Chapter Text
The apartment in Berlin had peeling wallpaper and a broken radiator, and Bucky had stayed there for three weeks before moving on. The one in Budapest had been better, a fourth floor walkup with good sightlines and two exits. He'd lasted a month. Now he was in Vienna, in a place that smelled like old cigarettes and someone else's life, and he was trying to decide if he'd make it to spring here or if the itch to move would take him before then.
The notebook sat open on the small kitchen table. He'd written the date, January 14th, at the top, careful and deliberate because the date mattered. Tracking time mattered. It was proof he was a person, not a weapon. Weapons didn't keep calendars. Weapons didn't mark the passage of days or care about the difference between Tuesday and Wednesday or notice when a week had passed. But he did now; he noticed everything now, with an intensity that was sometimes overwhelming. The way morning light fell across the floorboards. The sound of his neighbor's television through the thin walls. The taste of coffee or bread, not just IV nutrients that had kept the asset functional. Coffee he chose to drink, in a mug he'd bought himself, sitting in an apartment he'd rented with money he'd earned doing odd jobs that didn't require questions or identification. These were small things. Human things. Things that he could point to as evidence every time he questioned his humanness.
Today's word: solivagant.
Bucky had found it three days ago in the battered English dictionary he'd picked up from a bookshop in Warsaw. He'd been mindlessly flipping through it when the definition had stopped him cold: wandering alone; a solitary adventurer. He'd read it five times, sounding out the syllables in his head, feeling the shape of it. Then he'd written it down to save for later, for a day when it felt right.
The practice had started in Moscow, two months after the helicarriers had fallen into the Potomac. Two months of running on instinct in pure survival mode, feeling barely human. Then one morning he'd woken up in a safe house and found himself staring at a Russian newspaper, and he'd realized he couldn't remember the last time he'd read something that wasn't a mission brief or a target dossier. So.. he'd read the newspaper. It was slow and laborious, his mind sluggish with disuse. But when he was done, he'd felt something shift inside him, some small reclamation of self. If he could read, if he could understand, if he could think about things that didn't involve killing or hiding or surviving the next five minutes, then maybe he was still a person underneath all the programming.
The words had come next. One per day, carefully chosen. He wrote them down, studied them, and used them in sentences like a school exercise. Like he was teaching himself to be human again, one vocabulary word at a time.
Sonder: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
Ephemeral: lasting for a very short time.
Ineffable: unable to be expressed using words.
Words that resonated, or meant something. Words that described the world he was learning to see again, the feelings he was learning to name.
Bucky stared at today's page with his pen hovering. He was supposed to use the word in a sentence. That was the rule he'd made for himself.. one word a day, written down, used, made real. It was a small thing but small things added up; small things made you human.
I am solivagant.
Too simple. Too obvious. He crossed it out and started again.
For months I have been solivagant, moving through cities like a ghost, never settling, never-
He stopped, his hand shaking slightly. He set the pen down and flexed his fingers. The metal ones moved smoothly, perfectly calibrated, but the flesh ones trembled. They'd been doing that more lately, trembling when he wrote, when he held things, when he tried to be still. HYDRA would have called it a malfunction but it wasn't. It was fear and hope and the weight of choices, of having agency again. The trembling was human, too.
The memories came in fragments these days, jagged pieces that didn't always fit together. Sometimes he'd remember a mission--blood and cold efficiency and the taste of copper in his mouth. The satisfaction of a target eliminated, a job completed, handlers pleased. Those memories made him sick now, made him want to scrub his skin raw, but he couldn't deny they were his. Part of who he'd been, even if that person had been a puppet dancing on HYDRA's strings.
Other times he'd remember Brooklyn in summer, humid and loud and alive. The smell of his mother's cooking. His father's laugh, rough and rare. His sisters playing. The cramped apartment where five people had somehow fit into three rooms and it had felt like home because they'd all been together. And Steve. Always Steve, woven through every memory of Brooklyn like a golden thread. Scrawny Steve with his too-big eyes and his stupid determination to fight every bully in the borough. Steve who got sick every winter and refused to admit it. Steve who drew in the margins of his schoolwork and looked at the world like it was beautiful even when it was cruel. Steve who'd said How can I? You're taking all the stupid with you and then everything had gone to hell and-
Bucky pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. The memories felt sharper lately, more frequent. That was progress, his therapist would have said, if he'd had a therapist. If he'd been brave enough to sit in a room with someone and admit to all the things that had been done to him, all the things he'd done, all the ways he was broken. But he knew that wasn't realistic for him, or safe for anybody involved. So, for now, he had the notebook.
He stood, moving to look out the window. Two stories down, Vienna moved through its afternoon. People with places to go, lives to live, connections he couldn't fathom. A woman with a red coat walked a small dog. Two teenagers shared earbuds, laughing at something on a phone. An old man sat on a bench feeding pigeons, patient and alone, but not the way Bucky was lonely. He'd been watching them for weeks, trying to remember what it felt like to be one of them. To belong somewhere, or to someone. To have a life that consisted of more than hiding and remembering and trying not to fall apart.
The watching helped sometimes. Reminded him that the world was full of people just living, just existing, not hunting or being hunted. Normal people with normal problems. But it also made the gulf between him and them feel impossibly wide. How could he ever be normal again? How could he walk down a street without checking every shadow, every rooftop, every face for threats? How could he trust that the peace would last?
The thought brought him back to Steve, the way everything did eventually.
He'd seen him yesterday. Not close--Bucky knew how to keep his distance, to watch from the shadows. But he'd been there, outside a café in the first district, close enough to see the way Steve hunched his shoulders against the cold. Close enough to notice the dark circles under his eyes, the tightness around his mouth, the way he moved through the world like he was bracing for impact. Close enough to know that Steve wasn't sleeping any better than he was.
The serum had changed Steve's body but not his tells. Bucky still knew how to read him--the set of his shoulders when he was anxious, the way his jaw clenched when he was thinking too hard, the carefully controlled movements that meant he was holding himself together through sheer will. Bucky had spent a lifetime learning Steve Rogers, and apparently not even seventy years on ice and decades of brainwashing could erase that knowledge.
Steve had been alone. No redhead assassin, no Falcon with his easy smile, no handlers or minders or whatever SHIELD called themselves now. Just Steve, getting coffee from a street vendor, looking small in a way that should have been impossible for a man his size. Looking lost in a way that made Bucky's chest ache with something he couldn't name. Grief, maybe. Or, recognition. Because he knew that lost look, having wore it himself most days.
The world had moved on without Steve Rogers, had left him behind while he slept in the ice. Steve had woken up to find everyone he'd loved dead or aged beyond recognition, had found a war still going, his fight never finished. Had found himself alone in a future that didn't need Captain America but couldn't let him go.
Bucky understood that. Understood being a ghost in your own life, displaced from the world you knew, trying to find a foothold in one that didn't quite make sense. Maybe that was why he'd done it. He'd almost stepped forward and let himself be seen. The urge had been overwhelming, to close the distance and say Steve's name, to watch as Steve's blank expression shifted into something different, something Bucky couldn't anticipate. To see if Steve would still want him, even if he was broken and remade and wrong.
But then Steve had turned, scanning the street with the wariness of someone who'd learned not to trust peace, and Bucky had melted back into the crowd. It was what he was good at, what he'd been trained to do, over and over until it was instinct. The asset didn't get seen unless it wanted to be seen. Except he wasn't the asset anymore. He was Bucky Barnes, or he was trying to be, and Bucky Barnes had never been good at hiding from Steve Rogers. So, he'd left something behind.
A receipt from a bookshop Steve would recognize--the one in Munich where Bucky had bought a sketch pad six weeks ago, paying cash, wearing gloves to hide his hand. Steve had been there the week before; Bucky had watched him browse the art supplies, looking at pencils and charcoal with the kind of longing that suggested he wasn't drawing anymore. He had watched Steve's fingers hover over a set of watercolors before he'd turned away empty-handed, and Bucky had wanted to buy them for him, wanted to press them into Steve's hands and say draw something, anything, don't let them take this from you too. But he hadn't. Couldn't, maybe.
The receipt had been carefully slid into Steve's book that rested on the café table next to his coffee cup. Bucky brushed past, close enough to touch, close enough to smell Steve's shampoo. Close enough that his hand had ached to reach out, to make contact, to confirm that Steve was real and solid and here. But he'd kept walking. Left just the receipt, creased from his pocket, marked with the date and the address. A bread crumb. A message: I was here. I saw you. I'm still in Munich, or I was, or I want you to think I might be.
Steve would know it was deliberate. Steve was smart like that, had always been able to read between Bucky's lines, to hear what he wasn't able to say. Steve would understand it was an invitation, a yes to a question Steve hadn't asked yet but Bucky knew was coming. Because Steve was looking for him, of course he was. Steve Rogers didn't know how to let go, didn't know how to leave anyone behind, but especially not him.
Bucky pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window. His breath fogged it, obscuring the street below, and he watched the condensation spread and fade. When he was the Winter Soldier, he hadn't left fog on windows. The asset didn't betray its presence with something as mundane as warm breath on cold glass. Now, he breathed and sweated and shivered, and it meant something.
The sun was setting, painting Vienna in shades of amber and rose. Bucky watched the light change, watched as the city transform from day to evening, and tried to imagine what would happen when Steve found him. Because Steve would find him, of that he was sure.
Would Steve be angry? Disappointed? Would he see Bucky as he was now and wish he'd put Bucky out of his misery on the helicarrier? Or would he do what he'd done that day, what he'd always done: refuse to fight, refuse to give up, insist that Bucky was worth saving even when all evidence suggested otherwise? Bucky didn't know. He couldn't predict it, because Steve wasn't a mission he could plan for.
He turned back to the notebook and picked up the pen. His hand was steadier now, the trembling having faded to a faint tremor.
I have been solivagant for so long I forgot what it means to be found.
He paused, then added:
But I'm remembering.
The words sat there on the page. Bucky read them over three times, waiting for the urge to cross them out, to run, to disappear again. It didn't come. Instead there was something else, something fragile and tentative that might have been hope, or might have been the memory of what hope used to feel like. He closed the notebook carefully, like it held something precious. Maybe it did. These pages were the only proof he had that he was becoming someone again, piece by piece, word by word. Every entry was a small act of defiance against HYDRA, against the handlers who'd erased him, against the part of himself that still whispered he'd be better off dead.
The apartment was quiet around him. Too quiet, probably. The tactical part of his brain, the part that was still the Soldier and would probably always be the Soldier in some ways, catalogued the silence as a vulnerability. No ambient noise to cover his movements. No crowds to disappear into. Just him, alone and exposed. He should move, keep going, stay ahead of whatever was chasing him. But the receipt was planted and Steve would find it soon, if he hadn't already. And Bucky had made a choice when he left it there, a choice to stop running, at least from him.
The thought terrified him. The thought exhilarated him. The thought made him want to pack his bag and be gone by morning, and also made him want to stay rooted to this spot, waiting and ready. Somewhere out there, Steve was looking. And for the first time in longer than he could remember, Bucky was letting himself be found.
He returned to the window, watching people hurry home through the cold. Watching them return to places they belonged, to people who knew their names and meant them. A couple walked by holding hands, their breath visible in the winter air, and Bucky watched until they turned a corner and disappeared. He wondered what that felt like, to touch someone casually, to trust that closeness wouldn't end in violence or control. To walk down a street with someone and not be alone.
He'd been wandering for so long, alone by necessity and design and the broken pieces of who he used to be. City to city, safe house to safe house, always moving, never settling. Solivagant. The word fit him like a second skin, like the loneliness he wore every day. But he didn't want to be solivagant anymore. He wanted to go home, even if he wasn't sure where that was, even if the only place that had ever felt like home was a person, not a place. Even if that person was looking for a ghost and might not want what he found. Even if Bucky wasn't sure he deserved to be found, to be forgiven, to be anything other than alone.