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He goes to Brooklyn after. He knows it’s supposed to be an important place to him; he read that in the exhibit. Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, two scrappy boys from Brooklyn.
He is no longer a scrappy boy from the streets of New York, that much he knows without having to read it.
Still, he feels something deep in his bones, something that tells him to go. When he steps off the bus at the Port Authority, teeming with people, it’s like meeting a ghost: He knows this place, except he doesn’t. Deja vu, he thinks, of course he’s been here before. (Most of his missions have been burned from his mind, wiped away — but he thinks that they must never have sent him here, because with every step he remembers. He remembers the feeling of his boots on these floors.)
He goes up to the map of the subway, deciding to take the A train to Brooklyn Bridge Park for reasons he doesn’t really understand; it just feels like the right place to start. He thinks that maybe he used to like parks. It’s the middle of the day, and although the train isn’t quiet, it sure isn’t busy. He finds a seat and leans back. He keeps his hands in his lap, folding them over each other, making sure to keep his eyes trained on the people around them. He knows that he looks nervous, that he looks like he’s watching out for someone, and he is; he’s always waiting for someone to find him. To take him out. At this point, he doesn’t care what it looks like.
The woman across the aisle — short, dark hair spiked into a mohawk with splashes of pink, eyeliner, tattoos — watches him, raises one pierced brow, and goes back to the book she’s reading. He can’t see the title, just that the book is old and fat and heavy. He remembers watching people read books on the trains; thinks that maybe newspapers were his choice.
Has a distinct feeling, then, that he must have preferred chatting with fellow passengers, and then his hands stop moving. He closes his eyes and breathes deep, the smell of grease and dirt and humanity. He concentrates on that. (He doesn’t like remembering, doesn’t like these sudden spikes of someone else bubbling up from under the surface, sharks underwater, except that thinking of it as someone else makes it as if he’s a someone right now, and he doesn’t feel like someone. He just feels lost, and he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he would like to be found.)
When he opens his eyes again, they’ve passed three stops, and the woman with the book is gone. He liked her hair, he thinks, and then he closes his eyes again. He can’t bring himself to look out the window at the tunnels. He knows that the sharks underwater liked to watch the tunnel walls whipping by, and he’s not going to give in to them, not yet.
They finally get to the High Street stop, just over the border into Brooklyn. He steps off the train, automatically checks for tactical teams; he’s always expecting bullets. There is no one suspicious in his line of vision, and he moves on. He knows how to walk like someone with confidence, even if he feels like he’s collapsing in on himself, and he draws himself up into something — someone — who could perhaps belong in this city. Someone who knows where he’s going. He takes the stairs up to the street; his eyes linger on a worn sign for the Hotel St. George. He remembers that name. It unsettles him.
If the Port Authority was a ghost, it’s because all bus terminals have a certain similarity to them. There’s a particular frenzy that accompanies long-distance bus travel. It’s the type of stop-and-go, hurry-and-wait, that no part of him has ever liked. It’s dirty and grimy and harried, and he fucking hates it. Cities, on the other hand, are much more unique beasts, much less recognizable. The ways they bustle and the ways they are built seem so much more varied; transit is for all the ways that people can travel, but cities are for all the ways that people can live, and he remembers enough of his life to know that a single person can, it seems, live in infinite ways.
If the Port Authority was a ghost, High Street is whatever is left behind when a ghost leaves this green earth. Some part of him recognizes it, but more is baffled. He stops at the top of the steps (moves instinctively to the side, to be out of the way) and leans on the green rail. He stares. So many of the buildings are unfamiliar; so many of them are new, clearly built after the war, part of the transformation from a manufacturing neighborhood to the upscale neighborhood this now evidently is. He doesn’t like the unease he feels at this. The sharks are clamoring, are upset. They know that this is different, that this is new, even if whoever he is doesn’t.
He puts his hands in his pockets, walks forward. He tries not swivel his head about like a tourist, but he can’t help the way his eyes catch things — that’s new, he thinks, or why the hell would they put that there, and he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it. He finally stops at a corner when he realizes he’s getting close to Brooklyn Bridge Park. He knows the building in front of him, really knows it. It’s brick, and the brick has a sort of bluish tint under its red; he’d always liked that bluish tint.
He has some recollection of being sixteen, of being a kid with a smart mouth and a chip on his shoulder, and of only noticing that blue tint because it was pointed out to him one day after school. Remembers blond hair and skinny limbs and this time he squeezes his eyes shut very, very hard. He hates remembering, he hates it, it makes his heart race and his head feels like it’s full of bees and it’s been so, so long since his heart has raced because of anything other than chasing and being chased (and he supposes this is still a chase, just of a different sort, and he might like this chase least of all).
He needs to sit, he thinks. In his pocket he can feel the wallet he’d pick-pocketed off a wealthy-looking fellow in D.C. There’s a small shop across the street; he’ll get some bread, and find a bench in the park and feed the pigeons, or ducks if they’re around. If anyone is looking for him, looking for the Winter Soldier, they won’t be looking for the man in the park feeding pigeons, trying not to feel the world around him.
He harbors the thought that maybe, just maybe, if he is the kind of man who could sit and feed the pigeons, maybe there is something left for him here in this city that he almost remembers.
He thinks that he would like to be the kind of man who could sit and feed the pigeons, here in Brooklyn.