This story is a collaboration between myself and the fantastic writer Ordis. She'll be taking over for the Bucky Chapters while I handle the Loki ones!
Disclaimer: Absolutely none of this is ours. Otherwise, it would be up on the movie screens with the rest of the fantastic Marvel Movies.
Summary:After Steve, he survives and wonders just who Bucky is supposed to be. Meanwhile, HYDRA struggles to find and return their most elite agent to the fold.
It's been a week since he went to the War Museum.
It is strange, he thinks. That he was Bucky. That he is Bucky.
His days pass without meaning. He eats. Sleeps. Moves. HYDRA will be looking for him, he knows. If he remembered more about them, he might know how to avoid them better. As it is, he moves, puts a hat on, and hopes it will be enough.
He sleeps on the streets, mostly.
The Winter Soldier would have broken into an apartment and slept there, if he had needed to. He doesn't. He thinks this is not something Bucky would have done, and Bucky is who he wants to be. He forgets, sometimes. Feels himself forgetting. If he's woken too quickly. If cats fight near him, or dogs bark too loudly in the night. He remembers before he kills them. Mostly. He steals a coat, to cover his arm. It's not really stealing. It's in the trash. He thinks that makes it okay.
He visits the library, when he can.
They look at him strangely, but most people do that.
He ignores them. He's good at that.
He searches for Steve Rogers, for the Howling Commandos, for Bucky Barnes. He searches for SHIELD. It's in the news everywhere, what has happened. SHIELD is HYDRA. SHIELD is who Captain America worked for. Steve Rogers is a hero.
Bucky, apparently, likes girls, and likes scrambled eggs without salt on them. He knows, because Steve Rogers says so on the video clips, eyes soft as he recalls events that he cannot remember. He's not sure he likes them. He can't remember trying either. But Bucky is who he wants to be, so when he finds ten dollars in the gutter, he walks to one of the places that sells food, and asks for them.
"Without salt," he adds firmly.
He doesn't like them. They're too rich.
He eats them anyway. Bucky would have, and he is Bucky.
He does not visit Steve.
He has seen the way people look at him, when he rummages through the trash cans for food. He's seen the way people edge away from him when the nightmares—or should that me be memories?—come at night and he wakes shaking, feverish, vomiting. He smells like rubbish. He looks worse. He won't inflict this on Steve Rogers. Bucky wouldn't have.
Inside, something small and secret tells him that this is a lie. The truth…
The truth, is that he cannot have Steve looking at him the same way.
_O_
He gets a job. It's partly because he asks, and partly because he pulls back a kid from the road before he gets hit by the car that ran the red light at the corner. The kid is bawling when he lets go. He eyes it doubtfully, before shrugging. It'll go. They always do. The woman with it is frowning and the man is giving him the same look most people do.
"What's your name?" the man says at last.
"Bucky, sir," he says.
He isn't sure what you're supposed to look like when you want people to like you. He tries to look like Steve.
"Well, here's for your trouble. God knows you look like you could use it," the man says, offering him some paper.
It's 100 dollars.
He refuses it, mostly because they should not have to pay him just because he saved their kid, but partly because lots of other people's kids died because of him. It's not fair if he gets something from this. It doesn't count, then, wiping the other out.
They leave him then. He goes back to the library.
Bucky likes blue, Steve says.
He'll have to get more of it.
When he returns late that night, there's a piece of paper in the cardboard box that is currently his home. It's from Susan, across the road, who thinks that he is a lot more heroic than he is and needs a new laborer to help lift things at her warehouse because the last five either quit due to the low pay or she fired them. If he's interested, she's offering him a room and a job.
It's not an option, refusing.
She's offering food and a place to sleep and he's sick of moving.
He's sick of eating garbage.
He tells her yes, and accepts meekly the conditions that he will have to shave and wash each day. There are better jobs, but there are worse ones. This one will do, at least until he works out better what Bucky should want to be.