The scent of the bleach burns in his nose and sends spikes of red-hot irritation back and forth between his temples.
Washing the chemicals out takes longer than is ideal. The public bathroom of a gas station isn't a smart place to linger, unsecured and cramped. Dangerous.
He tugs on the damp strands of his hair after drying it with his (stolen) shirt. He had done an adequate job. With a hat, he might even look like a natural blond.
It's enough to keep his cover.
–––
At first, he isn't sure how to(: exist without violence, make choices, be a person) do almost anything.
Sure, he can shoot a target from three hundred yards out and kill a man with nothing but a paper clip and a pack of gum, but laundry? Cooking? Personal hygiene? Not so much.
He learns, gradually. Everything is trial and error, but he makes progress, builds life skills.
The apartment he manages to rent out (under a false name) is small but cozy. He has a tiny bathroom, a kitchenette, and a living room that doubles as a bedroom. It's small, but he makes it his own.
There are newspapers on the windows. It helps insulate him, keeps the world out and him in. He likes the way the sunlight filters through them in the evening.
Hydra had never allowed him possessions (how could an object possess something?) which makes it all the sweeter to fill his apartment with Things. Small, useful things, but things nonetheless. Non-essentials, comfort items, utensils. It's a tiny victory, each time he brings home a new spatula or blanket.
His job (under the counter) is nice. He works nights at a club that is definitely a front for organized crime, but the pay is decent. He can't complain.
(He siphons from Hydra accounts and can't bring himself to feel bad about it. He considers that his delayed pay.)
He goes to the market every Saturday to buy fruit. The lady he buys plums from always sneaks him an extra one, citing him as her favourite customer. Every other week he buys non-perishables from the corner store. The cashiers all know him by sight.
His life is almost peaceful. Almost quaint. But, hell, nothing is ever simple when it comes to his life, is it?
Memories come slowly. In dreams and, more often, nightmares. He keeps a journal, filled cover to cover with the disorientated ramblings of a man half-mad with confusion and guilt. Newspaper and magazine clippings are crudely pasted in, the edges poking out between the pages.
It's not quite simple, it's not quite peaceful. But it is quiet.
He comes to think of the never-ending quiet as home.
–––
As the memories come, usually in dreams, journal after journal is filled with them. The first few journals are filled with meaningless acts of violence and the pains that were taken to get him to commit said acts.
Those memories are recorded in a shaky scrawl, the pages warped by tears and sweat and mucus.
He tells himself that he'll eventually run out of bad things to remember.
It hasn't happened yet.
But eventually, he begins remembering good things as well. Like tonight...
"God, you're beautiful."
A smile, lazy and joyous. A light blush covering delicate cheekbones. Blue eyes, holding the essence of the ocean within their depths, glitter in the late afternoon sunlight that streams through the blinds.
How lucky the sunlight, to be able to cling to this person as long as it desired. The sun was lucky enough to kiss each strand of golden hair and every inch of ivory skin. He is envious to his very core. He ached to be able to touch so openly, to be able to hold.
"M'nothin' compared to you," the person mumbled sleepily.
"Don't be ridiculous, doll," he said, tipping the person's chin up for a kiss. "You're breathtaking. God, if you could see yourself the way I see ya, Stevie, you'd never be able to call yourself lackin' ever again."
Steve smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners. His hand wandered idly down his stomach. "Guess you're gonna hav'ta show me, then."
His laptop is perched atop his knee, his latest journal rests next to his thigh. He clicks the first image that pops up, makes it as big as he can.
[Steve Rogers at Camp Lehigh, Aug 1943]
He stares at the image, at the man from his memory. At Steve Rogers. It feels like everything about him begins and ends with Steve Rogers, like they are two sides of the same coin, no more separable than a heart from a living body.
Steve Rogers was the connector piece, the thing that strung James "Bucky" Barnes, the Asset, and whatever he is now together. Steve Rogers was his only tie to the past and his only path towards the future.
It scared him, terrified him, that a single man could be so significant. But it also settled something deep inside, the thing that told him that this had always been the case. That, even if he doesn't remember, his story had always begun and ended at Steve Rogers.
The laptop closes with a soft snick.
He picks up his journal, pulls his pencil from his bun and flicks to a clean page. The page before detailed his remembered time in the Red Room. His hand glides over the cheap paper of the journal as he details his memory. Then, underneath it, he writes: Steve and I were lovers.
He chooses that word, lovers. It's a soft word, implying intimacy beyond physical. Affection and adoration.
It fits the memory well.
–––
He decides to call himself James.
He isn't Bucky, he isn't the Asset. But he can be James. Neither Bucky nor the Asset had claimed the name. It was his and his alone.
He likes to say it, over and again, just to himself. He never tells anyone his name. He doesn't have anyone to tell.
But saying the name out loud, in the sanctuary of his apartment, makes him feel like a person.
It's a very nice feeling.
–––
"You ready?" He asks, biting his lip and fiddling with his tie. This isn't something they do often, only seeking it out once every few weeks, but they have done it many times. No matter how many times they do it, he always gets nervous right before. But it's a giddy sort of nerve, one that energizes more than drains.
Steve has his jaw set, his fingers tugging at the frayed edges of his sweater. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm ready."
He claps Steve on the shoulder, pressing his thumb into the dip of his collar bone. He pulls away reluctantly and once again feels his envy of the sun rear its ugly head. Rather than voice this, he takes one last good look at Steve and smiles. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."
Steve scoffs and swats at him playfully. "As if you wouldn't do something."
The last thing he sees before the door swings shut is Steve ducking between a pair of trashcans.
The bar is hazy with cigarette smoke, the scent of beer and piss heavy in the air. It's crowded, as it ought to be on a Friday evening. He orders a water and sips from it as he surveys the bar. There were a couple candidates already standing out.
His moral compass isn't completely broken, although it is a little skewed. He's never felt guilt over bringing people to Steve. Steve knows where to go to find the unsavoury types, the murders, the rapists, the abusers, the sort of people Steve's kind were put on this earth to cull.
But he honestly doesn't care if they're bad people or not.
Their flesh sustains the carnivore, keeps him alive and relatively healthy.
That's all that matters to him.
The pencil shakes in his grip as he scratches line after line, pulling his dream into reality. His hasty scrawl is barely legible, a low-slung chicken scratch that makes his eyes hurt.
The dream is laid out on the page in words and sloppy sketches, a memory half-discovered and a story barely read. He hesitates to take his pencil off the page. It's missing something.
With little thought put to it, he scribbles the word carnivore.
James doesn't know what it means.
... He feels like he should.
–––
There's a scar on the back of his neck. He needs two mirrors to see it, but it's there. Just over an inch in diameter, the tissue is a light pink, faded with age. It's one of few scars he carries.
Almost all of his scars are from before Hydra.
A close call or two from the war, on his arms and torso.
A cat scratch on his wrist.
A long, jagged line on his leg from the corner of a crate.
A bite scar on the nape of his neck.
It's significant.
James doesn't know why.
–––
The news says a lot of things. Most of it is boring, every day shit– house fires, murders, politics. The mundane happenings of people in the city, the country, the world. He tunes it out.
A city being lifted into the sky isn't what James would call boring.
The news comes in waves, each detail crashing over him with enough force to knock him down, and just when he gets his footing again, another report is made, and he goes tumbling down.
Steve and the rest of his team are receiving medical care at an unknown facility. Avengers tower is pretty much toast. There are press conferences and PR statements and Twitter posts, and James reads and watches all of it.
He's exhausted, but he can't stop. Not... Not right now. He needs to know how this ends.
It's been almost a year since he arrived in Romania. Almost a year since he left Steve, broken and bleeding, on the bank of the Potomac.
It hadn't felt like that long.
But time was passing whether James was aware of it or not and that... That scares the hell out of him because he does know how this ends. How it always ends.
It terrifies him. Because if Steve is even half of what James remembers –a thousand times brighter and more intense than the sun, so vibrant and absolute that it hurts to look at him directly– then he would consume James. Steve had been his everything, his beginning and his end and the heavenly bodies that danced above his head. Bucky had worshiped Steve, and James knew, if given the opportunity, he would too.
That kind of devotion, the kind that Bucky and Steve had held for each other, doesn't fizzle out. James was not Bucky, but he had been once. What James felt for Steve was what Bucky and, to an extent, the Asset had felt for Steve.
And it's scary, that he can feel this deeply about a person he barely remembers. That he can love so strongly with so little to base it off of.
But he does. He loves Steve, and for that reason, James would give himself over to him a thousand times if that's what it takes to see that smile again.