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CHAPTER ONE
Another Bad Dream

... ... ...

He stood at the edge of a body of water, shimmering, mirror-bright silver. Burning. Tar-black smoke choking the sky, thick in his throat – the hot-metal tang of blood slick upon his tongue.

"You know me."

The flood of terror made no sense to him, the fragile, shivering ember of hope beneath it even less. Images and sounds were bursting in the spaces behind his eyes; a bright chaos both unfamiliar and subliminally known that he couldn't begin to interpret.

He was running – a stitch in his side, a dull throb in his leg and good shoulder, staggering until his feet caught up with him. His tactical gear far heavier than it should have been. Water coursed in tiny rivers down his back beneath his clothes, through the hair plastered wet to his face and neck.

"We can put the couch cushions on the floor, like we used to when we were kids. It'll be fun."

Each breath stabbed through his ribs, causing him to gasp like a wounded thing. The crevasse in his mind yawning wide and black and terrible…

"Your name is James Buchanan Barnes. You're my friend."

"You're my mission," he snarled, and the voice was not his own for all that it came from his own mouth, dragging across his throat with the serration of a blade.

His fist descended, the meaty crack of knuckles to cheekbone nowhere near satisfying. Serving only to aggravate the sense of wrongness he was trying his damndest to block out right alongside the face hovering, bruised and serene, below him.

"Then finish it. 'Cause I'm with you 'til the end of the line."

Something inside him was cracking, rolling and shifting like the plates of the earth in a quake. Reality tilting on its axis.

And then…falling.

Always falling.

Into ice and pain and an emptiness without perceivable end.

"Bucky, NO!"

...

~BUCHAREST, ROMANIA – 2016~

Sometimes the nightmares were more familiar than the waking world. Nothing in them ever managed to frighten him more than that knowledge did.

He was fortunate this night, opening his eyes and experiencing only a white-hot flash of vertigo as the room around him came into focus. He knew where he was, and knew that he was – relatively – in control. As much as he was capable of being.

Releasing a breath that rattled in his lungs, he rolled onto his back, staring unseeing at the ceiling as the other remnants of the dream swirled, a soupy fog inside his skull. Fading quickly, but there.

Bright lights overhead: hot starbursts of color against the matte black of a summer sky. The smell of hot oil and sugar and cooking meat, starch, sweat, and good soap. A woman's face: beautiful, warm, if lined and careworn, wiping her hands on an apron as she scolded a young child scampering from her kitchen. A boy's hand on his shoulder, tugging at his sleeve. A mop of blond hair. The salt spray of ocean water and the creak of old wood underfoot – very specifically underfoot. A laugh that became a wheezing cough and morphed back to laughter with the grudging ease of the long accustomed. Fragments that didn't really align or mean much of anything. Just splinters. Pieces of a jigsaw puzzle it would have taken lifetimes to reassemble.

Bitterly, he considered just letting them fade away. Chances were he was fooling himself, wasting his time on a miracle he had neither earned nor deserved. Still, resigned, he reached for the notebook and flipped it to a random place.

The journal – as with the fifteen or so others packed carefully away, safe below the floorboards – was full of writing. Sometimes only seemingly random scattered words, or lists, sometimes solid paragraphs eating up page after page. Sometimes there were rough sketches, other times full pencil drawings, painstakingly detailed. Precious journals filled with what might have been memories, or simply the poisoned conjurations of a broken mind.

The entire two-page spread to which he'd turned had been filled with chaotic scrawl. Large and blocky, tight and nearly illegible, crammed into corners and in the margins he had at first left empty and clean until he found he couldn't stand the whiteness. The same three words over and over:

James Buchanan Barnes

Gradually, somewhere on the second page, the words transitioned. Repeating a new phrase:

Bucky Barnes

It was his name – or what he accepted must be his name, though it felt altogether foreign. Not ill-fitting, exactly, just odd. Strange anew, perhaps, like a pair of shoes that had been broken in for a different pair of feet and required adjusting-to in order to wear with any amount of comfort.

That had been a hard night, the one where he had filled these pages. He had felt as though his head was fracturing around his consciousness as it screeched at him to recall things he no longer had access to, temples throbbing and tears streaming down his face to drip from the end of his nose and chin onto the paper.

"Who the hell is Bucky?"

Who the hell indeed.

Flipping until he came to the next blank page, he put the worn of his pencil to it and began to write.

Though the dreams had become, for the most part, manageable, that hadn't been the case initially. Night after night he spent with images folding in on one another, scraps from many lifetimes – some of which he couldn't be sure had ever taken place. Patchwork scenes of childhood innocence twisting into ones of torture, slaughter, unspeakable pain. Terror layered upon terror. Things he had been made to forget, or made to know. Things he struggled to hold on to.

He would wake not knowing where he was, the spaces around him alien, unfamiliar. Trembling, unable to move, skin and muscle burning with the echoes of pain that might never have been, or else feeling as though he had been submerged in a bath of ice. Sometimes he would be surging to his feet as if to flee, or striking out against a danger that had only existed in his mind. A handful of times he woke somewhere he had no memory of being before: huddled beneath a fire escape, curled up inside an empty shipping container. Sometimes – more than sometimes – he woke only to vomit up what seemed to be the entire mangled remnants of his own soul, and only felt the worse for it after.

Those early days, before the upheaval began to settle into something tolerable, had been excruciating. More than once he had seriously considered putting a gun to his temple to purge the horrors trapped inside his skull. And in those awful, empty moments, one thing had stopped him.

The man on the bridge.

The man who had given him a name. Who, with nothing more than words, had split his mind open like the shell of a walnut.

He could make sense of enough to pinpoint that there were two memories intersecting in his brain. Two very different bridges. One comprised of a city highway, packed with the wreckage of cars, scored with gunfire and the stinging smoke from a grenade. One scaling the side of a mountain and arcing over a ravine, frosted with snow, striped with the beams of a track. Yet the same face was present at each: contorted with fear and helplessness and shock, each time with an undercurrent of emotion so raw and blatant that it defied any simple defining name. The same voice calling out to him. The same man.

Steve.

It had been well over a year since the last mission in DC, yet still he had only vague memories as to what had occurred after having fallen – or…dived? – into the river. How of much of that was due to delayed effects of the machine designed to scour him clean and blank, and how much due to the overload of stress at the time, he had no way to know. He simply remembered being cold and scared, blindingly confused. Overwhelmed by the constant and unwelcome trickle of information he could make no sense of.

He vaguely recalled having read the plaques, the framed news articles from decades past, studied the photographs and the displays inside the Smithsonian. Many of them depicting a man that shared his face, but that he did not remember. Steve was a friend, a close friend, to that man, and an enemy to a part of him that had never been truly him at all – or so he now supposed. Not that he knew what that meant or where it left him.

He had connected to the exhibit on some level, enough to understand that it was truly him in the pictures, not just some lookalike. He retained enough scattered bits to fill in tiny gaps that he should not have been able to recall otherwise: a street where a movie theater had once been, a father's name, the last three digits of a serial number too blurred to read on the dog tags recreated in photographs. But the connections never felt like his own.

He didn't feel like that man standing stoic beside a childhood friend or flashing a confident grin into the camera. He couldn't quantify, couldn't reconcile, that man with the one who had spent his scattered waking hours over the last seventy years all but bathing in death, or where they intersected. He couldn't reconcile the acceptance in the Captain's – Steve's – face as he lay passive under the flurry of blows that, given a few moments more, would crush his skull in. Thinking about the forgiveness, the love that had been there made him physically ill. His mind, seeking to protect itself, rejected it. Violently.

He wanted to welcome the remembering. He did. He wanted identity – needed it so desperately that he hurt every time something slipped from his grasp to fade back into the gray stretch of nothing. It was just…there was a madness in remembering, and he was not too proud to admit that it frightened him.

He supposed exposure to anything was frightening when one was accustomed to being without.

There was a part of him that missed the simplicity of before that last mission. Whatever he had been then, he hadn't been lost and afraid. Freedom so far had been a convoluted mess of confusion and discomfort and an overbearing sense of being run into the ground like prey – a certainty which might very well have been paranoia stemming from memory turned back on himself as much as anything real. His emotions darted constantly between numb apathy and heightened bursts of anger, sorrow, and things he didn't have names for. Yet however intrusive that longing for less complicated times grew, it was never powerful enough to make him actually want to return to it.

He was not so ruined that he didn't understand that that life had been no life at all. And he had more than a hint of suspicion that he had experienced thoughts of escape, even when deep under Hydra control and lacking in the desire, let alone ability, to act on them. Yet now that he had…he had no idea how he was supposed to construct a semblance of an existence out of the rubble left in the wake not only of Sergeant James B. Barnes, but the of the Winter Soldier.

The only thing he was at all certain of was that he would not go back – and that he would do whatever it took to stay free.

The open-air market might have been Bucky's favorite place.

While no, he didn't spend an excess of time there – lingering too long in one place with so many people was dangerous – the spot was full of life and color and a simple, undemanding rhythm that he thought might be called normalcy.

He barely recalled how he had gotten to Bucharest. The journey was a blur of stolen cars abandoned as quickly as they were acquired, stowing away on shipping freights, nights spent with one eye open and a finger on the trigger of a gun. If he could be sure of nothing else, it was that he possessed the skills and instinct to survive, that he had strategic training and fluency in enough languages to make him blend in smoothly enough to minimize detection – to go virtually unseen.

If he had to gauge, he surmised he had made his way along the eastern side of the States and north into Canada, then across to Alaska where he had found transport to Russia, finally making his way west into Europe. It was far easier than it should have been to find work under the table as a laborer. There had been plenty employers of dubious repute content to look the other way and pay in cash, no questions asked. When he'd lingered, it had been only for brief periods. Long enough to rest, work, gather supplies, and plan the next move.

He had entered Romania via the coast, feeling safe enough to spend a good few months working the docks in Constantza – work which had come so easily that he was reasonably certain he must have done similar at some point before. Moving inland, he'd found himself in the Capital and had been there ever since.

Though he couldn't have explained why, Bucky liked it there as he hadn't truly liked many of the places he'd stayed before. Maybe it was due to having slowed down, no longer convinced that he needed to be constantly moving in order to escape the imminent recapture that had ceased breathing down his neck. Or maybe it was because he wasn't floundering quite so hard within his own mind and skin that everything around him was reduced to either threat or resource.

Becoming too comfortable in any one place was dangerous – he had to be ready to leave at a second's notice, his training would not allow any less. Still, there was something in him that yearned for a sense of belonging in a place that was his, a sense of...home, or the nearest approximation he could imagine.

Coming back to the same place every night had been grounding in a way nothing else had been up to this point. As was proven by the way he had come back to it so swiftly even after waking disoriented. And one thing was evident: being able to stop running, to be still, allowed him to take the time to attempt piecing together the jumbled fragments in his head. To attempt to salvage what he could of the life that was now, unquestionably, his own.

His days were spent simply. Up early, a pass through the market and elsewhere for whatever he required for another day, and then work. Sometimes he slept at night. Sometimes the night crept too close and too heavy for comfort and he forwent it altogether. He did require sleep in general, but he could go for far longer without it than normal people, and while being tired wasn't ideal he had endured far, far worse.

Some days were a bit more difficult: the energy it took to simply move among people, to interact with them even on the most minimal level – pretending to be normal – leaving him drained and exhausted, yet uncertain as to whether he would be able to adequately rest and recharge.

Some days were awful. Unseen enemies lurked in every shadow, around every corner. Every person he passed was an operative dispatched to incapacitate and drag him back to HYDRA, an assassin sent to put him down. Loud or inexplicable sounds sent him diving for a defensible spot, weapon drawn, doing his best to control the shaking. There had been times, earlier on, when he had blacked out, losing himself completely, and while he was fairly sure he hadn't done anything...he couldn't be sure.

Fortunately, as time passed, the days passed more and more calmly.

He had fewer episodes now, even in the face of sounds or visuals that had triggered them before. The unsatisfactory sleep was a problem, as was the inadequate nutrition (in his defense, he hadn't had to feed himself in...he had no idea how long) – but more often than not he could get through most weeks without incident. Overall it was getting better. Or so he had to repeat in his head when he caught himself counting the hours until the next bad spell.

Though it took effort, he did his best to focus on the little positives. Like the safe house, which was an actual apartment – albeit a tiny one inside a building skirting the borders of condemnable. He liked books: spent hours in the evenings hunkered on his salvaged mattress all but devouring as many as he could get his hands on, usually rescued from dumpsters or abandoned outdoor tables and park benches, or swiped from the donation boxes behind one of the bookshops.

He knew from research that he had never been a scientist, but he had definitely had an affinity, or at least a strong attraction judging by his almost subconscious draw toward journals, novels, and even textbooks focused in that direction. He had spent an entire week absorbing everything he could find on the subject of space travel after learning it had become an actual reality twenty some years after his...indoctrination. He was still partly convinced a man walking on the moon was a product of his mangled mind, but it kept coming up, and so he was forced to concede that it either was true, or that his delusions were consistent.

Food was another thing he had come to enjoy, for all he was still trying to piece together how to get adequate amounts of it and in what forms. For the Asset, sustenance had been just that and mostly administered intravenously. Discovering taste and texture had proved fascinating, even when deciding he didn't like something. Every once in a while something he tried sparked a hint of vague familiarity, though he was rarely able to follow it to any sort of concrete memory.

He was leery of shops, knowing them to be riddled with cameras and possessed a preference for plastic charge cards rather than physical money. This was one reason why the market so appealed to him. The open space – crowded as it might have been with stalls and with people – the venders more than happy to take cash and blissfully unaware of how easily their attention slid from him. The way it was never too crowded, and never too empty. The interesting smells, the unhurried chatter and haggling and occasional titter of laughter. It didn't feel safe, exactly, he still wasn't entirely comfortable around people, but it felt…pleasant. Worth the risk. At least for the time it took him each day to procure necessities and be on his way.

Approaching a cheesemaker's stall, Bucky surveyed the wide selection of wares, somewhat intimidated in spite of himself.

"Can I help you?" the woman manning the stall asked with a smile, leaning toward him from her perch upon a tall wooden stool.

He ducked his chin slightly, hiding his eyes below the fraying brim of his hat while simultaneously trying emulate shyness or manners.

Pointing at random, he indicated a basket of hand-cut wedges wrapped in clear plastic. "Two—two of those, please?"

Romanian was not one of the dialects seemingly hardwired into his brain, yet he had found it possible to grasp enough of it to get along with after much listening, with generous thanks for its similarities to other Slavic and Germanic languages. The occasional slip or error had worried him at first, but most locals seemed to shrug it off as either a nuance of his personal speech, or else deemed him a tourist or immigrant and thought nothing more of it. It would not, he suspected, have been so easy a few decades or so ago.

Just another small thing to be grateful for.

The vendor wrapped his selection securely in brown paper before handing it to him, her eyes skimming over his gloves before fixing upon the money he proffered.

It was difficult not to shrink under even such a faint hint of scrutiny. A glance, no more. Simply taking in the oddity, and just as swiftly dismissing it. Still, the impulse to hide his hands away, to shove them deep into the pockets of his jacket was a powerful one. The gloves made him stand out. Much less than would a metal hand, certainly, but enough to make him nervous.

He had crafted his appearance well, Bucky reminded himself. People expected men like him to be a bit odd. It didn't matter so long as he was polite, kept his head down, did good work, and caused no fuss.

Gratefully it was well into fall now, and easier to blame weather than it had been a few months back.

"Here you are."

Taking his change with a mutter of thanks, he shifted backward and into the mill of people.

He stopped twice more: once at a produce vendor for some apples and carrots, and again at stall selling grains, nuts, and the like.

He wasn't getting enough protein. His body kept telling him so in the hints of strain in about his joints and in the frequency with which he was tiring after less and less time. He had seen a help wanted sign at in the window of a butcher shop down the road…maybe he could work in trade for meat or eggs for a few days. Maintaining his energy was just as important as was avoiding attention and having sound exit strategies.

While he never took the same route too often, his favorite way to exit the market was the one that took him past the café situated on a corner at the eastern edge. A cute little shop, tiny tables spilling out into the adjoining alleys and multicolored swaths of cloth slung overhead between buildings to form a cheerful canopy above. When dusk fell the lights strung among the colorful cloths were illuminated, casting a soft brilliance over the patrons that always struck him as nothing short of magical.

Morning sunlight filtered between the canopy now, falling in pale, perfect beams. The morning rush wouldn't build for at least another hour, and so most of the tables were empty, but a few people sat absorbed in a cup of tea or coffee, skimming through a morning paper or pursuing some other such morning ritual. A businessman in a suit, briefcase propped against the leg of his chair and file folder spread open in front of him. An older couple holding hands, talking quietly. A young woman gazing aimlessly out at the passersby, steaming cup cradled in her hands.

Something stirred: a faint coil of awareness unfurling somewhere within a corner of his mind.

She was lovely, with a fine, Slavic sort of beauty that was as haunting as it was striking. Delicate features, narrow nose and chin, blonde hair worn braided and pinned to the back of her head. Yet it wasn't this which caused his steps to slow heedless of his conscious will, or what drew his focus in to that single point and caused the rest of the world to fall away.

He had never seen her before – of that he was sure. At least, not here in the square, or even elsewhere in the city, small as it was. But…he knew her. He didn't know how, or from where, yet he would have sworn it on any holy book. He knew no other way to explain the hitch in his pulse, the faint flare of what could only be called familiarity.

The woman lifted her cup to her lips and he tore his eyes away, moving swiftly for the side-street that would take him out of the plaza, feeling distinctly unsettled.

Was it strange to describe a woman's face as eerie? Probably. Yet he had the oddest inkling, like that of something hovering just out of reach, as if something had brushed across the back of his neck and he'd turned to find nothing and no one there.

She must have resembled someone he had seen on a mission – perhaps even someone he had killed. It couldn't be any more than that, surely.

Shaking it off, he adjusted the fit of the backpack across his shoulder and cut across the district to the construction site at which he was temporarily employed.

Limited as he was to the kind of jobs he could get without either references or documentation, the work accessible to him was mostly hard labor – hauling, building, welding, and the like. More often than not the crews he worked with were comprised of ex-criminals who had done hard time or other men and women that had difficulty finding other work. He was allowed to keep his head down and generally left alone, which suited him. As did the labor, if he was honest. His head was so occupied just with the task of functioning that it was almost a relief from it to use his hands and body and simply do for eight to ten hours a day.

This job in particular was an especially decent one. The foreman knew a little Ukrainian, which allowed for easier communication, and paid well for good work. Bucky was able to request his shift be spent up in the higher levels where the scaffolding still needed to be assembled, leaning on the extra focus it required to maintain balance in order to drive off the uneasy itch under his skin.

By the time the shadows grew long and quitting time was called he had managed to even out and the incident was entirely forgotten – lost to weariness and hunger.

...

It was white.

An endless swath of it stretching around him.

A world of white broken only by the faded stripes of dark and barren trees. At least he thought that's what they were.

His vision was…blurred, swimming, bleeding to black before brightening anew and he attempted to refocus on the thickening trees. His chest ached. The pain in his left shoulder was a piercing, unending screech like that of a teakettle gone ignored. He couldn't feel his hand.

Had he been shot? He couldn't recall.

The sound of the snow crust as it broke beneath him was oddly loud, like the dull roar of the ocean in his ears. Except that the rhythm was wrong. Oceans didn't carry the clack of metal to metal, the hiss of steam. His head lolled, pulse pounding in his temples. Red streaked the whiteness, a jagged trail stark as paint vanishing into the dark.

Agony burst behind his eyelids.

He was being peeled apart, sharp things burrowing into his brain, his insides, gnawing holes in his bones. The pain...indescribable.

He thrashed.

He was strapped down, unable to move. Unable to do anything but scream as the unseen force twisted his organs inside out and stripped his skin away in shreds.

When he woke, it was with the certainty that he was still under – the dream having dragged him somewhere else, spinning yet another version of hell from the shattered fragments left of his mind. He lay there, eyes darting, chest heaving, his body a rigid knot of tension; all but humming with it as he tried to tamp down the overwhelming reflex to flee, or to fight.

The room was completely alien at first, strange and too dark and frightening. Threat-assessment instinct kicked sharply into gear as he surveyed the space from where he curled on his side, clutching so tightly to the knife in his hand that the groove just below the grip cut into his skin. Not that he felt it for the dull echo of pain in his shoulder, in his gut, and in his temples.

It took long, awful minutes to come down from the sudden surge of panic. For the world to realign around him, began to feel tangible and solid, and for the sensation of the sweat plastering the shirt to his skin to overwhelm the phantom pain. For him to recollect where and what he was.

Swallowing the bile pooling sour in his mouth, Bucky slid the knife back to its resting place underneath the worn old mattress and rolled onto his back.

Not for the first time he was grateful that he had elected to sleep with a blade rather than a gun. A knife afforded him more control when immersed in an otherwise uncontrollable state. It prevented him from shooting on reflex while potentially not entirely present. It didn't render him any less lethal – nothing could short of deepest unconsciousness, which he rarely reached without the aid of machinery. However much he might try to keep those in proximity to him safe, the reality was that he had only limited control. He could throw a knife with as deadly an accuracy as he could direct a bullet, even unseeing and with focus rattled, but it was marginally less dangerous. He was inclined to keep hold of such a weapon than let it go unless he had no other option. And since he could not as of yet tolerate being in such a vulnerable state without a weapon within quick reach, it was the safest choice.

Folding the top layer of the sleeping bag back, he felt the sweat streaking his torso and pooled in the hollow of his throat seep further into his clothing, kicking his feet free.

In the beginning, he'd slept in his shoes, unable to shed the compulsive need to be ready to bolt at a split second's notice. As the paranoia had eased – and with it the compulsion – he had grown comfortable simply keeping them close beside him for easy access. It was still beyond him to remove any of his clothes. Perhaps another week he might be able to forgo the shirt. Perhaps a month, the pants. Perhaps never. It would unquestionably have been more comfortable, less stifling, it might have helped him sleep more easily. But just now, he couldn't stand the vulnerability.

With a controlled exhale he sat up, the fine titanium plates of his left arm smoothly realigning as he dutifully reached for the notebook resting on the overturned crate he was using as a bedside table. If he couldn't sleep due to the dreams intent upon slicing his mind to ribbons, he could at least use them in effort to remember.

Memory was a funny thing.

At the root, it was nothing but a word: a concept in the abstract up until the very moment whereupon it ceased to be. Gone, memories became all that could have made him…well, him. Without them, he was nothing. Stripped of everything else, memory was all he'd had that was truly his. When even that had been taken from him, what did it leave behind but an empty husk? Scraped clean, hollow, and malleable. No longer a man but the shell of one.

As things began to filter back, he supposed he was no longer entirely empty. But that was meager consolation when he struggled to get through a single twenty-four hour cycle without an episode of panic, no matter how small, brief, or seemingly insignificant.

The ghosts taken root inside him, occasionally calm though they could be, were never subdued. Constantly, patiently, they waited for a moment when his focus slipped – when he became too relaxed – whereupon they crept in front the shadows at the recesses of his mind. Sinking into the crevices to spread, to consume as much of him as they could before he was able to fight them back, leaving him to come out of each battle bruised and bloodied, and nauseous, and convinced anew that he would never be free of them.

Perhaps that was simply what life was, albeit in extremes. How would he have known any different?

Pausing to look over what he'd written, his attention seized upon something he'd read before. Several lines, specific combinations of words.

Woods heavy with snow. Being dragged between barren trees. A streaking trail of blood.

The rhythmic clack-clack-clack-clack and distinctive blaring gush of steam which in combination could only have been a train moving along its track at high speed.

Pain so intense that it robbed him of even the voice to scream. The sensation of being bolted down and torn repeatedly open.

Though the phrasing had varied, as had perhaps the imagery itself, these were all things he'd written before and more than twice. Did these fragments of dreams come from memory? Were they snapshots of what had truly happened, or merely emulative of it – taking an event and warping it into a nightmare?

From picking up the first journal he'd liberated from a recycle bin he had written down everything, whether he thought something was true or not, whether he suspected it to be a figment or couldn't decide if it was real. He marked the things he wasn't sure about, wrote down questions and other thoughts the questions sparked, hoping that if he dedicated at least that his mind might do the work subconsciously and piece some things together on its own.

He wasn't sure how much – or even if – the technique was succeeding, but he was still determined to be somewhat proactive.

Light was starting to seep in through the seams in the newspapers plastered across the windows. An hour or so past sunrise, then, and time to get up.

Scrubbing his flesh hand over his face, he put down book and pencil. Then he rose, starting for the tiny bathroom nook with its missing door, and set about getting ready to start another day.

...

It was three days later that Bucky saw her again.

The market was busier, swollen with the extra bodies attracted the especially decent weather on a Saturday morning, and he had been on his way to his new weekend job at the butcher shop.

Though the position had technically been for Monday through Thursday, it had been part-time, and after some negotiating with the owner he had been allowed to come in on weekends instead so long as he worked hard and put in a few hours on Monday and Friday nights. Though a gruff and seemingly impatient sort of man, the owner had been unexpectedly gracious about the scheduling, and about the possibility of Bucky taking from the unsold products as part of his pay. Perhaps because he was that hard up for the help – the job being deemed unpleasant by many and that few stayed long for – or, less likely, something about Bucky inspired a measure of pity.

Bucky didn't much care which it was. He was just grateful for the extra income to add to his emergency stock and the potential of being better fed.

He had been turning from a produce stall, tucking away the bag of apples he'd just purchased and contemplating whether it might be safe to duck into a bookshop to study a cookbook for the proper ways to prepare meat without making himself ill…when there she was.

She stood at another stall just across the way buying a jar of what looked to be honey. Her profile was to him, so he could see the very slight upward tilt at the tip of her narrow nose, the graceful sweep of her brow. Her hair was loose, falling about her neck and shoulders in warm golden waves. She was beautiful and…sad, somehow, though he couldn't have explained what made him think it. And he swore the sadness in her face echoed a lostness inside himself. Enhanced it. Until all of a sudden his chest felt tight and hollow.

He was staring. He knew he was – stopped dead in the middle of a middling morning crowd – and it was going to draw attention. He needed to move, to do anything other than stare. Yet he found himself once again caught by the feeling of something knocking upon the back of his consciousness as if trying to make its way in from the cold.

The young woman turned, her chin lifting as her eyes rose from the jar cradled in her hand to slide across the gently rolling rhythm of the people around her.

When her gaze first touched on him, it was light and brief, and he thought she would simply move on as she had with everyone else – simply taking measure of her surroundings to locate a gap in the bodies into which to step. Preemptively he felt the some of the tension in his shoulders ease at this. Until the easy movement of her study stilled, her eyes rising ever so slightly to find his face.

Awareness crackled lightning sharp down his spine and he stiffened, his pulse spiking in his throat and a chill spreading across his skin as though ice water had chased the blood from his veins.

She was looking right at him: he couldn't have melted into the space around them if he'd utilized every trick and every ounce of skill he possessed. He should have corrected, then, covered the slip by diverting her attention; offered a quick smile and gone about his business, asked if the honey was good, made brief conversation and then move along as if he were just another person among the many she might happened to have come across that day. But she held him pinned like a beetle to a corkboard, still technically alive but too stunned to move.

And he didn't understand why.

Fear, certainly. That he recognized. But it was something else, too; something that made no sense – that he had no word for.

Her face shifted, her mouth softening with the slightest hint of what might have become a smile should she allow it to, and it was almost as if she were looking at an old, dear friend she hadn't seen in over an age. And then…

He saw it in her eyes, a sudden sharpening as they ever so slightly widened. The seedling smile giving way as her lips parted as if with the beginnings of dawning, disbelieving awe.

Or recognition.

A tight cluster of shoppers crossed between them, laughing and gesticulating animatedly, and swiftly – forcing his limbs to move – he enfolded himself within their ranks, utilizing them as a shield with which to extricate himself from the street and into the relative safety of the closest alley.

When he found her again amidst the bustle, it was to see her chatting with another of the vendors, expression as smooth and calmly occupied as though nothing at all had just occurred.

For a while longer he watched her from afar, waiting for his heartrate to settle and the odd tightness in his chest and temples to relax, half convinced that he had just experienced some kind of hallucination.

Had that just happened? It wouldn't have been the first time he'd projected the conjurations of his own mind onto his surroundings…but it had never felt like that. It had never felt so real.

If he performed beyond expectations at his new duties for the butcher, it was due to the agitation humming like latent energy stitched into his flesh and matter. It wasn't so easy to shake the sense that he had stumbled across something…important? Dangerous? He didn't know. And it bothered him that he didn't even know that much.

The tasks of the job were almost too perfectly suited to his skillset. If asked, he would have claimed to have worked in another such shop before, which was how he came to be such quick hand at cleaning and sharpening the blades and other tools, or so unperturbed about cleaning up the blood, broken tendon, and other waste. Depending on one's perspective, it wasn't even entirely a lie.

He had been able to tell by sound alone that one of the grinders had a loose part and had it fixed in under ten minutes, which had earned him a look of pleased appreciation.

Truth be told, Bucky had just been glad of something that required some real concentration to take his mind off the girl in the market. And what or might not have happened. But he was also glad that he might have inadvertently offered up a reason that he would be worth keeping on indefinitely.

The best part of the job – and one he hadn't expected – was the hot meal he would receive for every day he worked. In addition to selling meat and offal, the shop also sold prepared food using its own wares. Often a stew or sometimes a sandwich, as an alternative way to attract customers. When, halfway through his shift, Bucky was instructed to go and get himself a bowl of thick, hearty stew with lamb and barley and potatoes, he did so with surprise and gratitude so immense that he felt his eyes watering as he slowly ate it in bites as small as he could stand.

Come closing time, he was sent off with a small package of unsold ground lamb and the brusque expectation that he be there bright and early the next morning.

The lamb he prepared in an old cast iron pan with some pre-cooked rice, and though it was absent seasoning, the meat itself was flavorful and filled him completely for the first time in what might have been months.

The girl…well.

He had been unable to get the way she had looked at him out of his head. Not just the soft, almost wistful merging of pain and of tenderness, but the abrupt flash of shock that had seemed to say: you…

…I know you.

And the way, as time put distance between him and the encounter, the more certain he became that he had not, in fact, imagined it.

NOTES:

Welp. Thank you, brain, for throwing me down yet another fandom rabbit-hole and leaving me there.

So I love Bucky, and I LOATHE how dirty the MCU has done him until very recently, and even then...the sins cannot be undone.

(#notmySteveRogers)

Anyway. True to form, here I am, trying to appease and/or purge an inner demon that will not shut up until Bucky receives all the snacks, cuddles, and love he so deserves.

This story takes place during two separate, interspersed timelines, which will be labeled, and is cliché as all get-out (and I don't give a fuck). It also features a great deal of pseudo-science that is partly real and partly me cobbling together an amalgamation of retro-science and comic-science to likely dubious results, and completely inaccurate depictions of how PTSD and amnesia(?) recovery work. I'm going to do my best to be as respectful as I can and honor the severity of such things, but at the end of the day I'm just a silly fangirl writing a silly story to make herself feel better. As far as I can tell there shouldn't be anything too rough, but I'll amend my tags if I feel like this changes. Ultimately it's a romance (because of course it is), so there is that.

I have no idea how long this thing will be, or how quickly I'll be able to write it, and no idea when my stupid obsessive mental space will switch gears on me. It'll be an interesting ride, for sure.

Be well, and thank you for reading.