Who: Bucky Barnes & OTA What: Exploration. When: Friday, April 3, near sunset Where: Outside Test City Mall Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Amnesiac pseudovillain with PTSD. Status: OPEN/COMPLETE
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Pop culture was an enigma the soldier had no desire to solve. If someone had asked him to 'Riddle me this---?' about modern media, he'd have told them to go to Hell. Possibly with the knife he couldn't stop touching. It was the only weapon he kept out. All the guns---his armor---it was all packed away in his backpack.
What a strange concept, too: a grown man carrying around a backpack as if he were a student or a child.
Memories of his childhood were few and far between. There was a certainty to the thought he had never owned a knapsack as a student in school. He remembered a strap. It had been leather. A belt? Had he bundled his books together with a belt? Was that a thing people did in the---what year had he been a boy in? The 1930s? The '40s?
He was 98 years old according to the brochure they'd given him at The Smithsonian.
Born March 10, 1917, James Buchanan Barnes, had supposedly died at 28 -or was it 29?- in 1945.
Death was a strangely amusing concept to him. If he was capable of death, he didn't know how nor did he understand what method could be used to enact enough violence on him to send him to his grave. They could possibly take him apart? Someone had put him back together. That had to mean someone could break him into pieces again.
Like a puzzle.
A human puzzle.
Was he human any longer?
Steve Rogers was still considered human. According to the brochure he was, more or less, the perfect human which meant he was superhuman; no one thought of him as some mad scientist's experiment gone wrong. Of course, he'd not gone wrong. He'd turned out just right.
Once upon a time, he'd been that man's very best friend. His entire existence had been tied up in him when he was a skinny kid from the wrong part of Brooklyn. It had been nothing more than a miracle they'd survived their youths from all he could remember. He remembered a lot about the way Steve Rogers had looked as a boy, how his body had felt impossibly frail yet unbreakable all at once, how his breath had rattled in his chest…
Why couldn't he remember anything else about his youth? Why couldn't he remember how his own body had felt? Or how his own breath had sounded? Or even something simple such as why he hadn't owned a backpack?
It made no sense to think HYDRA had erased all of his life except Steve Rogers. Captain America surely wasn't a role model they'd have wanted him to keep in his head, right? The only thing he could think was he'd loved Steve. Somehow Steve had been more important to him than anything else, even himself. It was the only thing which made any sense at all.
Here he was now though and there was no Steve, only his memories of the boy he used to be, and who was he? Was he able to call himself Bucky Barnes? His body was mostly the same, but his mind wasn't and his heart was barely even functional. All the memories he held in his head now were of deaths. Murders. He'd become a killing machine for HYDRA.
Stroking his thumb along the edge of the blade in his pocket, he whistled idly along to the music he could barely hear from inside the mall. His senses were so heightened they hurt. The song was catchy though so there was that.
It made no sense, but who was he to talk about sense?
"Say my name, you know who I am...yeah, right. I'm glad someone does."
His voice was more a rasp than anything else. When was the last time he'd spoken? What had he said?
All he seemed to have were questions without answers. At least in this place, he had a chance to start over. Someone else was writing the script, sure. It wouldn't matter though because he was safer here than where he'd been. No one here was likely to get hurt by him. This place wouldn't let him hurt anyone. He didn't think anyway. It didn't seem likely. Nothing did these days.