Chapter Text
He hadn’t meant to get so close.
He’d always made it a point to hang back, to keep to the shadows and to never let the boy know that he was even present; for his safety and for his own good as well. But things had happened so quickly—who was he to know that he would actually jump into train tracks for some fucking camera, of all the fucking things—and he could only react, not think about it, because if he’d had time to think about it, the kid would be dead and his mission would be failed and, before he knew it, he was holding him.
He’d been so distracted that he hadn’t even gone back for CCTV evidence quickly enough. By the time it crosses his mind, he knows Stark probably already had the video and he hadn’t even begun to think of the ramifications of that, no, all he could think about was how Peter Parker smiled at him as he’d thanked him, and the way it had his brain damn near short-circuiting left Bucky rolling his eyes in irritation with himself. He’d spent so long in the shadows of the kid’s life that the idea of him actually perceiving him is a shock he’d never expected.
He allowed himself to slide into a seated position, back still against the door, his left hand still burrowed deep into the confines of his jacket pocket, unmoving and unaffected by the rage of endorphins that the flesh found itself victim to. A small part of him wondered if the kid had noticed the arm, if he’d put two and two together, but he knew it best not to focus on it at this juncture.
Not that it wasn’t important—if anything, it was actually far too important to be ignored, if he was completely honest with himself. If he’s been made, then it jeopardizes the mission. And, if the mission is jeopardized, then Bucky is jeopardized, then he needs to clear house and flee but it’s for that exact reason that he doesn’t want to think about it.
He’s gotten comfortable here, after all, in this small, abandoned building in outskirts of Flushing. No one has come knocking in the year and some change he’s been here; no one is the wiser of his presence. One good thing about this city is that it’s one of the easiest places on the planet to go into hiding. So many people in such a large space, finding one is like finding a needle in a haystack, even if this needle in particular happened to have a bright red star slapped on it.
Besides, he’s not the only one to be squatting in this building, which is why he’s installed all these locks. The building has been in developmental hell for the past five years, sold from contractor to contractor and falling more and more into disrepair with every passing year. Homeless tend to use this building, but for the most part, they stay in the bottom two levels, sometimes even the third level. Rarely do one of them make their way all the way up to the sixth story where Bucky has chosen his residence, but just, in case he’s installed the locks.
The last thing he needs is for someone to stumble in and find him here.
Bucky knows it’s ridiculous he’s stayed here for so long.
He knows, logically, that his next step should’ve been to get out of the country, go overseas. Get somewhere where his name is less known, his face less identifiable.
Thankfully, he has yet to be recognized, but there’s a limit to how lucky he can get, no matter how careful he may be. His face is attached to so many of the files uploaded from SHIELD’s secure servers to the web; who he is and what he has done is information that belongs to the public domain. It’s all out there, there to find for anyone who wants to look, and he knows there are plenty who would like to find him because of it.
They have tried to find him, and they have yet to get even close, but that doesn’t make this place safe for him at all. While it may be like finding a needle in a haystack, the internet is the best at finding. Moving was the best way, the only way, to keep his freedom.
However, as much as he knows he needs to go—Parker makes it very, very hard for him to want to.
He’s only been living in this building for a bit over a year, but he’s been watching the kid for much longer. In fact, of his few memories from Before, Parker’s dossier is a sight that was burned into it; a high-level importance to the Winter Soldier for reasons that Bucky’s not entirely sure of himself but can’t seem to let go.
After D.C., one of Bucky’s first moves was to find out where the boy was, even though all he could remember at that time was just Parker’s name and picture in the dossier. He came back to New York and found Peter at his school, older than his picture with a toolbox in hand and smile on his face, completely alone and accepting of it. He had thought, he had hoped, that the visual would’ve been enough to let go of his former mission and disappear, but, much to his own amazement, he’s actually been here ever since.
He’s stayed to the background of Peter’s world, watching the boy from a safe distance, and he’s not sure entirely why he does this, either, why this has become his mission, or what this mission is to achieve. All he knows for sure is that this mission is what keeps him going.
He finally gets himself to calm down enough to push off the floor, sliding the cap off of his head and placing it onto the countertop, right alongside his keys, bending down to flip the switch on the generator he’s set up to power the apartment. He doesn’t need it for much more than the heat from the radiators he has set up across the apartment, very occasionally does he use the computer he has, but he keeps it just in case he wants to track Parker’s internet movements, which he rarely feels the need to as the kid lacks social media presence. He has them, just as any teenager in this age would, but he doesn’t really use them to post on; he mostly just reads Buzzfeed ‘articles’ (if one could call them such) and engineering posts. Sometimes he’ll post about a game he’s played or share a video of the robot he’s building at school for his team, but that’s really the extent of his presence. He really just has it to say he has it, not really to do anything in particular with it. Bucky has a notification set up to go straight to his burner if he does post anything of importance, anyways, so looking regularly is unnecessary.
He lets himself fall into the beaten-up couch, his hand immediately falling to pick at the hole he’s been working on for months. He found this couch in a bad state, and he hasn’t exactly done anything to help with it; he picks at the foam where it shows and pulls at the stitching, turning bad to worse, not that he was ever planning on fixing this couch.
This living situation was never supposed to be as permanent as it’s seemingly become; he was supposed to stop in New York to check on Peter and he’s yet to leave. Two days became two years before he’d known it, and while he knew he should be more weary, all he could do was think of how light Peter was when he’d picked him up. It had been like carrying Ma’s porcelain teapot—so light, but so fragile, like if he had tightened up too much he could’ve broken Peter like he was nothing.
It’d been why he checked him so vigorously for injuries.
He’d been more scared that he’d hurt Peter than Peter had gotten himself hurt.
He can’t remember ever holding anyone like that. Maybe Steve, back when he was skinny and weak, perhaps, but it’s different, not just because of the obvious (the serum) but because of who they are to him. He was never really worried about hurting Steve because Steve was always the strongest person he knows, even when physically he wasn’t, so holding Steve and carrying Steve like that wasn’t so scary. It was vastly unlike holding Peter like that, because Peter’s just different, and Bucky stops himself right there, because he does not need this train of thought running through his head tonight. No, not with everything that’s happened this night.
Bucky doesn’t sleep much anymore. He’s tired of sleeping. He’s done over fifty years of it by force and he’s tired of going to sleep and missing the world around him. Since he’s awake now, he spends his time in much more useful ways than wasting it with sleep—reading, namely; learning about the world that evolved without him, learning all that he’s missed and how this current world has come to be as a result.
Bucky’s always loved learning. Always. He always knew it to be a necessity, to learn and understand his world, and that’s never changed. He read even when books were hard to get, not just in the front lines but in the depression, but his favorites to read had always been the science fictions, which always put his imagination to the test. He loved to imagine the impossible, to think about what could be instead of what is.
He’d always been a dreamer, as his Ma would tell him, his head always in the clouds and never on earth. He thinks it’s why he has such trouble remembering a lot of what happened Before, before Steve had broken through the programming of the Winter Soldier. He spent too long in the dream, pretending and waiting for everything to just stop and in the process everything shattered apart.
Everything’s in fragmented, broken pieces; the things he remembers far outweighed by the magnitude of things he’s forgotten. He remembers randomly, without rhyme or reason; his most consistent thoughts having to do with Parker, which he thinks is why he’s focused so much of his attentions on him now that he’s no longer Hydra’s pet.
But he wishes he knew why he’d chosen Parker to focus on.
Why he made him a mission of his.
Why he needs so much to make sure that Peter is safe.
And why, even days after the incident at the subway, he continues to follow him.