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“Aye, that happened to me once.”
James Barnes stares at Thor with that hard, calculating look that is all Winter Solider. But the wry smirk it turns into is mostly Bucky.
“It's the hair, isn't it?”
“I believe that is part of it,” Thor agrees, smiling bemusedly. Bucky sighs, looking down at the action figure some enterprising company had begun manufacturing upon realizing that no one had ever thought to copyright James Buchanan Barnes' likeness. He had started to formally request that they stop production, but Stark (the younger one, Howard's son; he looks enough like his mother that Bucky can keep them straight in his head pretty well) had quietly showed him the demographics breakdown for sales of the toy, and he hadn't had the heart to complete the request.
“At least they didn't include the arm,” he mutters, setting the toy down in front of him and flexing fingers he can't feel.
-
That's where it starts, but it doesn't stop there.
The first time Bucky gets a piece of fan mail written in crayon he just sits on his bed and stares at it, reading it over and over again until he has it pretty much memorized. It's misspelled and rambly, but the sentiment is easy to understand: Sarah Morgan, age 6 and a half, thinks he's the bee's knees and would rather like to marry him, if he'd be so inclined. He gathers that it's mostly the prospect of having twenty-four-hour access to braid-able hair that compels her proposal, but the undying loyalty to his best friend that his public persona has been painted with figures into the attraction pretty largely as well. After the first one, many more follow, until Stark finds out and starts heckling him gleefully about underaged groupies and tea parties having to do with someone named Mrs. Nesbitt, which, when Bucky finally convinces Steve to explain the reference, earns Stark a flick on the ear with his unyielding metal fingers and a murderous glare that isn't entirely faked. Stark takes the hint and leaves the subject of his littlest fans alone from then on.
Still, Bucky can't help but find the whole thing obscene.
“I'm not Prince Charming, I'm an assassin.”
“Former assassin,” Natasha corrects him. She's the only one here who makes him nervous on a regular basis besides maybe Steve, mostly having to do with the fact that she's also the only one who has even an inkling of what he's gone through and therefore refuses to treat him with kid gloves whether that's what he thinks he needs or not. Steve will still back off and let him be when Bucky asks him to, but Natasha will literally kick his ass into gear and get him up and moving when she thinks that's what he needs (and she has the bad habit of just about always being right): sparring or cooking or even just running, anything to keep him occupied away from his thoughts. She has a way of looking at people as though she can see right through them, and at least some of the time it's pure bullshit, but when she turns that look on him he knows it purely isn't.
“Like that makes a difference,” he mutters, and she flicks flour at him. They are baking: baklava, and Natasha insisted they make the phyllo dough from scratch, a ridiculous amount of finicky and repetitive work that he is resigned to because it is at least better than wallowing in blood, his original plan for the night. She'd been the one to bring up his fan base, and that's also an unpleasant topic, but dwelling on it won't threaten to tear him to pieces.
“Aw, come on, Barnes, you aren't a little pleased to have the attention of so many ladies?” she teases, chopping nuts with technique he knows she didn't learn in a kitchen. He snorts.
“Maybe if more of them'd introduce me to their older sisters,” he smarms back, and it's something the old James would have said, but it rolls off his tongue like rocks, forced and awkward, and she gives him a sidelong look that lets him know she doesn't buy it one bit. She's a quite a dame, Natasha Romanoff, and he'd be more aghast at the idea that Rogers hasn't, doesn't, and apparently never plans to make a move, except he's also glad of it for purely selfish reasons. Steve is more pleased with the two of them than Bucky feels he has any right to be, and he punches him in the arm, hard, every time he catches Steve grinning proprietorially at them.
(But he is glad Rogers approves.)
“People shouldn't look up to me, least of all impressionable young girls,” he mutters, laying phyllo dough in the pan and slicing up butter for another layer. He wears a latex glove on his metal hand because it keeps tearing through the delicate dough. The glove only helps a little, though, and he tears the next sheet he tries to pinch between his fingers. He growls, crumpling the dough in his fist, and she lays a hand over his, gentling him.
“Those impressionable young girls look up to you because you're loyal and brave and you came out of a bad situation and made it a good one,” she says gently. “What's wrong with that?”
He snarls, because she's right, damn her, but he still can't help but sympathize with the parents' groups that routinely object to his face being on school supplies and posters, especially the ones aimed at 6-16 year old girls. Every damn time the tired, old conversation gets started someone brings up the Winter Soldier, and every damn time someone else brings up the fact that he'd been brainwashed and look at all the good he did before that and all the good he's done since, and every damn time he can't figure out which side he agrees with more.
Natasha squeezes his hand, once, and goes back to chopping nuts.
-
The Avengers are out for breakfast at Denny's, because Tony Stark insisted and because they are all too hungover from battling whatever idiot was crazy enough to mess with them this time to wait until they can make it back to the tower to eat. Bucky is bent over his plate shoveling eggs down his gullet as fast as he can (the call had come in sometime before lunch the previous day and he hasn't had a bite to eat since the peanut butter and jelly sandwich he'd managed to gulp down before bolting out the door) when a figure steps up beside him and stops, twisting gently side to side. He looks sidelong at the figure, which turns out to be a young girl wearing a purple tutu and rain boots. She is staring at him in fascination, and he somehow finds the presence of mind to swallow the chewed up eggs he's got in his mouth and straighten up.
“This is my Bucky doll,” she says, holding up one of those damned dolls for him to see. The left arm has been painstakingly but not at all skillfully painted pink. “He didn't have a metal arm so I made him one. It's got missiles and grenades and,” the girl sucks in a breath, having gotten to the end of her lungful of air prematurely, “also he can use it to communicate with aliens, that's why it's pink, so the aliens know he's friendly. Can I touch your hair?”
“No,” he says before he can stop himself. She doesn't seem perturbed by his abruptness at all.
“Mommy says I need to respect people's personal space, so that's why I asked. I didn't know you went to Denny's; do you come here all the time? I like the strawberry syrup, Mommy says I can't have syrup when we're at home because sugar makes me hyper, but we can have it when we're here because it's special, are you here for something special?”
A harassed-looking woman bolts around the corner and spots the little girl, stage whispering, “Bonnie!” before making her way quickly over and grabbing her daughter's arm. She turns an embarrassed smile on Bucky.
“I am so sorry,” she says, attempting to coax Bonnie away, “I hope she wasn't bothering you.”
“Not at all,” he says, breaking out his charming smile, the one he rarely finds occasion to use anymore. He hopes it hasn't warped into a grimace during its long period of disuse.
“Here,” the little girl says before she is dragged away, “you can have this.”
She holds out a paper flower that is slightly crumpled. Bucky takes it with his flesh and blood hand, so he can feel that it's slightly warm.
“Thanks,” he says, staring after Bonnie until she is dragged around the corner and out of sight. He turns back to the table to find his teammates all staring at him in varying degrees of disbelief and amusement. He glares at them all and goes back to his eggs, but he eats with his metal hand, keeping the flower cradled safely in his lap with his other one. When he gets back to his rooms he sets it on the desk he's never had occasion to use, arranging it carefully so that no errant breeze will dislodge it nor elbow knock into it. He can see it when he sits on the couch to watch TV, and glances at it often when he does.
-
Teen Vogue wants him to be on the cover of their May edition, and Bucky is so aghast at the prospect that he can't speak for several minutes. Stark babbles at him about how he should feel honored, and Natasha is laughing quietly behind her hand, and Steve is just sort of smiling softly at him like this is a good thing, and suddenly he can't take it anymore. With a roar that visibly startles even Natasha he stands and stalks out of the room, ramming his metal fist into the door jamb on his way out, leaving a sizable dent. It's stupid and petty and very much overkill, but he feels dangerous and he thinks that the people around him, much less the general public, are stupid to have forgotten that. He feels stupid to have forgotten that.
He can't risk going out in public like this, so he retreats to Stark's private shooting range and empties clip after clip into a paper target until it completely disintegrates and falls to the floor like confetti.
God knows he wants to be the kind of person who can appear on Teen Vogue; not for vanity's sake, but because the kind of person who appears on the cover of Teen Vogue is a harmless celebrity, someone people love to discuss and pick apart and crush on. Wholesome. It is not someone who still, still, sees blood in the crevices of his metal arm, even though it's a Stark Tech replacement and the old one has been destroyed. Even though for the most part his kills were long-distance and he rarely got any actual blood on his hands. Even though he thinks he's starting to really believe people when they tell him that what the Winter Soldier did wasn't his fault. Not his fault, maybe, but he still did it. He was the one who did those things. His hands. His brain calculating and planning. His sense of cold, distant accomplishment, of grim pride in his work. He will never not own those things, and that is not the kind of person you let young girls idolize.
He sets the gun down and takes his ear muffs off, reeling in the sudden, intense silence. His disquiet soon settles, though, and he feels almost... peaceful. The shooting range is very still when no one is shooting in it. He thinks about a paper flower and crayon drawings and about the fact that he can't figure out why this is all converging on him. All he knows is that he's just a guy from Brooklyn who got mixed up in some weird shit because he refused to do the smart thing and keep away from a guy like Rogers who was always going to end up in weird shit because the guy doesn't know how to leave things the fuck alone, and he's still paying for that dumb loyalty seventy years later.
He doesn't usually let himself think about whether he would rather have been left to die in an exploding factory, rather frozen to death in a ravine, rather Steve just swallowed his damn sense of righteousness for once in his life and taken the Winter Soldier down, but he thinks about it now, and he thinks... maybe he'd do it again. If it all gets him to this place, where the food is excellent and Steve is happy and not starving or threatening to die every time it gets too cold out. This place, where there's a beautiful da- woman who he's beginning to think might not back away if he were to kiss her; where what he does matters. That maybe the price he'd had to pay to get here wasn't higher than what it got him in return.
The thought terrifies him, but he embraces it, shaking with the idea that what happened to him wasn't a question so awful that death was the only correct answer. He hasn't been actually suicidal in a while, but he realizes this is the first time he's actively chosen life instead of just continuing not to choose death. He's bowed over the table full of guns in front of him, shaking and gripping it so hard it's denting, but he's alive and for the first time in a long time that's actually, without reservation, okay with him.
He still doesn't want to be on the cover of Teen Vogue, but now his reluctance is rooted in, well, not fear. Manly pride, maybe? A desire to preserve his solitude? He can decide later.
But it won't be fear.