Work Text:
The first set of choices Bucky made about his living situation were about subterfuge. He made sure he picked a place where the landlord didn’t have scruples—the guy was happy to not take his passport, as long as Bucky always paid on time and in cash. He was still running and he wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be easily flushed from the bushes.
There were a couple of places like that, real shitholes across Europe. He never bothered to stay in hotels, because hotels were almost always where Interpol would start looking first if they wanted to find someone who was on the move. He would squat in abandoned buildings or find one of the many beaten down examples of Soviet architecture where the landlord had long since learned that it was valuable to have someone who didn’t want questions asked if the money was good.
But after a few jumps, he started thinking beyond running—he was so tired, and his head was still spinning, and he still wasn’t entirely sure who he was, besides the vague sense that he was someone named Bucky, that he had used to have a life. The thing he knew the most was that he was fucking sick of running. He wanted to lay down and sleep.
The second set of choices, then, were tactical. He still picked a place where he could pay in cash and he stuck to the Soviet Bloc. He now had a better explanation than he used to for his pitch-perfect American accent, but he still found something comforting about pissed on and torn up statues of old Communist heroes.
This time, though, he looked for a place with an eye about how could leave if he was chased out—if he had to go, if someone finally found him. A place where it would be shit-hitting-the-fan to have to leave. He chose a corner unit, at the top of the building. When the landlord showed him the place, he stared out the window for a long moment—yeah, he could make that jump. If he had to do it.
The place was littered with debris. Craigslist had advertised it as furnished and he supposed there was a mattress in the corner and a beaten-up couch. It counted. He took it immediately, and for the first two weeks straight, he didn’t leave. He ate out of cans and sat in the corner and tried not to shake himself to pieces out of terror about the idea of settling in. He spent a lot of time staring at the green wall, the vaguely patterned wallpaper.
Maybe it was the brain-damage, but he ended up deciding he liked it.
It was months before he made any other decisions about the apartment other than those. He holed himself up like he was still just running, sleeping in his boots when he slept at all. Relaxing, even a little, was painful—like muscles cramping up after a long time perched up in a nest. He felt pins and needles every time he bought a pack of candy or a novel with a man’s naked chest on the cover—flowing hair, raised script. Those weren’t things he was used to wanting, but he wanted.
He got most things he needed at a flea market near the University, still uneasy with spending much time in cramp little stores. It was a nice place and he liked it—the open-air mellowed the musty smell of old fabric and shifted it to nostalgic instead of anxiety-producing.
At first, he bought the bare essentials. Many pairs of gloves were most of it, because his metal arm tore the shit out of them in just a couple of wears. There was a lady who sold gloves who would laugh at him, every time he’d go and buy up each one that would fit.
She never asked why he’d only try them on his right hand, though, which meant that Bucky liked her.
"If you need work gloves, buy work gloves," she scolded him.
People don’t wear work gloves to buy fruit at a produce stand, lady, that’s not exactly stealth.
"I’m a fashionable guy," some part of him said, basically without his permission.
She looked at the utilitarian military-green coat he was wearing, his filthy ball-cap, his too-big jeans. It was, to say the least, a skeptical look.
"This is what fashion looks like now," Bucky said. "Punk rock."
He vaguely remembered the nineties. Grunge had been a thing. Maybe not in Romania—the early nineties was the first time he’d been back in America for an extended period, after the fall of the Soviets and the chaos that allowed American HYDRA to steal him. They’d kept him on the west coast, mostly. He remembered plaid, and Pierce, and a strange sense of nervousness in his handlers.
Now, with his strange flashes of memory, it made more sense to him: he’d always been even more erratic when faced with a New York accent.
The recollections made him nauseated, even in the bright sunshine, even though Pierce was dead and nobody knew who he was. He fled from the woman, a couple of pairs of gloves still in his hand and without paying.
She shouted after him, but he couldn't bear to stop.
It was with a lot of shame that he slunk back to her stall, the next week at the flea market. When she saw him, he could see color rise to her cheeks and her mouth open in what would be a haranguing he would surely deserve—but instead of squaring his shoulders and staring into the middle distance, like he’d been trained to take his punishment, he found himself hunching, trying to make himself small. It was an older protocol.
It worked, apparently—she softened.
"You owe me money," she said, finally, and he nodded. He had been feeling miserable about it for days, totally out of scale to the couple euro he owed. He handed her the money and bought even more gloves. He then told himself he was going to buy something else, because he owed her.
He looked around her stall, but most of it was stuff he wouldn’t need. Clothes that would fit his body too tight, if they fit it at all. T-shirts with designer logos on them that were printed off-center or with misspellings.
In the corner, though, there was a pile of throw pillows. It was a strange thing for a stall like this to sell, but it caught his eye. That couch was fine, as far as couches go, but—well. It was nice to have soft things, wasn’t it?
He drifted deeper into the stall, well aware of the thin fabric covering his head and increasing the darkness, trying not to be. There was a great pile of them. Different patterns, different colors. Some of them had sequins sewn on or characters he didn’t recognize. Really, he should grab the first one he saw, overpay, and toss it in the trash on his way out. He didn’t need it.
But he found himself lingering, studying each and every one of them with every ounce of his considerable attention. He felt the softness of their fabric on the palm of his right hand and visualized the faded colors of his little apartment. The green, the beige, the muddy brown of the couch. He couldn’t get something too bright, it wouldn’t fit. The place was muted and calming. It needed a calming sort of pillow.
It couldn’t be green, he had too much green, and it would fade into the brown of the couch. It had to be—there was one, a dark color that was somewhere between a red and an orange, faded like it had been left in the sun too long. It wasn’t quite cheerful, but it was like the memory of brightness. (Maybe one day he could have an apartment where he could have truly bright colors, he thought, and the daring of that sent electric current through his veins.)
He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the woman wasn’t watching him and he slipped off his left glove. He ran his metal hand over the fabric—it didn’t catch. Something strange fluttered in his stomach.
As quickly as he could, he paid for the pillow and went back home.
When he put it on the little couch and stared at it, he felt his heart pound. He felt like a fool, but at the same time, he genuinely and completely thought it was beautiful.
His face twitched up into a little smile, looking at that. He left the apartment again to go get a candy bar, to give himself a less ridiculous excuse for the fizziness in his veins.
The next weekend at the flea market, he bought some beautiful sheer curtains to replace the beat-up quilt that he had pinned to the windows. They let in light, even when he closed them for some privacy.
A few weekends after that, he bought some plums and wondered if he could find a throw blanket in exactly that deep color purple.