As an FYI, this story is fully written and tops out at 7 chapters (assuming I don't split anything up more than I have) and about 26k words.
Chapter 2: In Pieces
He's himself but he's in pieces. The notebook he picks up at the gift shop helps: in it, he writes everything he thinks, everything he remembers, as soon as he can find a pen. All thoughts of handlers and chairs and missions get stuffed onto a page and then crammed into a corner of his mind opposite the one he'd just broken out of.
The scream is gone, because he's back, because he doesn't need to scream at himself anymore. He thinks. Hopes.
He's doing the right thing, right? By hiding, taking a minute? Or should he be turning himself in? The thought of more cells has him breaking out into a cold sweat. What about Steve? Is he okay? He just—he just left him there on the riverbank. Someone found him, right? Someone who wasn't HYDRA?
The notebook can't answer him and neither can the picture he'd bought at the museum's shop as a souvenir. A nobly-posing Captain America staring off into a brighter future. One day Bucky's gonna know just what he's looking at, but for now, eyes on the present, Barnes.
In between battering waves of recollection, he checks up on the real Steve. Discreetly as he can, and he relearns from the blitzed alleyways of his own brain that he can be pretty damn discreet when he wants to be, even in a place as coated in cameras as the capital. Steve's in the hospital, healing. Alive, thanks to Bucky pulling him from the river. Almost dead, thanks to Bucky trying to kill him.
Bucky leaves him to his healing; satisfied he's not gonna be the thing that does his best friend in, he's got recovery of his own to do. He's not showing up in front of Steve a complete wreck without even something to show as an apology for…everything, really. Can't exactly send a bouquet to his hospital room with a note saying, "Sorry for forgetting you exist and then trying to kill ya, pal, get well soon." No idea what can make up for that. No idea if he can even claim "best friend" anymore, no matter what any museum exhibit says. So he goes to ground, disappears in America's gaps, tries to find himself in the shadows.
Trawling through memories that alternate between warming him with scenes of his family and friends in Brooklyn and burning him with nightmares of the tables and the syringes and the chair also reminds him of what else happened on the helicarrier: trying to kill Steve's…friend? Ally? The guy's sticking around Steve's hospital room enough to fall asleep there so Bucky's leaning towards friend. Plus the rest: shooting Steve. And stabbing Steve. And punching Steve in his stupid face for stupidly dropping his stupid fucking shield.
"I'm not gonna fight you."
Yeah, maybe you should've, he bites back at Steve's memory-voice. Maybe then you wouldn't've almost died. What would I do if I killed you, huh? Ever think of that? If you go, that's the end of the line. Simple as.
Turns out the Midwest is an easy place to disappear in. He takes enough of a detour in Wisconsin to drive past Camp McCoy—or Fort McCoy, according to the trucker giving him a lift. Army Reserve, still used mostly for training.
"Pick your feet up, Barnes, this ain't your high school track team!"
The drill sergeant's name is dust in his memories but that voice still makes him sit a little straighter in his seat.
He finds an off-the-books job on a dairy farm when it turns out he can speak Spanish well enough that the owners, thinking his English isn't nearly as strong, don't bother asking more questions. Conditions aren't great, but the other guys working there are nice enough and they appreciate an extra hand that can do the work of three in a pinch. Tricky to keep his arm hidden, but not impossible.
When he's not on the farm he's in a tiny condo whose "For Rent" sign—long ago weathered by wind and rain—went away with the cash he liberated from a few more ATMs. His job doesn't pay enough to cover rent, but that's fine. He'll just move on when his pilfered safety net gets low. He'll keep enough to keep him alive until his next cash job; no more robbing ATMs or someone's bound to notice. Steve is bound to notice, because if the guy risked his life to pull Bucky outta hell once there's no doubt in Bucky's mind he's set on doing it again, whatever hell this counts as now.
Being…hunted by his once-best-friend is an odd feeling. Steve is so many different people in the scattered puzzle that is his brain. The punk from school who couldn't ever not mouth off to bullies regardless of the inevitability of getting his ass kicked. The headache with a heart of gold who didn't understand that going to war would kill him no matter his convictions. The savior who pulled him out of one hell and then stayed in another, so of course Bucky stayed too.
Until he couldn't hang on anymore and betrayed everything and everyone he ever cared about. Including Steve, in all his forms.
"You. Are. My. Mission!"
A couple months pass. His notebook starts to fill up; he nabs some sticky notes to use as tabs so he doesn't have to keep paging through the thing looking for specific entries. It's during one of these scrapbooking sessions—a designation he never fails to hear in Dugan's voice, because the man would definitely make fun of him for this—that he realizes the "property of" box on the inside cover is blank.
Sure, practically every entry in the thing says who he is, but there's a certain satisfaction in scrawling James Buchanan Barnes. His full legal name, just to make it official.
And then, somewhat less officially: if lost, return to Steven G. Rogers.
He waffles on an address until the dark corner grumbles, turns over, and slides out a mission briefing. He blinks and sees rooftops. A window. An apartment. A target, tracked through a wall based on where Steve is looking.
Sure, that address works. Too bad his now-shaking hand makes his chicken scratch completely illegible.
God, he can picture the look on Steve's face if he gets this notebook. Coming home from whatever he does during the day, hip-checking the door open because he's probably got something in his arms, closing the door with his heel. He'd set what he was carrying on the counter—mail and groceries, Bucky figures, because if his metabolism is anything like Bucky's then the man eats enough for ten—and take a second to stare at the counter and brood.
The brooding is a total guess, but it's what Bucky would do. Lot of things to brood about, lately.
Then Steve would start going through his mail, and he'd see the wrapped up notebook. He'd set aside the letters he was sorting through and pick it up, maybe squeeze and bend it a little to try to glean what it was while he read the shipping info. It's what he did at Christmas, Bucky's pretty sure. Always tapping and poking and turning before carefully peeling away the paper to reveal the prize. Bucky'd always done some investigation of his own, tossed out a guess or two, and then gone to town when the thrill of expectation hit its apex. Not Steve. He was too careful for that.
So he'd poke and he'd prod and maybe he'd raise an eyebrow at whatever random return address ended up being there, if there was any at all, and finally he'd set to unwrapping the thing. Bucky brushes his fingers over the worn and creased cover to match the imaginary Steve. Unwraps the cord holding it shut, eases it open in deference to the wear and tear. Lets his eyes fall on the familiar writing on the first page:
"I woke up. Feels stupid to write it like that, but that's how it feels. I fell in '44, lived a nightmare for seven decades, and woke up on a museum bench. Got a lot to remember. More to make up for. But I'm alive. My name is James Buchanan Barnes, and I'm alive."
Imaginary Steve goes to pieces at that. Bucky just brushes a thumb over a fold in the paper and lets the fire of the determination that put these words on the page warm him anew. My name is James Buchanan Barnes. I'm alive. When the nightmares keep him from sleep, when he can't keep his food down, when he wonders if any of this is worth the pain, he tries to remember that feeling. It gets him through.
He says his own name in his head a lot. Reminds himself who he is, who he's trying to be again. Wakes up muttering Rank, sergeant, the rest of the litany poised on his tongue. He wonders if Steve's ever done something similar; woken up having to remind himself who he wants to be.
Probably not. Steve's the steadiest goddamn guy Bucky's ever known.
Steady or not, it takes imaginary Steve a long time to pull it together and keep going. Long enough for real Bucky to drift off to sleep in his blankets, notebook in hand, ever more memories playing out under flickering eyelids.
He remembers more than just Steve and HYDRA. The Commandos are the first to solidify in his mind as whole people beyond fragments. Friends and brothers in arms. There's no way to sum them up in a way that feels adequate on paper, but he tries to get the biggest pieces.
Timothy "Dum Dum" Dugan: brawler, possessor of the most ridiculous mustache on the front lines, never afraid to start a fight with Bucky over something stupid, and entirely too protective of his bowler hat.
Gabriel "Gabe" Jones: enthusiastic machine gunner and driest wit on the team, a polyglot whose mastery of French let him share all kinds of jokes with—
Jacques Dernier: French Resistance explosives extraordinaire. Always critical of British culture in their brief reprieves in London, yet despite the language gap he'd always seemed the most able to read Bucky when Azzano haunted his thoughts, even if he never shared whatever he saw, not even to Gabe.
Then there was Jim Morita: radioman, calm under pressure, and pragmatist to a fault. Jaded by the treatment of his family back home, he nevertheless knew exactly how to take Dugan out at the knees when the guy got ahead of himself at the bar.
And finally, James Montgomery Falsworth: British Army Major and the kind of lunatic who enjoyed parachuting out of planes. Ever composed when on the ground—outside the bar, at least—he was the backbone of the team when Bucky and Steve weren't around. Or were arguing.
From his memories, when the Commandos were first formed, they did a lot of arguing.
After the Commandos come more snippets of his family. He looks up his parents, his siblings. All dead—his youngest sister just a few months ago. He was HYDRA's weapon for almost her whole life. The discovery leaves him empty for a while. There's only so much grief a single guy can bear.
Their kids, at least, survive them. There are Barneses all over the globe, now. His heart twists when he finds his middle sister's twin boys named Bucky and Steve. She'd once had a crush on the guy, one that grew into a simple fondness as they got older. Apparently she'd never let him leave her heart completely.
Remembering them is the hardest. The Commandos hurt, sure; but it had been war. Any one of them coulda died at any point. His family, though? His siblings? He was supposed to die before them. He was the one who enlisted. And how he's here and they're six feet under. They died believing he was dead, that he went to war and never came back. In a way, they were right.
He never even got to ask his mom for her cherry pie recipe. Why did he want that? Right, another sergeant in the 107th wanted to know it. His name was…was…gone. Bucky can almost picture him. Curly brown hair, missing front tooth, and a demeanor that made it clear he'd lost it in a fight. A bad liar who said the recipe was gonna be a gift for his girl.
The 107th is the slowest to escape the rubble in his mind. Names and faces disconnected from each other emerge one by one, or sometimes in a flood that's more pain than memory if his brain is feeling particularly vengeful.
He gets one of those attacks on the job and wakes up to see a rusty holding tank about to fall on one of his coworkers. He body-checks the thing, changing its course so it slams into the dirty concrete floor instead. The floor cracks and the whole building shakes from the booming impact. His coworker stares at liquid gushing out of the tank, then at Bucky.
The job was good while it lasted. Bucky leaves the next day.
He winds up somewhere in California. Wasn't Jim from around here somewhere? As good as "around here" gets in one of the biggest states in the country.
He wanders for a while, avoiding the big cities, hitchhiking as best he can. People these days aren't nearly so willing to pick up strangers. He gets by on a couple of eighteen wheelers who don't notice him jump onto the back while they're getting gas. The wind on the highway is refreshing, if nothing else. And he can appreciate the view; the sky's never been quite this vast before. He squeezes one eye shut and can feel the ghost of his sniper rifle settling against his shoulder. The scope narrows in on the center star of Orion's Belt.
"Bang," he whispers, closing both eyes and letting the world fall into darkness.