AN: Hello friends! This fic is pretty much finished bar some editing on the last couple of chapters so you should get a chapter more or less every day.

Some general content warnings (vaguely spoilery maybe): this fic contains descriptions of mild-medium(?) violence, recovery from surgery, and the aftermath of self-harm. It also contains blood and a small amount of vomit.

Specific warnings from the prologue: mild violence and a racial slur (slur is in Romanian)

I hope you enjoy!

here I am,
The only living boy in New York.
Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where,
And we don't know where.
Simon and Garfunkel, 'The Only Living Boy in New York'

NEW YORK

Steve feels like he's always chasing someone just out of reach. His feet carry him automatically along Brooklyn's familiar routes but instead of memories taking him to the malt shop or the laundrette he keeps ending up outside yoga studios and boutique mayonnaise stores. Every dark-haired man is a knife twisting in his chest. The ghost of Bucky haunts Brooklyn just as much as the ghost of what the borough used to be.

He spends increasing amounts of time in the Avengers Tower, reading history books and devising endless strategies and contingency plans. Every recounting of acts of violence claws at his chest: was that Bucky? Did they make him do this one too? He learns that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president he'd signed up for and one of his childhood heroes – 'Look Ma, he's sick like me, and he's President! That means I can be President some day too!' – had authorised the development of the nuclear bomb. He reads about the tens of thousands of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sees the pictures of children with cancer caused by radiation, and wonders what it was all damn well for.

…

BUCHAREST

Bucky dreams of a cliff, rows of people marching over its edge in orderly lines. Sometimes they're people he's killed and sometimes they're his fellow soldiers, faceless thousands of them marching into the trenches, falling into the mud. They pile up, a mountain of tangled limbs in olive drab, reeking of blood and rot and piss. Sometimes he's there, dressed as the Winter Soldier, wearing a necklace of gangrenous toes and barking orders to the soldiers as they go over the cliff. And sometimes he's them, marching blindly into the void over and over again.

He tries not to sleep.

Bucharest is full of evidence of attempts to change its nature. Bucky squats in the ruins of a half-built hunger circus, washing his face in the rainwater that runs off the dome. A group of street children frequent the building; they try to pinch his stuff the first day and quickly regret it, but not enough to leave him alone. They call him Serghei; their names are Alin, Oana and Madalena, and they are all under the age of twelve. Bucky buys them food and magazines and they go to internet cafes and collect information for him, news updates on HYDRA and the Avengers. They teach him Romanian beyond the swearing and military commands he already knows (although they teach him some new swears as well) and he teaches them how to use knives. He tells them about 'the old country' like it's the funniest damn joke in the world.

'You kids are damn lucky, y'know that? There were some older kids on my street who were missing whole limbs because they had to work in the factories and the machines ripped their arms off.' He performs a complicated mime of an arm getting shredded by gears. 'None of these fancy child labour laws you got nowadays.'

'Is that what happened to you?' Oana asks, pointing at his arm, and Bucky makes a fist involuntarily.

'Why didn't their parents work instead?' Madalena butts in. She's eleven, the oldest, but she still believes in parents.

'They did. Everyone had to work.'

'What did you do?' Oana is demanding and intrusive. She's the one who Bucky found with her hand in his stuff while the other two hung back on lookout.

'I had a paper run,' he replies confidently, then frowns. 'No… my- my friend did. My parents had money, but he… he was sick, but he wanted to help his ma, so he went down to the corner store all confident and asked for a job. He-' Bucky starts laughing at the memory. 'He borrowed one of my shirts so he'd look nice and he barged in there, could barely see over the counter, and practically ordered the guy to give him a job. Only got half a block on his first day before almost busting his heart, so-' Bucky is laughing so hard he's practically wheezing '-so every day he'd pick up the papers, cocky as you'd please, then he'd duck 'round the corner and I'd be there on my bike and I'd have to deliver the whole damn lot. He tried to make me take part of his pay but I'd sneak it to his ma behind his back. Man, he hated me for that.'

'Did he get better?' Madalena asks.

'Huh?'

'You said he was sick, did he get better?'

'He got so damn much better he made the papers,' Bucky says, then breaks into laughter again. The kids think he's strange and they tell him so.

He spends a couple of hours every day trying to recall memories. Mostly he focuses on Steve, patching together stories from their past that he recounts to the kids later (they're largely apathetic but he produces more turtă dulce for every story they pretend to listen to). Memories of Steve make his heart ache like he's dying but it's all worth it. Sometimes the… other memories come whether he wants them to or not and the kids won't see him for long stretches at a time. He tells them he's going away for work but they're pretty sure he's unemployed, or else he wouldn't be living in a half-built hunger circus with a bunch of homeless children. Sometimes he doesn't remember what he does or where he goes until he's back in the squat with blood dried in the joints of his metal arm and something grim turns up in the news.

Bucky finds a guy who can get him new identity papers. He ditches the fake passport he made at an abandoned HYDRA facility in North Bethesda and uses his new ID and a wad of cash to rent a shitty apartment. The kids stay in the abandoned hunger circus but they still keep their exchanges going, and on Children's Day they even manage to guilt him into letting them come over for a meal. They eat like wolves then the kids all take a bath together, the three of them rotating in and out of the tub, splashing each other and flooding the bathroom. Bucky has a heated exchange with the downstairs neighbour who complains about the water, who calls him a tiganu dracului and threatens to call the police, who gets a black eye and almost worse until Alin starts crying and the girls put themselves between the neighbour and Bucky. The kids don't come back, and neither does he.

He moves between abandoned communist-era apartment blocks, brain twitching with memories. Mostly he tries to enjoy the city. He visits the galleries and the markets and the Palace of the Parliament. He walks along the river and spends his nights in jazz clubs until he's finally exhausted enough that he has to go back to his squat and sleep. He dreams of the cliff, and of searching for Steve in the mass of people going over it. He misses the kids. He misses Steve like crazy. He loses three days and wakes up at three in the morning on the floor of an art museum, covered in blood. Two weeks later, Captain America finds him again.