Three Years Since the Snap

Dear Bucky,

I'm sorry I haven't written in a while. I think part of me was afraid of becoming too dependent on talking to you this way, but something happened, and this is the only way I can begin to get my thoughts in order. You're the only person I want to talk to about this, you're the only person who could begin to understand, because you know me. You know every part of who I am and what I was, and you loved me regardless.

It turns out I didn't even fully know every part of who I am. I'm not sure I like what I've discovered.

I told you my mother walked out on Papa and I when I was six years old. I never knew anything more, and to be honest I don't think I ever wanted to know. He never talked about it, and I never asked him, but maybe I should have. No one is here to give me answers now.

I always assumed it was because Papa had joined HYDRA, or because he'd left the KGB. I'm not quite sure how the timelines fell, but it was around that time that she left. I don't even know if she told him why she was going. She didn't say goodbye, and until recently I wasn't even sure if I remembered what she looked like. We never had any photographs of her when I was growing up, I think Papa got rid of them. I didn't even remember her name until we looked it up. Mariya Ivanov. Or, I suppose she must have changed the surname after she left. Maybe she didn't, but it didn't matter to us. Our world became just Papa and I, and I think he hoped I was young enough to forget that it hadn't always been that way. I think part of me did forget, because the other option was realising that we had both been abandoned. I was a lot older before I realised that other people's mothers don't walk out on them.

As far as I was concerned, she had died that day. She didn't exist anymore, and it was easier to keep going believing that.

It seems like she kept existing though. Natasha has helped me piece together the full story, or as full a story as we can cobble together, so maybe if I write it down here it'll start making sense.

My mother was young when she had me, twenty, it turns out. Papa was a few years older, but I figure that was normal for the time. I mean, look at our age gap, Buck, I can't be one to talk. Anyway, I guess her age is important, because it helps what comes next make sense.

She went to America, it seems. How she managed that in 1968 I guess I'll never know, but she went. And at some stage she met Wilfred Nagel Sr. I don't know if she ever divorced my father, but I suppose things like that were harder to check up on. I'm guessing no one in the US Records office was searching for Soviet marriage records at the time. From what I can tell, he was a government scientist of some sort. Maybe there was some benefit to taking a Russian wife in the middle of the Cold War, maybe they really loved each other, I don't know. Either way, she married the man. She started a new life knowing she'd left her child behind.

I don't know why that hurts, Bucky. After all this time it shouldn't, but it does. I didn't think I had any more pain left to feel but this isn't like losing you. This is a deep, old hurt that I didn't even know I was carrying. It feels like a betrayal. I suppose it is. I thought I knew what that felt like, after being betrayed by HYDRA and being left on ice, but this is different. This is someone who shouldn't have walked away, but they did. It really fucking hurts, and I don't want to hurt anymore. I'm angry, and I've got nowhere to put that anger. Maybe that's why my pen is about to go through this page.

Anyway, by this stage she had forgotten Papa and I, I suppose, and in 1972 she had another kid. My half-brother, it would seem. Wilfred Nagel Jr.

I'm so glad that pattern started after I was born. I'd hate to know I was carrying her name.

I know I told you Nagel's name. If you were sitting beside me now you might have begun to put all of this together. It feels like some twisted cosmic joke, honestly.

It seems he inherited his father's mind for science. Maybe Mariya had a knack for it too, I don't know, but that's the path he took. She was at his graduation, Bucky, that's how I pieced all of this together, I found a graduation photo in an abandoned lab and there she was. Standing there in 1993 looking so damn proud of her kid when her first born was halfway across the world locked in cryostasis. Standing there with her living husband when her first was dead and buried in some unmarked grave on a Siberian mountain.

But the story has nothing to do with me at this stage, or maybe it does. The parallels are there, and I hate them. Nagel followed in his father's footsteps, working in government labs, and at some stage HYDRA recruited him to work on the super soldier serum. They never stopped trying to get it right again after us, Bucky. He must have seen my name in the records. Maybe he knew who I was, maybe he didn't. Perhaps if he'd known the link between us he would have tried to track me down. I don't know. I wish I knew less, now. I wish I hadn't pulled on this thread, Buck. It's put my head in a place that I don't like at all. Some angry, bitter and twisted place.

How is it that all roads led to HYDRA for Mariya's children? Did she have something to do with them? Is it just a sick coincidence? I don't know, Bucky. No one is able to give me answers. Nothing Natasha was able to find is telling me anything more than the facts I'm giving you.

From what I can tell, Nagel never managed it. Not whilst HYDRA was active anyway. After everything that went down in D.C and the official disbanding he went underground, but from what we've found he got picked up by the CIA, and not as a prisoner. Maybe they were working on the serum too, but we can't find anything on it. What we have found is that he was taken in the Snap, and as far as I can tell, it seems like the Winter Soldier Programme went with him.

Mariya was taken too. Her husband had died a few years back. I bet she grieved him. I bet she was there for her son when he lost his father.

Anyway, there's no one left to give me any more details.

So that's the story as far as I can piece it together. I don't know what this means for me, Bucky. I'm at a loss again, but what else is new? Taking down the last of the Programme was the only path I knew how to follow without you, and it's gone. I don't know what to do now.

I wish you were here. I need you. I need you to tell me that this doesn't mean anything for me. Not for who I am as a person. It doesn't mean that HYDRA is still in my blood, that they still have their claws in my life.

I need you to tell me that it wasn't fair, what she did to us.

I need you to tell me that it isn't my fault, that she left me.

Because I might just believe you, if you were the one telling me.

But you can't. You're gone too.

I miss you so much, Bucky.

[A/N: This could all have some dramatic repercussions in the future... X]