Chapter Text
The day Bucky finds the black card is the day he slips the purple paper sleeve off his last strap of Hydra cash, fanning the stack of twenties out between his metal fingers. It’s enough to pay the rent on his glorified squat and keep him in food for two more months, but after that, he’s going to have to do something to get money, be it legal, illegal, or somewhere in between. He pulls five twenties off the top of the stack and then puts the rest back into the otherwise-empty safe that sits nestled under the corner of his bed.
It’s May 2nd, 2016, and Bucky has been living in New York City for almost two years.
After Insight Day had turned into a disaster and the Triskelion had fallen and the helicarriers had dropped in flaming pieces out of the sky and he had almost beat Captain America to death, he had wandered around DC for a while, living rough, sleeping in alleys and doorways. Two weeks of trying to survive, trying not to kill anyone, and trying to stay away from whatever remnants of Hydra might be out there looking for their lost Asset. He was a loose thread, now, just waiting to be raveled back onto the spool by the next person with a passing knowledge of the trigger words.
No habits, no patterns, the Soldier had said, that’s the way you keep them off your trail. But the exhibit at the Smithsonian was a spinning reel and there was a barbed hook sunk into the meat of his jaw, a line between them drawing him inescapably in. He couldn’t help himself; he had gone, in those two weeks, again and again and again, each time in a different disguise, different clothes and a different hat. Twice, he went in the middle of the night, slipping in through a basement window and knowing, somehow, how to move so that the cameras couldn’t see him. This was how the Soldier took care of him, even if he’d figured out early on that he and the Soldier were two separate creatures. That he wasn’t the Soldier, he was something else.
He went to the Smithsonian to look at the pictures of Captain America and the Howling Commandos and Bucky Barnes, but especially to look at the film clip of Captain America and Bucky Barnes—inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield—standing against a brick wall, easy smiles on both of their faces. We ARE friends, Bucky Barnes had said, the words clearly visible on his lips, and then they’d both laughed.
It fascinated him, this easy camaraderie, the blindingly obvious friendship and the subtler depth of feeling that could be teased out of the expressions on their faces. The clip was only five seconds long, playing over and over again in a loop, but he watched it hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in the two weeks that he haunted the museum like a particularly recalcitrant ghost.
At night, huddled against a brick wall under a women’s polyfill winter coat he’d lifted from the lost and found at the museum, he thought about the video clip, the contrast between the two friends and the memory that twined its insidious fingers around him, the memory that he had sunk his metal claws into and couldn’t let go of. He only had two weeks’ worth of memories, fourteen days’ worth, three hundred thirty-six hours’ worth, twenty thousand minutes’ worth; less if you discounted the time he spent asleep. Each memory was a flake of gold leaf which, melted all together in the crucible of his mind, might eventually be enough to mint the coin of a new self.
So as much as he hated it, he couldn’t bring himself to want to forget the memory of beating Captain America half to death on the shattered deck of the helicarrier, the crunch of the bone under his fist, the split in the soft, pink lip that dripped red blood, and the blue eye surrounded by a purpling bruise, almost swelled shut but still gazing at the Fist of Hydra and seeing someone else, instead.
You’re my mission.
Then finish it.
Two weeks after the Triskelion, he woke up early one morning before the sun had properly begun to rise and before the park he was sleeping in came awake in a glorious riot of birdsong, knowing, without knowing how he knew, that the time for thinking was over and that the time for doing was nigh. He couldn’t wait around any longer for them to come find him; he was going to find them first.
So began a month-long tour of destruction up and down the east coast of the United States, from DC to Atlanta to Charlotte to DC again, then up to Philadelphia, over to Pittsburgh, and finally, to New York, hitting dozens of out-of-the-way bases in between.
On his way out of DC, he stole a nondescript sedan from a parking garage, he stole a change of clothes from a thrift store, he stole a length of tubing from a hardware store and gas from the tank of another car in the parking lot. He stole whatever he needed, in fact, because he had no money, at least not until he took down the first base and cleaned out their safe, plus their weapons cache and their closet full of tactical gear, for good measure.
He wasn’t reckless about enacting his vengeance, exactly, but he no longer felt the compulsion, underscored by his programming, to keep his equipment in tip-top shape, either. Not only did he no longer have handlers to punish him for damaging equipment that belonged to Hydra, but he had to figure out for himself for the first time how to keep his equipment—body, his body, he had to remind himself constantly—in good condition. The first time he broke the fifth metacarpus of his right hand when a punch landed badly, he pushed the bone back into position until it no longer crunched and then went about his business for the next few days. He still knew how to cut the pain off so that it wouldn’t distract him from his mission, but eventually it occurred to him that if the bone set badly, he would have to rebreak it and then wait for it to heal properly before he could resume his tour of destruction.
He drove back into the city he’d just left, walked into the sketchiest looking club he could find, and slid a hundred-dollar bill across the wet bar top. The bartender pocketed the bill without even looking up, and when he asked for the name of a discreet doctor who accepted cash, a phone number jotted down on the back of a receipt was pushed back at him with no more fanfare than if he’d asked for a napkin.
He got his hand set properly, the serum did the rest, and in a few days, he was on the road again.
Food was a little more difficult. The equipment—the body—needed a constant supply of energy, which he already knew. Of course he knew—even when he was the Asset, he’d had to supply his body with all of that energy, himself, via his mouth. None of the technicians who did equipment maintenance were stupid enough to get that close to his teeth. But when it wasn’t handed to him ready-made in a tube, procuring the right things to provide energy in the right proportions to other macronutrients was a fucking nightmare. And when he started to regain his sense of taste, round about Atlanta? He almost wished for nutrient paste again. Almost.
He was constantly hungry, or at least what he thought he’d identified as hunger, a grinding, gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach like his body was a millstone reducing his guts to dust. At first, he ate everything he could lay his hands on from the gas stations where he stopped to fill up the tank of the stolen sedan. Sleeves of dry crackers and packages of doughy chocolate chip cookies and Snickers, so many Snickers they glued his teeth together. Salt and vinegar chips that peeled the skin off the inside of his mouth. Beef jerky, like eating his own boots. Sometimes he threw it all back up in the gutter, but sometimes it stayed down long enough to be converted into energy, which filled him with an unfamiliar sense of buoyant satiety as alarming as it was desirable.
Once and only once, sometime after Atlanta, he picked up something called a hot pickle in a pouch. It was, confusingly, not hot. It was room temperature at best, even cold, having been sitting since the world was new in a bin in a gas station that was air-conditioned half to death even at the end of April. It bobbled sickeningly inside its plastic pouch, swimming in a pool of its own juices like the pallid green ghost of a monstrous, disembodied penis.
He managed to spill half of the sour-smelling juice on himself when he squeezed the pouch too hard in alarm, and then when he took the first bite, he immediately realized his mistake. This was not supposed to be a hot pickle. This was a spicy pickle, and the inside of his mouth was on fire.
He was the Soldier, though, right? He could just turn off the pain.
He could not, however, turn off the smell of the pickle juice, so while he normally would have slept in his car in some out-of-the-way turnabout off the main roads, he was forced to check into a motel with some of his Hydra cash and the ID of—he had to look at the name as he was handing it over because he hadn’t thought to do that first; jesus, was he getting sloppy, or was it the pickle juice fumes?—Kevin Bunsen, unfortunate Hydra IT guy. There was a creaky washer and dryer on the premises that operated on a steady stream of quarters, and he washed his pickle-y clothes along with everything else he’d been living in for weeks. At least Hydra wouldn’t smell him coming, now. The element of surprise was important.
Eventually, he had raided enough bases and destroyed enough equipment that he could breathe a little easier and could walk down the street without feeling the imagined prickling of eyes on the back of his neck. He felt like he could take a break. Whatever remnants of Hydra still existed surely had to know who was behind the sacking of all their East Coast bases, and the legitimate authorities were sure to notice if he kept it up any longer. It was time for a sabbatical, to take a little time off and think about what he was going to do next.
So he squatted in New York for a while, first in Manhattan and then in Queens, before he found a tiny little apartment on the top floor of a skinny little house on McDonald Avenue in Gravesend, sandwiched between a body shop and a shady medical supplies distributor that never seemed to be open. In his methodical, Soldier way, he broke into it one night, just to make sure that it wasn’t a front for something that was going to draw the attention of people who didn’t need to be reminded of his existence. But it looked like a legitimate medical-supply business, with stacks of boxes of rubber gloves and surgical masks. Probably not entirely legitimate, he figured, but whatever side business they had going on was something petty, like the way Anton, the guy who owned the body shop, paid most of his employees under the table. Small-time crime, nobody gets hurt, nobody’s interested in looking behind the curtain, nobody wants to ask the neighbors any questions.
The F train ran on its elevated tracks right in front of his living-room windows, but he was only a block and a half from the nearest stop, and it was easy enough to get used to the click clack screech of the subway passing by. The apartment was little more than a closet with a smaller closet where he slept, but there was enough space in the main room for the sofa left by the last tenant, and in the bedroom, a double bed pushed up against the one drafty window left enough room for one bedside table and a broken-down garment rack that he used as a closet. There was a matchbox-sized bathroom and a grimy kitchenette that had a two-burner stove, an oven barely big enough to roast a chicken, and a minifridge. It was small, drafty, noisy, freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer, but for the first time he could ever remember, he had something that might someday deserve the name ‘home.’
He bought a pillow, something called memory foam that felt like laying his head to sleep in the lap of god. He bought a frying pan and a spatula and then a knife, a kitchen knife. The distinction made the Soldier sneer in the back of his mind, but Bucky found that cutting meat with his fighting knives tended to make him think of other flesh he’d cut with the same knives, and that compromised his still-new ability to keep solid food down long enough for digestion to happen.
He found a book on a park bench, something called The Big Book of Science Fiction, and read it from cover to cover, staying up one entire night and half of the next to finish it. Then he found a bookcase in a dumpster that wouldn’t fall over if he kept one side of it propped up with a wedge of wood. He bought a pot of mint and kept it on the windowsill beside his bed, where he could reach over and brush his fingers against it, flooding the tiny bedroom with the smell of sweet green living things.
A few more bits and pieces of furniture and other home goods, and eventually he had something that looked like a home and felt like a home (and quacked like a home, some little faraway voice had peeped, nonsensically, in a remote corner of his mind). Finally, he could stop living as if he were five minutes from fleeing the country. He could stop weighing every action against its probable equal and opposite reaction, and he began to learn how to care for himself.
He graduated from gas station fare to bodegas to proper groceries; he tried yogurt and carrots and raisins for the first time. Every morning, he got up when his body told him to and jumped the first hurdle of the day, that thing called ‘breakfast.’ At first, he ate Cheerios because he found them in the grocery store under a sign marked ‘Breakfast Cereal.’ But Cheerios were dry and bland, and even when he poured milk over them like the picture on the front of the box, something told him he could be doing better. After a little bit of research, he moved on to oatmeal or toast with butter. Then, gradually, he began to incorporate honey and peanut butter, and then some diced fresh fruit, and then the supermarket bread was replaced by brioche from the good bakery, and sometimes croissants, or eggs and bacon, or an omelet loaded with vegetables.
After breakfast, he took a shower and did whatever the equipment—the body; he slipped up, sometimes, even months into this new, piecemeal personhood—needed in order to feel clean and good and taken care of. He washed his hair, trimmed his fingernails, shaved the stubble that invariably darkened his jaw again before the sun went down, and dressed in clean, soft underwear, worn-in thrift-store jeans, and some kind of natural-fiber shirt.
It’s not that the body itself demanded these items, but he remembered the Soldier’s tactical clothing, the straps that bit, the seams that chafed, and the mask that left him breathing his own stale, recycled air, hour after hour and chapped his lips until they cracked and bled, the mortification of the flesh. After almost three months away from Hydra, after one month of destroying everything that came within reach of the long metal arm of the Soldier, it might have seemed that in the grand scheme of things, the urge to take care of the body and feed it things that tasted good and dress it in soft clothes was an insignificant rebellion, the damp fizzle of an out-of-date firework. But he knew better.
As his flake-of-gold-leaf memories came back, memories from before, from when he was James Buchanan Barnes and he lived in Brooklyn with Steven Grant Rogers, he found out that he’d always been the kind of person who liked soft, nice things, and good, rich food, and a clean, sweet-smelling body. Maybe it was insignificant, but it had all the power of a thunderclap, his self returning to fill a vacuum that, for seventy years, he had not even known was there.
The memories were a problem, though. They trickled back one by one, sometimes in bits and pieces, prompted by a smell or a sound, sometimes appearing out of the blue in their entirety, like a reel of film thrust roughly into his unwilling arms.
Maybe it was a normal thing that happened to real people, to remember the time when they were thirteen and their best friend was so sick that his ma called the priest in because she thought he was going to die, and they thought they were going to die, too, they were so afraid. And then, when they remember it for the first time in seventy years, to feel that fear again so sharp and so painful, like a fist to the gut, that they have to run to the toilet and vomit until their stomach is empty.
It probably wasn’t normal, though, and it wasn’t conducive to the insignificant rebellion of making his body feel good, so he did what any real person would probably do and took every golden memory of Steve Rogers as it surfaced and folded it into quarters, and then folded that into quarters, and then folded that into quarters one last time, until it was smaller than a one-penny postage stamp. And then he stacked it neatly with the other golden memories in an imaginary snuffbox, like the one he’d seen once in an antique store, ornate, tarnished copper with a Chinese dragon embossed on the front. And when the snuffbox was full, he shut the lid and sealed it with a drip of solder and then dropped it into the fathomless black lagoon that lived at the very bottom of his heart.