I've started living my life very strictly according to schedule. If you'd thought I was anal retentive as a soldier back in WW2, well, you'd be dead by now, probably. On the off hand that you aren't, you'd see that I've gotten more timetable-oriented and have developed some sort of odd fanaticism about living minute to minute all according to a prewritten plan. The telephones today are tremendously convenient for doing such a thing; the one that Natasha got me is something called an Apple iPhone: it's fascinating, the way you can touch the screen and the little icons and play games or send messages or read the news. It's also enormously useful for planning out my day, and I'm really quite grateful to her for purchasing it for me, but she just brushed it off and told me it came from SHIELD funds or something of the sort. I personally think she was bluffing, as she didn't quite meet my eye, but she just told me not to worry about where it came from.
I'm sure it had nothing to do with the police officers who came to my door a few hours later and held up their badges, all official-like, and started babbling something at me about GPS trackers and stolen merchandise. They were throwing so much technical jargon around that I ended up calling Nick Fury on my iPhone, and a few minutes later he just...dropped down out of the sky, all huge and terrifying and positively menacing, and called the police officers some very...explicit expletives that I can't say. They were quite derogatory, but the police officers looked quite cowed (perhaps it was Nick's threatening posture and the fact that he's also missing an eye and goes around wearing an eyepatch like a pirate) and backed away with apologies.
6 AM: Wake up. My iPhone sounds like a foghorn at 6 AM on the dot, just like the sound I used to wake up to as a child in Brooklyn, stumbling out of the house with Bucky dragging me behind him, rubbing frantically at my eyes as we reached the top of the hill a mile or so away from our houses, watching as the sun tipped over the outline of the bay and the lighthouses sounded their calls to guide the ships into safe harbor.
I've asked Natasha what's happened to Bucky, if there was any news about him from the 1940s; really, I've asked her if I can have another memory of him besides the last one, where he was falling, falling, falling, stretching and reaching out for my hand as if I could save him one last time, the fear and resignation spiking deep through his dark brown eyes as he realised that I couldn't catch him, that I was no superhero, that I was just an ordinary man who could afford to take a few more chances than most. She's hedged a bit, looked over to the side and scuffed her toes into my linoleum floor, and told me that she personally couldn't answer that. I wonder what she's hiding from me, but it's probably not such a good idea to press her. I've seen her at the SHIELD gym, bench-pressing barbells that probably weigh twice as much as she does.
6:10 AM: I go run a few laps around Central Park after brushing my teeth. It's certainly changed since the last time I've been here, but then again, I suppose most things do change after 70 or so years. That's just the way the world works.
7:00 AM: Obligatory bathroom trip, a shower, a shave, and brushing my teeth for the second time. They've apparently got toothpaste in all kinds of flavours these days. I'm partial to the cinnamon, myself. And don't get me started on the vast variety of shampoos and aftershaves and colognes they've got at the department stores. Natasha went out with me to buy my toiletries, and when I stood for a solid two minutes in the shampoo aisle trying to work up the courage to ask why hair hydration was so important (I wasn't under the impression that hair drank water, or that the biology of hair was similar to that of a plant...perhaps hair photosynthesized?), she elbowed me in the ribs and told me to just pick one that I liked the smell of. We ended up bringing home a green bottle shaped like a fish with a red cap that promises it's tear-free (at this, I imagined some poor person rubbing some other, lesser brand of shampoo into their hair and sobbing, but Natasha told me it meant nothing of the sort, and also mocked me for buying a children's shampoo. I see no problem with this).
7:30 AM: I make breakfast for myself, usually eggs and toast and coffee. The coffeemaker Nick set up in my kitchen is one of these newfangled devices where you stick a little cup of flavoring in the top and the coffee comes out the bottom. A really interesting, really complicated gadget. I cannot speak so highly of the toaster, however; it is fond of burning me and not actually toasting the bread, despite its hellish temperature. I remember Howard Stark once had some plans going for artificial intelligence, where he tried to mimic human intelligence and communication in inanimate machines. Perhaps his ideas have worked out, and the toaster is one such example.
9 AM: I head over to NYU with my sketchpad and pencils. I've enrolled in some art courses; I've always wanted to go to art school, but being in one of the worst wars in US history kind of throws a wrench into those plans. The teacher tells me that I'm an exceptional figure drawer, although I lack creativity and keep drawing the same features over and over, producing people with dark eyes and dark hair that curls over their forehead and a mouth that quirks up at the corner. Believe me, I've tried to draw people as they really appear, but I just happen to suddenly look down and there are the dark hair and eyes that I know so well. Dark eyes and dark hair can't be too uncommon in the population, surely, so perhaps I'll run into that person one day and just know that they're the one for me. You know what I'm saying? Maybe you don't, I've always been sappy like that.
12 AM: Lunch. I love lunch.
1 PM: I sit with Natasha for a few hours and she educates me about some of the newer things in the 21st century. Just the other day, she showed me how to operate the little black box embedded in the wall in my kitchen, which she called a microwave. She put a bowl of food inside, and I watched as it spun round and round in a circle, almost knocking her over when it beeped and announced that the food was ready. Lately, she hasn't been around much, so I've just been browsing the Internet and looking through online news articles. That's about the extent of my computer knowledge.
6 PM: Dinner. Dinner is also fantastic. Sometimes Nick eats with me and stabs his steak with a knife that looks lethal, and it's quite the sight, him just staring at me over the table with that eye of his and popping steak into his mouth with the edge of his knife while I attempt to make polite conversation. (It's actually downright awkward, but God forbid I let him hear me saying that.)
8 PM: I watch a television show or a movie, and attempt to catch up on pop culture. It still baffles me. How could people possibly care where that celebrity went to get their nails painted or who that singer got caught kissing backstage?
9 PM: Bedtime. I must say sleeping is an excellent activity, and I do highly recommend it, although I do have the oddest dreams. A little child saying something about The Whisper Man and Captain America, a middle school student complaining about one of his friends, a young man reading to me from a history textbook. His features are always the same, dark eyes, dark hair, slender hands, and perhaps this is why I can't draw any other kinds of features. It's a mystery to me, really.
Today was a day like any other. I got up, went for a run, ate breakfast, went to class, ate again, and waited patiently for Natasha to drop by my apartment. She'd apologised for being so busy the past few days, but she was definitely going to come today. I checked my phone, checked it again an instant later, as if she might have texted in the millisecond I looked away. 1:15 PM. And she hadn't said anything. Her message screen didn't even have the dots to tell me she was writing something, and I felt a bit miffed at being blown off so easily.
She burst in the door at 1:23 PM, her hair wild and ringing her face like a fiery halo. She didn't even acknowledge me before she reached for the television remote and flicked it on. I opened my mouth to say something, but she shushed me and changed the channel to the news, told me to just shut up and watch.
I don't usually watch the afternoon news, I prefer the evening ones, but the picture to the left of the announcer's face had me silent and gaping at the screen.
It's him. It's really him. It's the one, that boy I've been gabbing on about all this time, with the dark, confident eyes flecked with gold specks, a strand of chestnut brown hair curling over his forehead, his mouth quirking up one corner as he smirked at the camera. He feels so familiar, feels so much like at home, and I just stare at his picture, losing myself in his eyes even as the announcer says something about "Stark Industries," "recently found in the Middle east," "billionaire," "critical condition."
"The reason I bring this up," Natasha says, voice drowning out the announcer's and interrupting my reverie, "is that we'll probably be meeting him sometime soon. He's round at Nick's, or something. Or holed up in that penthouse apartment of his or wherever he lives, wouldn't surprise me if he had the Empire State Building as his personal residence, he's worth something like $200 billion or something obscene like that -"
I tune out Natasha and turn back to the screen, where he's still smiling at me, his gaze cool and confident, and for the first time in almost a year, I find myself thrown completely off schedule.