Author's Notes: After watching Captain America: Winter Soldier, I devoured the arc in the comics.

And what struck me more than all the rest was one tiny detail in Bucky's dossier: that one time, in 1973, when he didn't come back after his mission. That one time when he remembered enough to try to go home.

So here. Here are my feels, trying to sort themselves out in fic form. This will likely end up three or four chapters.

The Long Road Home – Chapter 1

The target's blood is a flaky brown crust on the fingers of the Soldier's metal hand, but along his ribs, beneath the stealth gear that encloses him like a second skin, his own blood is still wet.

It is sticky and warm, the heat like –

(– a blazing disc, hanging in the too-bright blue above a barely-remembered skyline.)

– the oppressive thrum of the boiler in the hotel basement, where he has spent the better part of two days awaiting the arrival of his target.

There is pain along with the wet; it comes in time with the rhythmic thud in his chest, and sometimes the world swims as he takes a step, becoming darker at the edges. The Soldier gives it little significance. He is certain that it will not interfere with his return to the designated extraction point.

He has cleared the hotel gates already, made an unmarked return to streets where blunt, blocky cars stand beneath a dark sky hidden by the glare of lights and the severe lines of a city at night.

He has turned the corner and is away, already past the highest likelihood that the air will be filled with whirring bullets, though of course the Soldier expects them anyway.

He always expects them, with a tense wariness that never leaves him.

As the Soldier nears the extraction point, the streets become more crowded. The strange, squat cars are more frequent here, and doors with flashing signs above them open, spilling laughing faces into the night. The Soldier examines these new arrivals for signs of threat – too-watchful eyes or the tell-tale flick of fingers toward a concealed weapon – but they are complacent, unaware.

A couple leans together, staggers into a wall, laughing at something the man has said. Their words are a warm drawl, thick with the wrong accent, faces flushed and eyes bright. "I can dig it," says the woman, and the Soldier does not know what she means.

Her hair is wide and loose, the pants she wears long and slender as a gun except for the flares at her ankles. The man puts one arm around her and pulls her in close –

(– to guide her into a spin, their feet light and quick on the dance floor, her skirt lifting as she twirls. And there in the crowd, hands moving in time with the music, together and apart and together again, is a smiling man that he thinks he knows.)

– right there in the street to kiss her.

The Soldier closes his eyes.

He presses the fingers of his flesh hand on top of them, so hard that dark spots flicker behind his eyelids. Someone on the crowded street pushes past him, making the pain in his ribs surge, and for an instant the Soldier is so disoriented that he does not react. He does not so much as reach for a weapon.

When he opens his eyes again, he finds that he is shaking.

The man and the woman are gone.

The Soldier walks more quickly, now, through streets filled with twangs of music that spill out from open doorways like blood seeping from a wound. The air teems with scents he does not know – a sharp, astringent smell, and once, as he passes by a building fronted by sheets of clear glass and filled with low tables, something that makes him swallow against the sudden flood of moisture in his mouth.

The Soldier ducks his head and presses onward.

He is precisely one block from his extraction point when he sees the blue box sitting on the corner, its front open to reveal sharp-edged black newsprint trapped inside.

"Former POWs Charge Torture By North Vietnam," the headline screams, and the photo beneath shows –

(– a cluster of men, haggard and thin, some barely on their feet. The tan jackets they wear are torn and caked with filth, the buttons open in the fronts. The man from the dance floor is there again, not in tan but blue, and he is surrounded by a rising call of voices.)

– hard-faced men in helmets and uniforms of a deep, rich green, set against a background of tree trunks and creeping tendrils.

Above the photograph, the paper proclaims itself the New York Times.

The date is March 12, 1973.

The nausea comes so suddenly that the Soldier almost doesn't have time to lean away from the sidewalk. He cannot remember ever experiencing this dry, heaving twist in his stomach, but his body must recall what to do, because he puts his hands on his knees to brace himself as his throat convulses, spraying bitter bile and the water he gulped down during the wait in the boiler room.

His eyes sting. His side, hot and damp, roars in protest.

After three slow breaths, he discovers that he has not stopped shaking.

"Hey, man," says a voice, a vague intrusion somewhere to his right. "Watch it."

The Soldier is aware that people are turning to give him space as they pass. He is aware that his mission required him to attract no attention. He is aware that he is failing in this.

He knows, too, that he is keeping his handlers waiting. They will be precisely where his briefing instructed him to expect them, ready to return him to the room where he awoke, to wires and water and ice.

His stomach squeezes itself again, and the Soldier makes a hoarse, sharp barking noise as he retches, but there is nothing left to come up.

He counts the beats in his chest until they slow again, but when he thinks of ice, his mind skitters sideways like a target attempting to evade elimination.

His extraction point is a block away. In five minutes, he can be there.

But when he begins to move at last, he finds that his footsteps lead him in the wrong direction.