'til the end of the line

( It had been almost three weeks. )

A couple more days of rest (and goats) later, Bucky found his way back to the island. Directly to MCA, too. He didn't bother going down to the basement floor to drop anything off at the apartment, either. He knew where he wanted to be, first and foremost.

He knocked on Jesse's door.

[ooc: For the gal. The bit under the cut is NFB for off-islandness, and also adapted from a flashback in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode 4. Also GUESS WHO'S BACK AFTER A WEEK WITH NO LAPTOP!]

Bast damn you, James, stay home! We're busy!

So...

That was a no on skipping out to Wakanda, then. And a last-minute one, at that. Bucky had his bag all packed, had been trying to book his portal, but then all the connections were down, and reaching out to Ayo -- Well, apparently they had something more important going on, and she hadn't been particularly subtle about him being of the most help by simply staying away.

So with a big, long-suffering sigh, he was ordering pizza, now. The TV droned on in the background, turned onto a news channel from his home world, on the off chance whatever was going in Wakanda was getting a mention. There was nothing, which wasn't surprising: if they could, they would keep it that way, like they had for a very, very long time.

Whatever concern he felt (not too bad, considering how incredibly capable every last Wakandan he knew seemed to be) mixed in with the general jittery discomfort he'd been feeling all week. But he'd be fine. There was beer in the fridge, there would be pizza, he would just... ride this whole thing out in relative peace.

(Hey, at least the usual nightmares had been displaced by -- some new, very confusing ones. The Coney Island Cyclone seemed to feature heavily for absolutely no goddamn reason.)

That was, at least, until there was a knock on the door, a delivery. A single green carnation, and a note that just said, ???? - Gray.

"What the fuck is this?"

The delivery person had no answer, and also no interest in providing one. And also leaving, so Bucky was left closing the door, and then just standing there with his flower.

Right.

[ooc: Yes that's Black Panther happening in the distance. Open!]

What had started out as a weekend in Wakanda, to get the lay of the land on the work the people there had offered to attempt doing on unscrambling Bucky's brain, had turned into a month. A little over one, actually? Bucky had lost track of the details. The days had all quickly started blending into each other, somehow unpredictable and repetitive at the same time. Technical prodding at the stump of his metal arm, meditation until he felt like what was left of his brain was about to goop out of his ears, waking up from restless naps in his assigned hut to the sight of the faces of curious kids from the village peering down at him, food, nightmares, back to the prodding, repeat, repeat, repeat.

In all that time, he was yet to manage to get Shuri to call him anything other than 'Sergeant Barnes'.

(There was something comfortable in how Ayo called him James, though.)

(There was something a little Jesse in it.)

Coming back to Fandom for a while felt like a vacation, or at least as close to one as Bucky actually had a concept for, anyway. And yes, that was a little funny, in a sad way, considering how long he'd spent running away from this place for years. And probably said something about how much sooner he should've come back. But he was here now.

In both senses.

And so he made his way back into the quiet of his apartment, dropped his backpack on the floor by the door, and sent Jesse a simple Landed text.

Then just stood there for a moment, and listened to the faint ringing in his ears.

[ooc: Open, and I am officially back from vacation.]

It was the day that it was, and Bucky had been out on the mainland to have crappy supermarket cake (no candles, got to be a fire hazard after a hundred) and to hear the news from Wakanda.

He'd still been thinking about the latter when he'd asked Jesse to make good on her promise (or whatever it was) of microwave lasagna (or whatever it ended up being).

And he was still thinking about it now as he knocked on Jesse's door.

(Although now he was also wondering if he should have brought something with him.

Just look at the humanity seeping back in now that he was letting it.)

[ooc: For the one that lives here.]

This was no way to live, but Bucky was used to being a ghost, by now. Flitting from city to city, never staying long, going from burner phone to burner phone even long after the last calls and messages from Fandom had come through. He'd ditched the latest one just last week. It had been a year and a half since Wanda's last text. Nothing from her ever since.

(Or Jesse.)

But that didn't mean he hadn't heard of Wanda, at least. There had been an incident, some time ago, in Lagos. Collateral damage on what the media and political high-ups were deeming an unacceptable scale, leading to her being blamed on the news. General opinion on the Avengers tanking, too. All leading up to something called the Sokovia Accords, essentially a contract to force the Avengers under the supervision of a United Nations panel, to only act when and if that panel deems it necessary. Bucky had a few guesses about how Steve might have felt about that.

The world was changing, and Bucky could feel it too.

( But right now he was at a street market, in Bucharest, buying plums.  )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC a-okay, adapted from Captain America: Civil War (with a little bit of Remedy's Control sprinkled in) to the tune of It's Been A Long Long Time, YES THIS IS FINALLY ACTUALLY HAPPENING. Preplayed with the incredibly patient and amazing weirderthanthou. Part 1 of 2.]

There'd been that... typical Fandom incident, back in October. And Bucky hadn't taken it well. He'd taken it so poorly, in fact, that when he'd woken up on the following Monday sharing a hotel bed with a stranger, he'd only gone to the apartment to grab his always-packed (always ready to go, always ready to run) bag, then bolted.

He'd been keeping his head down, ever since. Traveling around, not staying anywhere too long, always making sure he wasn't being tailed. It was exhausting, but it also felt like it was better than the alternative.

Somehow.

(Sokovia had fallen apart, not too long ago.

He'd thought about Wanda.)

It was a new year, but everything was the same. Another market square with fresh fruit and enough hustle and bustle for him to blend into it, buying things with broken language and money from questionable sources. Another old cinema next to a narrow alleyway.

(And like always, he thought about Jesse.)

But this was better.

Right?

[ooc: NFB for distance. Can be open if you want to try your luck with his burner phone - he wouldn't have given anyone the number, but Fandom works in mysterious ways.]

Bucky's dreams were -- vivid. As much as a collection of flashes could be called that. The swell of music. The warmth of a room full of people. Someone shouting his name. Brass against a red curtain, smiling faces, loud, loud, loud. Spinning so fast he'd either chuck up or just laugh, and then --

The swell of a dress.

The warmth of a single body.

A red ponytail.

---

Bucky woke up with a gasp. His eyes checked the room around him, frantic, but there was nothing off. Everything - not that there was much - was exactly as it had been when he'd fallen asleep. His heart was racing, though.

He looked down his body.

... Right.

He was going to need a cold shower.

[ooc: Open! ... A little later.]

Today was just another day for Bucky. Like most days, when he wasn't out, he was sitting by the dining table with his notebooks and the laptop. Researching, reading, learning. Filling in the gaps - less in his memory, these days. More in his knowledge, in his understanding of the world as it was now.

In his understanding of his place in it.

Christmas didn't really factor into that. There were no decorations in this sub-basement apartment. Barely anything else to begin with, really. Just him and his piles and piles of notebooks, and whatever furniture had been here to begin with.

But he'd bought oranges. They were still sitting on the kitchen counter, ripe and waiting.

He didn't want to talk about it.

[ooc: Expecting one!]

Bucky Barnes had thought about Fandom less and less as time went on. Sometimes, he'd think on the wonders of the future, maybe even accidentally make reference to them out loud, but that was about it. Funny thing, war: it had a way of making itself your top priority. Every waking moment, and most of the other ones too, if he was honest. And as time went on and the war kept on raging on, he began to block it all out on purpose.

( See, he remembered the way Steve - Fandom's Steve, the weirdly bulky version of his best friend - had reacted to him when they'd run into each other on the island. )

Bucky Barnes was thinking about Fandom now.

Or at least, someone was. He knew the name went with the face he saw in the mirror, but that was... Was that enough? Even with more and more flashescoming back to him practically every day, now. He'd stayed under the radar, gathering up all the information he could possibly dig up. Some of it was easy - his name, his story, was right there on display at an exhibition at the Smithsonian. Born in 1917, Barnes grew up the oldest of four... and so on and so on. He'd pieced together most of the timeline by now, facts helping him slot the fragments in his rattled brain into more meaningful contexts. But there were still two big gaps.

One, the memories he had about Steve Rogers didn't add up.

Two, an archive had a small collection of letters. Letters from him, sent to Rebecca Barnes in Brooklyn from a town called Fandom. Nothing in them was really anything special: mostly well-wishes and talk of a candy store and things that read painfully like in-jokes that he couldn't quite get the hang of even though he tried. But while the letters were mundane enough, unremarkable, nothing historians would obsessively pore over, they were the only thing suggesting a time in his life when he'd been living on some small island off the coast of Maryland. There was not a damn thing, not a single mention of it anywhere else.

And it was like a gaping hole in his story. And there was no more Rebecca to ask about it.

So the logical step was to follow the line to its other end.

He was going to Fandom.

( ooc: NFB, NFI. Yes, I did in fact just use just one post to sum up Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Also over a year of in-game time and half a century of Bucky's personal timeline. it's been an excessive leave of absence but MY BOY IS COMING HOME! )