Chapter Text
Bucky was having a hard time coming to terms with what he was witnessing. The heart on his wrist would beat for several days at a time, and then suddenly stop for months, to only beat once more for a few days. He couldn’t wrap his head around what the hell this could possibly mean, and he wasn’t too sure he wanted to know. Did it mean his soulmate kept dying and coming back to life, or was it something else entirely? He had seen weirder things before, but this was his own soulmate for Pete’s sake. He wasn’t even sure how he and his soulmate met, let alone who they were.
He even asked Nick Fury about it once. This was short-lived thanks to Fury’s “I don’t give a damn about my own soulmate, why would you think I give a damn about yours,” and Bucky never brought it up with the man again. He did bring it up with Steve however, but that was a sore spot since his soulmark only ever beat the one time with Peggy.
“There’s always someone else out there for ya, bud,” Bucky had said, but Steve wasn’t as easily hopeful.
Bucky had a theory, but he wasn’t sure if he should run it by anyone since it sounded so bogus, even to himself. He couldn’t find any files on this mysterious individual since that incident in Iran, and after a lengthy period of post surgical healing, he chose to do as much research as he could. He found that this ghost of a person was the reason behind dozens of assassinations but there was so little to be said about them that he considered them to actually be a ghost, and everything he did find led to a dead end. This didn’t explain the occasional heartbeat though.
Finally, he decided to bring it up with not only Steve, but Tony as well. “So…what do you guys think?”
“What does who think about what?” asked a very tired looking Bruce Banner walking into the communal living room.
“Buck here has been on the hunt for a ghost,” Steve said.
Bruce turned to Bucky when he got back from in the kitchen with a mint tea in his hand. “What kind of ghost?” he asked then took a sip of the hot liquid.
Bucky sighed, unsure how he should explain. Go for broke, he thought. “I was on a mission in Iran a few years ago, and to keep the story short, I think the person who shot me is my soulmate.”
At this, Bruce lowered his cup to waist height and gaped at the Agent. With narrowed eyes, he asked, “Did you see what they looked like?”
Bucky brought a hand up to his forehead and closed his eyes trying to remember. Since having gotten shot, that specific moment had been fuzzy for him, but the one thing he wouldn’t and couldn’t forget was the way the ghost-of-a-person stood there longer than he thought they should have, giving him ample opportunity to catalogue some aspects of their appearance. “Shoulder length red hair, petite but deadly, female…definitely female.” Bucky opened his eyes slowly and looked between the three men.
Bruce and Tony exchanged a glance and a nod, and when Tony turned back to Bucky, his gaze held something cautious. “Are there anymore details you can tell us?”
Bucky squinted and thought for several seconds before he said, “Yea, she was wearing goggles and a mask, and uh…” he hesitated to say this next bit, but at Steve’s encouragement, he finished with, “she had a metal arm. With a red star on the shoulder.” Bruce and Tony shared another look, this one uneasy and anxious. “What? What is it?”
Tony leaned forward, placing his elbows onto his knees. “I’ve only heard whispers thanks to Bruce’s insistence, and I put JARVIS through the ringer trying to figure out all that I could, but even he, through my resources, only found the vaguest and minimal things on her.”
Bucky looked back and forth uneasily from Tony to Bruce and back to Tony again before turning back to Bruce once more. “What did you find?”
Bruce released a heavy sigh, and glanced over to Tony before replying, “We don’t have her true name, only the one she goes by, but like Tony said, what we did find wasn’t much.”
“Well?” Bucky urged, leaning forward almost excitedly to have some form of information to go off on. Maybe he can dig deeper into SHIELD’s files and…but how would that work if JARVIS couldn’t find anything? He would have to come up with something of a plan.
“Her alias is the Winter Soldier.”