Work Text:
He makes it three nights in his new apartment before his mattress meets a gruesome end.
There’s a nightmare (the details are blurry, but they’re usually pretty predictable. Blood and screaming and the Chair, the feeling of everything slipping away again. Trying desperately to hold onto some idea of what’s happening, who he is, until eventually there’s not enough of him left to even try that).
There’s waking up (it’s dark, he doesn’t know where he is. For a split second he’s frozen, waiting for orders, for the words, for a target to walk into his crosshairs).
Then there’s the panic, as he remembers that he’s a person with a body, that he doesn’t have to let this happen again, and he goes for the knife under his pillow. He’s flailing in the dark, half-conscious, pathetic, and all he knows is that it won’t happen again, it can’t, he won’t let it. He’d rather die. He nicks his wrist with the knife as he blindly scrambles for it, and that only makes it worse.
Things go fuzzy for a moment, and Bucky carves the mattress to shreds. There’s no HYDRA, no Chair, just springs and foam and feathers from his pillow, which has become collateral damage in this whole thing.
The slight give of the mattress as he butchers it, the crunch of the coils under the knife are too similar to how it felt when he stabbed a target in the chest, felt their ribs give way. Bucky blinks, stops. His right hand is covered in blood, dripping down from the cut on his wrist.
He spends the rest of the night hunched over the toilet, vomiting, and the next morning the slaughtered mattress is out on the curb. He doesn’t buy a new one.