Winter Soldier's Soulmate Ch. 02

"Blue, I guess?" He sounded uncertain even to his own ears. He almost wanted to cringe. He used to be better at this. That thought gave him pause. What did he use to be better at? And just like that, he was dragged down into another flashback:

"Why are you dragging me to this again?" He looked over to see the same blond haired, and blue eyed kid walking beside him kicking a can.

"You know I need my best wingman Steve." He heard himself say as he put his arm around the kid and pulled him in for a noogy.

The kid pushed him off and glowered at him.

"You just want me around, Buck, so you can have both ladies to yourself."

They stopped to stare at each other. The kid had his arms crossed over his chest and was glaring at him.

"Steve you know just because I'm good with the ladies, doesn't mean I don't want you to find a girl. I'm here for you, punk, what'd' ya' say?"

The kid unfolded his arms and sighed in defeat. "Jerk," he grumbled then gave a dazzling smile that lit up his whole face before punching Bucky and taking off at a sprint while Bucky chased him, laughing.

He slowly came back to himself. He was still sitting on the edge of the open trunk and Lucy was leaning against the arm. She was silent while he shook his head trying to bring himself fully back to the present.

"You were out of it for a little bit there. What's up?" she finally said in a calm, quiet voice that he greatly appreciated at that moment.

"A flashback I think," he said rubbing the thumb and forefinger of his right hand on the bridge of his nose to try and stave off the headache that was building after the flashback.

She hummed then asked. "Tell me about it?"

"It's not really all that interesting." he tried to deflect.

"Tell me anyway?" she asked.

There was no pressure in her voice, just curiosity. He sighed deeply but for whatever reason decided to indulge her in this.

"I was with a... friend I think. I called him Steve. I've seen him before in other flashbacks. Anyways, we were talking about a double date I was dragging him to."

"Sounds like a nice memory." She stayed silent for a second before hesitantly forging ahead. "So I've kind of guessed this but just wondered if you could confirm. You don't remember a lot of your life do you?"

He wooshed out a painful breath at her words. "No, I don't,"

They were both quiet, she seemed satisfied with his answer, but he thought she deserved more of an explanation. Again he wasn't sure why he felt so strongly about this, just that he did. His emotions had gone entirely out of control since meeting her. It had been so easy to stuff them down before he heard her scream.

"It's...It's painful to remember, so I don't." He finally said.

"I'm sorry it hurts so much. I wish there was something I could do to make it better." She sounded sleepy.

He looked down to see that her eyes had closed and her head had leaned more heavily against his metal arm. That metal arm contained very minimal feeling. Enough to know when something was touching it, but not the texture or how much pressure there was.

He had never wished for more feeling in that arm before now. He wanted to know what she felt like leaned against him. Even with his aversion to physical touch due to the expectation of pain, he knew subconsciously that her touch would never be painful.

They stayed like that for what felt like an eternity and yet not enough time before she sighed and hopped off the trunk. He reached out and grabbed her before she could take a step though.

"You should be wearing shoes." He said in explanation.

She looked down at her bare feet as if surprised that she wasn't wearing shoes.

"Back home, I walked barefoot everywhere."

"Where is home?" He asked curiously.

"Virginia. You?"

"Brooklyn."

He was surprised at himself, he hadn't known that until she asked but now that he thought about it he could see the streets of Brooklyn as he walked them with Steve. His friend, maybe even his best friend. The rest was still fuzzy. He had done enough soul searching for one day.

"Wait here, let me get you your shoes."

She nodded in acquiescence as he made his way to the passenger side door of the front seat to grab the dollar store flip-flops. He brought them back and handed them to Lucy, she put them on and started walking away from the car.

"Where are you going?" He asked.

She froze, then turned to face him. She was wringing her hands and couldn't meet his eyes. She looked nervous.

"I...I need to go to the bathroom." she finally mumbled.

If it weren't for his advanced hearing, he wouldn't have heard her.

"I'll show you where it's safe. I left traps. And here, let me grab you some toilet paper."

She gave him a small smile at that. He hurriedly searched through the bags until he was able to open up the toilet paper pack and grab her a role. He handed it to her as well as the flashlight he had tucked in the back too.

He gently grabbed her arm to help guide her so she wouldn't trip about 20 feet from the car and behind a large oak tree. It blocked her view from the car, but that's what she would want. Privacy was important. He understood that probably better than most people. He hadn't had privacy for years. Every little thing he did was watched like a hawk. From him using the bathroom, to his assassination shots. He was constantly under surveillance. You learned to tune it out and get over it. But he never wanted that for her. Any humiliation he could spare her he would.

He left her and headed back to the SUV, she didn't need to know that his hearing was acute enough that he could pick up a fox moving through the underbrush thirty feet from them, let alone her movements. He would give her as much privacy as he possibly could while still keeping her safe.

He decided to set up the two sleeping bags in the back of the car with the pillows. He tried to make the makeshift bed look as inviting as possible despite its crudeness and his lack of ideas of what she would like. After that, he checked all his weapons on his body.

The inventory included five guns, nine knives, and two tasers currently. That was good enough, plus his sniper rifle. He grabbed his sniper bag out of the car and slung it over his shoulder. He had already spotted a good tree, that would give him an excellent view of the surrounding area while still keeping him close enough to the car that he could be to it in thirty seconds if need be. It was a little riskier than he liked, but the car was the safest place for her to be since he had changed the windows to bulletproof glass. If they fired a bazooka, the glass wouldn't be able to stop it, but he would hopefully have drawn their fire, and/or killed the person beforehand.

Bucky heard her returning from the old oak. There was a slight spring in her step that hadn't been there before. She beamed at him. He honestly did not understand Lucy at all. He wondered how she could still smile at him after what she had witnessed and what he had put her through over the last two days.

"Thanks," she said when she was within speaking distance.

He grunted at that. He gestured toward the bed he had attempted to make for her. She smiled again, lighting up her eyes.

"Is this for me?" She whispered, sounding almost unbelieving.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak with so much emotion filling the air. The fact that he had been able to make her happy filled him with a warmth that he hadn't remembered feeling for a very long time. Not since before Hydra.

She climbed in, kicking off her flip-flops before she could get any dirt from their bottoms on the sleeping bags. She turned and looked back at him almost expectantly. He cocked his head in question.

"Aren't you coming in too?" She asked, unsureness covering her face and evident in her voice.

He shook his head. "I can better protect you from up there." He pointed in the direction of the tree he had in mind.

She looked through the window at it, noticing that the lowest branch was about eight feet off the ground. She then looked back at Bucky.

"But, Bucky, what about sleep?" She asked.

"Don't need it," He said succinctly. He could go seventy-two hours without sleep. Granted it wasn't exactly comfortable, but it was doable. Twenty-four hours was nothing. Their enemies were much more likely to attack in the dark than they were to attack during the day. As long as he grabbed a cat nap in the morning before they left he would be fine.

She gave him an almost-exasperated sigh and a look. It reminded him of how another person used to look at him, he just couldn't quite remember who, and now was not a good time to go into flashback mode. He needed his wits about him. Especially with the night encroaching in on them fast.

He closed the back hatch of the car before she could say anything to contradict his decision or statement. Her safety was his top priority, not his health. He locked the car for good measure, then made his way on silent feet to the tree. He leaped with ease grabbing the lowest branch with his metal hand and using his momentum to swing himself up and into the branches. He scurried his way up, finding a suitable perch that gave him an excellent view of the surrounding area.

He unpacked his rifle and put it together, cradling it in his arms like a child. This rifle had gotten him out of more than one tough spot. He trusted it more than he trusted people. Well, maybe not as much as that kid Steve that kept showing up in his memories.

He wondered yet again why the kid was so important to him. And why that guy who dragged around the shield and was called Captain America drew him like a moth to a flame. He had thought about looking into the guy, but every time he tried thinking about Captain America too much he got a horrible headache that completely incapacitated him as his whole body rebelled from the pain.

He had been able to give himself time to adjust to other things before tackling that issue. But now, it couldn't wait any longer. Not with Lucy. She had moved up his plan by months. He had wanted that time to ease himself into all those painful walls. Instead, he felt like his head was about to be smashed into the wall whether he liked it or not.

He heard movement coming from the left and lifted the rifle up to his shoulder and looked down the scope as he clocked the noise and repositioned himself in the branches. He spotted a herd of deer moving through the trees and grazing as they went. A few of the does' were heavily pregnant, reminding him that spring was right around the corner. Not a bad thing.

He remembered liking spring and fall, but not summer or winter. Summer was too hot, and winter was...

He was in a bedroom, in a run-down apartment. He looked down at a roughly 10-year-old Steve. He watched as Steve coughed violently, shaking not only his small form but the whole bed. Bucky rubbed a hand along his back while he sat beside the kid. He noticed that Steve was wrapped in a mound of blankets and Bucky's own toes felt numb. He looked out the window to see heavy flakes of snow falling and building up on the apartment building across the alley. It wasn't the best view, but it was the best Steve's mom could afford on her own.

He felt Steve shiver after the coughing fit, clutching the blankets around himself as tightly as possible.

"B..b.bucky I..I'm s..ss...s.so cold" he heard Steve chatter.

"I know, punk. Hold on." Bucky familiarly pulled the covers back from Steve and climbed under them, wrapping his arms around the skinny kid.

Steve continued to shiver, but he also snuggled into Bucky's arms, seeking the older kid's warmth. Bucky held on tight until Steve stopped shaking and his labored breathing lengthened into that of sleep.

Bucky pulled himself out of the memory and shook his head, trying desperately to clear it. Now was not the time to be having flashbacks and regaining memories. Now it was about keeping Lucy safe.

He closed his eyes, laying his head back against the tree and opened up his other senses. Focusing more on smell and hearing.

His hearing felt like it flowed out to encompass the space. He could hear the rustling of a mother mouse as she returned to her den to feed her hungry babies. A vole was sniffing at a tuber under the ground below his tree. He could hear the faint sound of digging below him.

His sense of smell did the same. He could smell the sweet scent of spring filling the air, a dead kill made by a predator on the wind. The scent was roughly a day old, so the body was probably stored somewhere by a fox or other predator.

He focused his senses back on the clearing, where the car was sitting. He could hear the vehicle rocking every now and again as it groaned ever so slightly. Lucy must be having difficulty getting comfortable.

He almost felt guilty about that, but he needed to shut down those emotions and become the soldier fully. He had one mission: to protect Lucy.

*******

Lucy shifted her body again. She was extremely grateful to Bucky for everything he had done for her, but this wasn't something she was exactly used to. Her family never camped, or really went on vacations for that matter. Her dad was a farmer, and her mother was a nurse. Plus she was the youngest of four.

They didn't really have the money to afford to go on vacations. Not only was she not used to all this, but she was worried about Bucky. He was out there all alone in the night sitting in a tree of all things. She had watched him through the window of the car as he flung himself up in the tree with a level of grace that seemed impossible for his bulk.

He definitely couldn't be human, or not fully human, not with that move. But that raised the question of who was he? Lucy shook her head and buried her chin more thoroughly into the sleeping bag. She kept running into more questions than answers.

She thought back to the mark on her inner thigh. She had decided to not look up the name of her soulmate on the internet. She didn't want to have a preconceived notion of who he was as a person before she met him. But now after everything that had happened. It seemed she needed to look it up whether she liked it or not. The only problem, she didn't have access to a computer, phone, or other electronic devices that she could access the internet from.

Maybe they could stop at a library somewhere...

**********

Steve leaned back in his desk chair and rubbed his eyes. His neck felt tight, and it was hard for him to see straight after sitting at the computer for the last two hours. He wasn't fully used to all this technology yet, but that was ok. Sam was supposed to arrive in the next 10 minutes or so to help.

There had been practically no word on Bucky for the last three months. Not since his once-best-friend had pulled him out of the Potomac.

Steve got up and stretched his large body, working out the kinks. His stomach growled, reminding him he hadn't had dinner yet. He had been so caught up in research that he had forgotten to eat. That was unusual for him in normal circumstances, but looking for Bucky seemed to always take priority over everything else no matter what.

He heard a knock at his apartment door and quickly headed over to it, pulling it open, allowing Sam to enter.

"Hey man, how's the search?" Sam asked as he slapped Steve on the back.

Steve just shook his head as he closed his apartment door and walked over to flop on the living room couch.

"Well then I'm glad I'm here because I have a lead," Sam said, sounding casual.

Steve's head had been resting against the back of the couch with his eyes closed, but at Sam's words, he snapped upright and leaned forward intently, seeing a smug look on Sam's face.

Steve took the time to actually look at Sam. He wore his usual jeans and a nice shirt, but he held a folder in his hands that Steve hadn't noticed before.

"Yea?" Steve asked, on edge with hope.

"Yea, turns out roughly two weeks ago someone registered a new soul mark name."

Steve shrugged, "So? That happens all the time. Why does it matter?"

"Well, the name that was recorded is the interesting part. It was James Buchanan Barnes."

Now Steve understood. He shot up from his seat and started pacing the apartment. He remembered the name Bucky had shown him all those years ago. How could he not? She was the soul mate to his best friend. Lucy Camille Elliot. The registration system was new though. It had been established in the 60s with the civil rights movement. For the civil rights groups, it was a way of showing that whites and blacks were equal. For the anti-civil rights groups, it was a way of finding the people that had racially different soul mates and label them as damaged and lock them up.

Bucky and his soul marks' had never been registered. But having Bucky's name show up was definitely an interesting development.

"What do you know about her?" Steve asked as he stopped pacing to lean against the arm of the couch.

Sam flipped open the folder and started reading from it. "Well, it looks like she's 21, getting a degree in psychology and lives in Dallas." Sam stopped speaking.

Steve looked at him and gave a raised eyebrow. Sam cleared his throat, hesitating.

"Tell me," Steve said tensing.

"Well, I did some digging and found out that yesterday night her place was broken into. Two dead bodies were found in it, another was on the sidewalk below the window. It looked like he was tossed out of it. Also on the other side of the street. On the roof of a building was another dead guy. He was shot in the back of the head, and he was carrying a sniper rifle.

"It was big news in Dallas. The neighborhood she was living in is used to gunshots and what not. Hence why it took so long for anyone to call it in or police to arrive on the scene. No one has seen or heard from her since. She is currently labeled as a missing person's case."

Steve had started pacing again, halfway through Sam talking. "Any evidence that Buck was there?" Steve asked.

"No confirmation, but what little I could get through my contacts, the kills were done by a professional, with a lot of skill and strength. A man's windpipe was crushed by one hand. It could be him, Steve. But I don't want you to get your hopes up. He may not even know that he has a soulmate anymore, not after what Hydra did to him."

Steve nodded, knowing Sam was right. It was just so hard for him to feel helpless. He wanted to help Bucky. He wanted his best friend back.

"I'll ask Stark if I can use the quinjet and we will head to Dallas in the morning. See if we can gather more information on site." Steve paused before plopping back on the couch. "If it is Buck, then she's in safe hands. Whether he knows she's his soulmate or not. No one else can hide as well as he can. He's the master of subterfuge." Steve finished with a sigh.

"But he also would be taking care of Lucy. She doesn't have his skills, making it more likely they would be spotted." Sam added.

"Then we better hope we can get to them before anyone else if that does happen."

Sam nodded before flinging the folder on the coffee table, getting up and walking to the apartment door. "I'll see you in the morning, Cap," Sam said as he closed the door behind him and headed for his own apartment across the hall in Avengers tower.

Steve picked up the folder that Sam had left him, opening it up. The first thing he saw was a picture of Lucy. She was dressed in a graduation gown and was holding up a diploma to the camera. She was average, brown hair, brown eyes. Nothing spectacular. But on closer inspection, Steve saw a twinkle in her eyes that lit up her smiling face. She looked the picture of innocence and happiness. He liked her, Steve decided.

********

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Don't forget to comment!!