The residents of Brooklyn, the Soldier will discover, are strongly attached to the memory of James Buchanan Barnes.
After leaving the cemetery, he mulls over encountering three buses between Barnes's graveyard and Steve's, and decides it wise not to seek out anything else related to his past until nightfall at least. If their graves are serving as a place of education, then other locations relating to them may be utilized for the same function. And the Soldier's strength is in being a призрак; he cannot be one if he places himself in situations where he can be seen by potentially the same group of people multiple times in a day. For all he knows, someone who glimpses him could be HYDRA. Does HYDRA use children? He thinks they might if it were advantageous.
And HYDRA is only the first entry in a long list of those sure to be looking.
So he spends the rest of the day concealed in the vacant building where he'd stayed the day prior, waiting, flipping the remaining knife in his hands. He does not want to lose the muscle memory associated with his weapons, with his own body. With HYDRA, that was never a problem he can recall. The Soldier is not sure how long he spent resting between missions, but he thinks each time he woke, he did not sense a passage of time. There was never an opportunity to lose what he'd been taught, because he never stayed awake long enough for it to fade.
Now he can't sleep, can't practice with any guns or combatants, but he can flip the knife. So he does until the sun goes down.
Once the sky is dark and the noises of traffic and pedestrians outside are only intermittent, he vacates the location. There is no set destination when the Soldier moves tonight; there must be things Barnes experienced in Brooklyn that are not written about, and systematically traveling the streets until he finds something that triggers a memory seems to be a reasonable objective. The locations he knows of have barely sparked recollection, so why not explore the unknown?
His body has begun to function irregularly again.
His eyes are the main source of error. They keep sliding shut when he does not will them to, for periods longer than a blink. Sometimes his neck seems to stop supporting the weight of his skull and his head drops down when this happens as well. His vision will swim and his eyes will feel strangely warm. It may be related to the water leaking from them at the graveyard, but that has not happened again.
His hand has begun to shake, though not enough to interfere with his ability to hold a weapon. He feels warm again, flushed but not thirsty, dizzy if he stands or turns quickly. It's not quite a memory but he thinks this is how it felt to come out of the tank, only lacking the cold of cryo. The injections stopped the sensation then. He doesn't have those injections now. And his stomach is still paining him, accompanied by a pressure lower in his abdomen that he can't identify, perhaps in the intestines? None of it threatens his functioning, not yet, but neither had thirst at the beginning.
It is as if he's been given a needlessly complicated new gun and has been sent out with no instructions on how to use it. Or, more accurately, as if he stole such a gun and ran away. He bites his lips again; HYDRA wanted him to kill Steve and he will never do that, but that doesn't stop the overwhelming sense of wrongness that comes from disobeying his handlers.
The Soldier tries not to focus on the malfunctions, tries only to note any new irregularities before returning to the mission at hand. Brooklyn had not seemed large until he'd decided to examine every part of it on foot and while he covers a fair amount of ground before the sun is rising again, he feels he has achieved nothing beyond accelerating whatever is wrong with his eyes.
It is still mostly dark when vans travel through the streets and begin depositing newspapers in locked bins on the sidewalks. The Soldier takes cover in an alleyway, making sure the vehicle is gone before he returns to look. There is a large picture of the wreckage at the Potomac, a headline about the damage and another about an information leak from SHIELD online.
The metal hand shatters the plastic window and drags out one of the papers. He returns again to the vacant building to take in the information. HYDRA is exposed according to one of the articles on the front page, and keeping up to date on what he can of HYDRA, of Steve, is vital.
He reads. He finds he can read English more quickly than Russian, even with the way his eyes involuntarily shut. He learns that the female mission, Natalia Alianovna Romanov, released all of SHIELD and HYDRA's files onto the Internet while the Soldier was on the helicarrier with Steve. The paper says Steve is expected to make a full recovery. The article does not mention if the Soldier was a part of the leaked information. He needs to borrow another phone or find some other way to access the Internet and look at everything exposed.
And, he decides, once he is finished with the world news and finds the local section beneath it, he needs to leave Brooklyn.
The bus that reached the cemetery as he was leaving contacted the authorities in regards to the damaged headstone. He knows this because it has made the front page of the local news section, complete with photographs. There are quotations within the article, the teacher who called the police describing the damage as "devastating" and the authorities saying it shows a "shocking disrespect for a national hero." Children on the bus say they saw a man in a blue jacket and baseball cap walking out of the graveyard. Toward the end of the writing, after a brief history of James Buchanan Barnes's role in WWII and estimation of the damage costs, there is speculation on why the grave would be vandalized. One theory is that this is a protest of Captain America's recent actions in DC, or the act of someone whose criminal activities were exposed in the information leak, seeking petty retaliation by targeting something sentimental to Steven Rogers.
The people of this city are so convinced that James Buchanan Barnes is a hero, that even now, seventy years after his "death"—the Soldier has finally learned the current date from the newspaper—they are "devastated" by damage to his headstone. He feels sick. He also feels that he has drawn attention to himself unnecessarily, that he should be beaten for it, and that he should leave Brooklyn.
But leaving in the daylight—and it has become full daylight in the time he has been reading—when there is a description of him in the paper, would be a senseless risk. He will stay indoors, decide on his next destination—possibly back to DC, because he cannot imagine anyone would expect him to return or think to look for him there—and leave in the night. It is a logical plan that goes to pieces when he runs out of water.
The Soldier has worked out that water is essential to survival. Beyond that, he has no understanding of how it works or how often it is needed. He only knows that he was near death the last time he went without it and he does not want to reach that state again. He can retrieve water, return to concealment, continue to wait. If he zips the jacket and removes the hat, he believes his appearance will be altered enough that no one will connect him with the man mentioned in the newspaper.
His hair feels limp when he slips the hat into a pocket. It hangs down, almost heavy. It seems there is no part of him HYDRA was not maintaining, and it makes his head hurt to wonder what else he's missing.
Not far from his location is one of the buildings full of books, which he has learned is called a library. He knows that libraries are public buildings, and he believes they should have either a water fountain or the room with the stalls and the sinks. He is tense when he enters, prepared to neutralize every person within his line of sight if he must, but no one glances in his direction. When he finds the room with the sinks, there is another man there, with stained clothing and hair that hangs the way the Soldier's does. He is scrubbing at his face and then at his hair with the water from the faucet. After a moment's observation, the Soldier does the same before refilling the water bottle.
He is almost out the door of the building when he hears someone speaking.
"—News 12 was at the cemetery last night and now CNN and NBC are down there to—"
NBC. It stands for National Broadcasting Company. The Soldier has no idea if that is knowledge that was once relevant to a mission or a fact left over from Barnes's lifetime, but either way, the N stands for national. He has made national news.
He wonders if anyone else in the world has ever managed to fail so utterly at being an inconspicuous human in less than a week.
Traveling back to the vacant building at the fastest pace he can move without breaking into a run, the Soldier keeps one hand on his knife, ready to respond should anyone attack, approach, or look at him in a way that suggests either will follow. He is exhausted, and by the time he is indoors it is all he can manage to sit down before his eyes involuntarily shut again and he doesn't have the strength to make them open.
A/N: While fatigue, dizziness, shakiness, etc. are all symptoms of hunger, I also imagine that HYDRA would have kept the Winter Soldier on mood stabilizers and some form of sedation, so he's also in withdrawal for that, because I can't pick on this character enough, apparently.
I figure national news outlets (particularly the 24/7 ones like CNN) picking up "defacement of a war hero's grave" wasn't too out of the question, considering I once witnessed CNN run a story about a knot in a tree that resembled Michael Jackson's face (kind of sort of barely) right after Jackson's death, and also given everything that had just happened with Steve in DC, the stations would be likely to run anything Steve-related.
Libraries and other public buildings are often frequented by the homeless or mentally ill, so Winter with his arm concealed walking around like a robot trying to imitate a person wouldn't be an interesting sight, I don't think.
He's going to have actual human interaction in the next chapter, for anyone who's been missing that.
Translations for the Russian are as follows:
призрак = ghost