him made Bucky feel sick to his stomach.

“Zemo’s plane,” Fury started up again, sensing Bucky’s turmoil. “Rogers detonated it manually before it made its way over mainland Europe and saved millions of lives in doing so.”

The memories came back to Bucky in a flood. They had clung to the side of Heinrich Zemo’s drone as it rose through the skies and took them far out over icy waters. Try as they might there was no diffusing the thing and it became clear the only way they were going to take it out of the sky was by detonating it. Bucky had offered to do it but Steve wasn’t having a word of it and kicked him free from the plane. Barnes remembered tumbling through the air, the explosion bursting his eardrums, and the coldness of the water as he began to sink beneath the surface with only the faintest light from the explosion to guide him as he plunged deeper and deeper.

“He saved me,” Bucky muttered under his breath in a defeated voice. “He kicked me free from the plane.”

Fury stood up from his chair and walked towards Bucky slowly and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder with a sigh. “Then we can add your name to the long list of lives Steve Rogers saved that afternoon.”

Bucky shook his head as he tried to imagine what life would be like outside of these infirmary walls. The machine he was hooked up to looked like something out of a science fiction comic and something told him the rest of the world be equally as daunting. For as long as Bucky remembered he’d been a soldier and now he had lost an arm, the war was over, and the thought of living his life out a useless cripple that “died” sixty years ago was not one that appealed to him. He thought back to that day over the Atlantic and silently damned Steve for kicking him free instead of leaving Bucky there to die. Bucky, not Steve, should have died that day. 

Barnes looked round at Fury and shook his head, welling up ever so slightly. “You should have never woken me up.”

There was movement out of the corner of Bucky’s eye he spotted a young blonde woman looking through the window of his room at him. She was young, pretty too, but there was something familiar about the piercing blue eyes with which she stared at him. They were tinged with a hostility that Bucky did not understand but recognised in an instance. After a few moments of staring at him the young woman walked away and Bucky looked back at Fury whose eyes were locked on him intensely.

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“I can’t imagine what you’re feeling and I won’t pretend to,” Fury said as he pulled his cigar back out from the pouch he’d tucked it in a few minutes earlier. “But the world does not have time for you to sit around wallowing. Times are tough out there, Barnes, we’re fighting more wars on more fronts than ever before, we don’t know who our friends are and who our enemies are at the best of times, and things are getting worse by the second. You want to go back to sleep? You do that. But do it knowing there’s still work to be done in the real world.”

Instantly Bucky’s ears pricked up at the last sentence. “What are you saying?”

Fury placed the cigar between his lips and lit it as walked slowly over to a television that rested on the wall in front of Bucky’s bed.

“Take a look,” Fury said as he pressed a small button. A crimson logo appeared on a television above his head. “Steve Rogers may be gone but the world needs a Captain America now more than ever before.”