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[lostsoldier]

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OOC

Name: Jenni
Age: Old as balls.
Contact details: PM or plurk @ jennibeans
Characters already in Systemwide: N/A

BASIC PROFILE

Name: James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes

Age: 27 +/- 70 years of non-aging and questionable consciousness
Canon: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Appearance: Some scraggly metal-armed hobo in his Matrix and a balder one-armed hobo in Zion. (PB: Sebastian Stan)
Extraction point: A few months post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, spent simultaneously hunting down and running away from his past.

OVERVIEW

Personality:

Bucky Barnes has been HYDRA’s ace in the hole for half a century for a reason. Whether it’s because of or in spite of decades of brainwashing and trauma, he’s become the kind of assassin people tell ghost stories about in no small part because he has developed the characteristics necessary to excel at that vocation. In the process, though, most of the rest of his personality muscles have atrophied nigh beyond repair. He’s an incredible soldier, but he’s not super great at just being a person — at least not anymore, and not yet.

Seventy years as his Matrix’s longest-serving prisoner of war have taught Bucky a number of militarily useful but interpersonally disastrous lessons. Chief among those is emotional constriction. Faced with prolonged, repeated trauma from which escape regularly proved futile, he adapted in the only ways available to him. He stopped caring about it. He distanced himself. He learned to narrow his emotional range, to shed emotions that weren’t useful to his own psychological survival — pain, fear, despair, hope, over time pretty much everything. We see him do it right on screen, going glass-eyed and numb just before he’s pushed back in his chair for a mind-wipe that serves to reinforce that very adaptive response.

It would be a misinterpretation to see this reaction as surrender — it could be, and maybe at the lowest points in his life it has been, but separating himself from the reality of his situation on an emotional level, if not a physical one, wasn’t just a coping mechanism; it was one of the few avenues of resistance he had left. And if the look on his face when he bites down on his mouth guard for his mind-wipe was any indication, even after decades of this, he still has a hell of a drive to resist— he just didn’t believe he had the means to succeed. In light of that reality, the ability to control his own emotional reaction to the things he had to do and had done to him was one of the few, small ways for him to protect his inner self and exert power over a situation in which he was otherwise powerless.

So he got pretty darn good at it. His constriction is not total, constant, or fool-proof, however. While he’s probably more emotional in his few scenes in Captain America: The Winter Soldier than he’s been in the past seventy years put together, those scenes make it evident that he does still have a complex emotional life brewing beneath his protective shell of brainwashing-enforced desensitization. When he does have breakthrough emotions, they tend to be intense, confusing for him, and often expressed as anger or aggression. He’s short with Steve when Steve first implies their connection, and their second meeting ends with 10 minutes of punching, yelling, and refusing to acknowledge he knows Steve. Without the context of memory or experience, Bucky tends to struggle to identify, process, or regulate his emotions, and the result is when they do show, it’s often in sudden outbursts or with unnatural intensity.

It takes quite a bit to prompt that kind of reaction from him, it just so happens that Steve Rogers is a walking, talking source of cognitive dissonance for him. The idea that he used to be somebody else, that he used to have a name and a family and people who cared about him, has understandably been pretty difficult for him to accept when he’d spent so much time cutting himself off from those kinds of vain hopes. In addition to being purposefully stripped of his past and identity via brainwashing, he’s numbed himself to what was happening to him by convincing himself it was either worthwhile or excusable because he was not really a person — except apparently he was treated like a person, once.

Steve stirring up those memories has ripped up the whole foundation of his sense of self, and that’s been scary. He’s still reeling from it, and even though he had at least tentatively begun to understand who he used to be and what had happened to him by the time he was extracted, his drive to find those answers is balanced by a difficulty navigating those emotional waters — or any emotional waters, for that matter. After having most of the rest of his agency stripped from him, it's vitally important to Bucky that he be able to control his level of emotional engagement, and the fact that he can't when it comes to Steve makes him as avoidant as he is driven to find answers about his past. His distance from Steve over the past few months can therefore be seen as equal parts genuine uncertainty and an attempt to regain a measure of control in ways he understands.

Not every day of his life produces that degree of existential crisis though, and his emotional constriction typically remains intact. While it doesn’t make him a lot of fun at parties, as an adaptive strategy and a combat mentality, it is tremendously useful, because it means he can withstand a whole hell of a lot. Be it physical pain, not-immediately-fatal injury, twinges of conscience, or inconvenient emotions, he’s capable of stubbornly ignoring just about anything in favor of accomplishing a goal. He isn’t deterred by cold, heat, hunger, or the absence of the usual creature comforts. He doesn’t flinch, and he doesn’t hesitate, to an extent that can be downright unnerving. His fighting style seems to betray a genuine lack of fear of pain or death, perhaps because he lacks the sense of self necessary give those fears meaning. As a result, on the battlefield, he comes off as a relentless, unstoppable force.

While there are Steve Rogers-shaped exceptions to every rule, and his attention is more scattered recently than it used to be, when Bucky sets his mind to a task, his focus is singular and nigh on absolute. Brainwashing has certainly helped with that; it’s easy to focus when there’s literally nothing else on your mind, and in that context, he’s learned to rely on instinct to an almost inhuman degree, acting and reacting with little time wasted ruminating on why. The end result is a clarity of intention that allows him to think quickly on his feet, act decisively, improvise, and adapt to change without losing sight of the task at hand. A + B + C = murder; it’s simple as that.

As a tactician, Bucky demonstrates patience and planning as much as single-mindedness. Not for nothing does Natasha call him a ghost; he’s known for his ability to up and disappear, which takes a fair amount of forethought, and that’s not the only time he exhibits as much. For his first attempt on Nick Fury’s life, he positioned himself ahead and waited for Fury to come to him. For his second, he set up a high-powered rifle (and we assume s…ome kind of infra-red scope, he’s doesn’t have x-ray vision ok) across the street and waited for Fury to stand up and create a clear shot. He had the level of social intelligence to predict where his target would go to ground (Steve Rogers’ apartment) as well as the patience to wait for the most opportune moment to strike. When he did strike, it was with three shots through a solid brick wall — thorough, effective, and from sufficient distance to facilitate his own escape. Similarly, when he attacked Natasha Romanoff in Odessa, he’s reported to have waited for an opportune moment (a winding road and a nearby cliff), carried out the action most likely to kill everyone aboard (shooting out the vehicle’s tires), and planned ahead well enough to predict where Natasha would end up if she was able to pull her charge out of the situation, so that he could get there first and finish the job. He wasn’t hurried, he wasn’t emotional, he wasn’t malicious — and part of what made him terrifying was that you can’t reason with that; he was a force of nature more than a villain. Nowadays, he’s a little easier to get through to, but put him in the field, and you’re liable to see the same sort of inhuman determination.

The straightforwardness of his approach isn’t always a benefit, however. There’s a certain immediacy to this way of thinking, a direct cause-effect mentality that means he sometimes misses the forest for the trees. He ostensibly killed Fury, but didn’t bother with Steve. He killed Natasha’s engineer in Odessa, but only incidentally wounded Natasha herself. When sent after Steve and Natasha later in the film, he pursued the targets he was assigned, but paid just about no attention to Sam Wilson — who later flew up and kicked him in the head. He wasn’t worried about whether any non-targets had seen him or would become threats to HYDRA’s goals in the future; he wasn’t thinking about wider ramifications at all, because he wasn’t asked to. His history indicates he can be much more subtle, but his strategies tend to revolve around finding the most immediate solution to the problem at hand, using the materials he has, whether that means ripping a steering wheel off a car, throwing a guy in front of a speeding truck, or kicking a pilot into a plane engine, conveniently killing two birds with one stone. He can think outside the box because he doesn’t even remember what the box looks like, but sometimes there are actual advantages to understanding the box, as it were.

While Bucky is hyperaware of his immediate environment, he tends to have difficulty conceptualizing the world beyond what’s right in front of him. It's not that it's impossible for him to project the logical consequences of his or others' actions, and certainly he seems capable of doing so sufficiently for most tactical maneuvers. But he’s a concrete thinker, accustomed to relying on immediate impressions and instinct in the absence of anything remotely resembling a reliable memory. He takes things day by day, minute by minute, experience by experience. His sense of his own past and future is as constricted as his emotional landscape, both as a result of literally losing his past via brainwashing, and as an adaptive response to the constant, imminent threat of death that captivity entails. It hasn’t, up until recently, been terribly useful for him to think about his future, because it wasn’t likely to be any different or better than today, and he couldn’t remember a time when it had been any different. He’s therefore as rusty at broadening his temporal horizons as he is his emotional range.

The wider philosophical notions he has given deeper thought to since he fell out of a train half a century ago have unfortunately been HYDRA’s. HYDRA operates under the theory that humanity can’t be trusted with it own freedom, and that the only way to keep the people it deems worth protecting safe (or, y’know, just take over the world) is to kill those it deems a threat. Bucky is still sorting out how he feels about HYDRA’s organization as a whole, although not positively is probably a given. However, its leader Alexander Pierce’s expectations of him are uniquely revealing of how HYDRA’s influence and his own experiences have shaped his perspective. In their scene in the vault, Pierce gives Bucky an almost warm, inspiring speech about the importance of doing terrible things for the greater good, which happens to also be HYDRA’s good. While Bucky is in that moment unwilling to accept that rhetoric at the expense of his newly-discovered memories of Steve, it’s telling that Pierce expects that to work. He expects Bucky to buy into the idea that completing his mission at any cost to himself or anyone else is worth it, for the sake of what Pierce is packaging as world peace, and Bucky looks genuinely conflicted about disagreeing with him. While something akin to Stockholm Syndrome likely plays a role in Bucky’s relationship with Pierce over the years, and Bucky’s personality is suited to seeking inspiration from others, this conversation seems to imply that, under Pierce’s manipulations, Bucky has actually internalized the idea of putting a higher purpose (specifically, HYDRA’s purpose) above his own well-being or anyone else’s. After all, the core concept of a winter soldier is, in contrast to Thomas Paine’s summer soldier, he’s the one who will not shrink from service of his country, who will grit his teeth and bear it when the going gets bad — and in this case, bad means having your mind wiped so many times you forget how to be a human being anymore.

Where once sticking it out would have meant staying by Steve Rogers’ side through anything, under HYDRA’s control, that same dogged loyalty has been warped into something more horrifically self-effacing and destructive. These days, Bucky may have a knee-jerk suspicion of circuitous politics (and world domination framed as “freedom” in particular), but on a subtler level, he has internalized the idea that sometimes progress means somebody has to get their hands dirty. And that somebody is usually him. To do the kinds of things he’s done and not lose it completely, he’s had to buy into the idea that it was necessary, to some extent, and he’s only just started to question whether he really believes that. What “progress” really looks like, he has no earthly idea, but he knows when he does have a goal worth the sacrifice, he is very capable of doing terrible things to himself and others to achieve it.

Whether he likes it or not, though, Bucky is not in murder Kansas anymore. The few months he’s spent outside HYDRA’s control have been like learning a new language via involuntary immersion; he’s had to acclimate to a life that includes things besides combat, and it hasn’t been easy. To be fair, though, he wasn’t entirely without a mission prior to extraction; the mission was just self-directed now, recon on his own past. If the state of him in his post-credits scene is any indication, he’s continued to dedicate his energy to the task at hand, versus say, personal grooming. He eats, he sleeps, he steals clothes and keeps his face hidden from surveillance cameras, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care about much else, and frankly doesn’t seem to be acclimating any more than is absolutely necessary. But in theory at least, that will change as he continues the acclimatization process in Reality. He isn’t the type to stay idle for long, and in fact is more comfortable on a mission than off it, but down time exists for him now, and he’s going to have to get used to it.

Outside of his battlefield comfort zone, Bucky tends to come off as that quiet weirdo who could seriously stand to blink more often. He’s inclined to keep to himself, unused to talking so much as listening, or being a part of the crowd so much as disappearing in it. Although he is intensely curious about all these new, normal human experiences happening around him that have long since been wiped from his own head, he’s still uneasy and standoffish about indulging that curiosity, watching more than he participates. His reticence to engage can occasionally make him seem not very bright, but that's far from the truth; between the unpredictable resurgence of his memories and experiencing a lot of things for what feels like the first time, there is a lot going on in his head at any one time, sometimes to the point of distraction - he just isn't the type to share that with you. Silence and shadows are where he lives, and given the option, that's where he'll retreat to.

He’s not the friendliest, either. Though not necessarily hostile, he doesn't exactly make an effort to be approachable, and paired with unnatural stillness and perpetual hypervigilance, he can be kind of creepy. (Sorry.) Since he's not the most expressive (or...feeling) of folks, he can seem cold, harsh, and difficult to read. Where being battle-ready all the time can be an advantage during actual combat, it's otherwise maladaptive, causing him to operate at a fairly high baseline level of stress - which, again, he is used to functioning with and weathering, but "functioning with" means he responds to most situations as potential threats, and therefore he doesn't relax easily. It can seem like he doesn’t enjoy very much, although he'll patiently tolerate a lot of things; tolerating things is kind of his schtick. Just because he’s more often the straight man than the joker these days doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any sense of humor, but if one exists, it’s subtle, difficult to provoke, and easy to miss.

Not every aspect of the man Bucky used to be is gone, though. Canon unfortunately doesn’t provide a clear picture of how much Bucky does remember, aside from the brief flashbacks we’re presented with on screen, of his transformation into the Winter Soldier (which is subsequently wiped from his mind) and of Steve before the war. Sensory triggers and physical parallels in particular (his hand on Steve’s neck/shoulder at the end of their fight, N..atasha shooting him in the face??) seem to be the most effective means of prompting him to recover actual memories, and it’s therefore likely he’s remembered more in the months since the end of the film as he’s continued to interact with his environment, but it’s equally likely that reading about Bucky Barnes and watching documentary footage at the Smithsonian hasn’t given him much more than factual information on his prior identity.

In the absence of most of his memories, the learned features of his personality have not readily resumed — but honestly, “resume” may not be the most useful way to think about the person he is and is becoming. Nobody’s going to go back in time and undo what’s been done to him, and he’s not going to come out the other side the same old Bucky Barnes. His trauma is specific and his experiences have changed him in specific ways. But those changes have acted on core personality traits that, in the absence of his regularly scheduled brainwashing, have a chance to show again, in whatever form his more recent experiences have shaped them into.

The first and strongest those traits seems to be his protective instinct. Given he’s been pulling Steve’s skinny butt out of trouble for almost as long as he can(’t) remember, maybe it’s not surprising that has stuck with him, particularly re: Steve. While Bucky struggles with the fact that this instinct is contrary to his mission, he’s fiercely protective of the emotion and memory associated with Steve, and equally, irrefutably so of the man himself. But then, Bucky has always been the big brother type, drawn to looking out for the little guy to the point of bossiness. Although he used to be more confident in his ability to know what's best for people, when he does think he's right, he's still just as stubborn about it, if not necessarily as vocal. The stark contrast nowadays between other people's modes of thinking and his own makes it more difficult for him to understand them without context, but he has a natural a perceptiveness that's always let him cut to the heart of the problem, albeit after a bit more time to observe nowadays.

There is a solid core of social intelligence (and dare I say warmth?) somewhere underneath his disaster of a life, but it's harder to reach these days, and harsher in execution, as he's lost faith in the value of gentleness or coddling in most situations. He'll pull Steve out of the Potomac to keep him from drowning, but still leave him passed out on the bank with a bunch of bullet holes in his chest and water in his lungs. Basic survival is the most he's been able to offer most the people he's wanted to protect in a very long time, if he's been able to offer anything at all, so he's learned to lower his expectations and find value in what most people might consider harsh treatment. The world he knows is harsh, and he's seen enough people fall victim to that (and to him specifically), to have an ingrained sense that being soft on people doesn't do anybody any favors, even if he doesn't remember the specifics of much of what he's done to create that impression.

Bucky does still put other people's needs in front of his own, but in a capacity that is perhaps less healthy; he genuinely doesn't seem conscious of his own needs and therefore neglects them in favor of other people's goals. He still has an ingrained sympathy for the underdog that's born out of being genuinely inspired by the idea of this skinny kid from Brooklyn refusing to run away from a fight, but nowadays that also means having difficulty shaking Pierce's inspirations, too. He doesn't, and has never, seen himself as a good person so much as a the guy who helps other, better people get the chances they deserve - but he doesn't know what "good" means anymore, or if the things he's doing actually further that goal. Or if he wants them to, or what he wants at all, really. Being detached from HYDRA has left him somewhat adrift.

Waking up to Reality has in some ways been easier on Bucky than other people, however. His life had already been upended; he'd already left almost everything he could remember when he left HYDRA, and while he had one or two emotional bonds he might have liked to develop beyond the "yelling and attempted murder" stage, he didn't lose family or friends upon extraction the same way most people do. On top of that, he was already pretty used to having the metaphorical rug pulled out from under him, and persevering through the utter shitstorm of his life is old hat by now. However, the fact that his grip on reality was already pretty shaky hasn't done wonders for his sanity, and sometimes having fewer emotional bonds just means you need the bonds you do have all the more desperately. His time with HYDRA had already severely undermined his basic trust in people and the world around him, and he'd really just started to dip his toe in the shallow end of the trust pool again before he got yanked out. Part of him feels almost vindicated to find his natural suspiciousness was, in this case, correct, but that's. actually the opposite of helpful in the long-term, when it comes to restoring his trust in society. The double whammy of HYDRA and the machines has caused him to backside in the general trust department, although it may also have forged some tentative trust bonds with his extraction team.

Newly extracted, however, his opinions on Reality are still very much in flux. The only definite so far is anger - at having the virtual wool pulled over his eyes again, the same way he thought he had just escaped, and at the general state of the human race still trapped in that lie. The parallels between fields of Matrix-trapped humans and his own experience are visually as well as practically explicit enough to elicit a rare level of empathy from him - which is still arguably not very much empathy, and nothing he's expressed in so many words, but you know. Baby steps. It would be easy for him to transpose his slow-burning anger at HYDRA onto the machines that not only created HYDRA but seem to be doing the same thing. Right now, though, he hasn't sorted through those emotions well enough to articulate much of anything, and like everything else, he's liable to keep it to himself until he's good and ready.

Matrix:

Marvel Cinematic Universe is a world based closely on our own, with Earth-based geography and a similar timeline of social, political, and historical events. Technology, however, has taken a few leaps and bounds forward from what we know, and things like superpowers and aliens have recently begun to be recognized as reality, though all are within the theoretical reach of scientific understanding.

Advanced technology has shaped this world’s history. World War II in this universe featured tanks the size of buildings, energy weapons constructed using an alien artifact known as the Tesseract, and the creation of genetically-altered soldiers with superhuman strength, speed, and endurance. However, these facts were surprising to the average soldier at the time, and for most people, the war continued without too much science fiction made science fact. Captain America marked the emergence of the world’s first superhero, of sorts, and the publicity surrounding him set the tone for how this world deals with its supernatural heroes — by accepting and celebrating them. But Captain America was a soldier, not a vigilante, and no one would publicly follow in his footsteps for another sixty years, until Iron Man created a suit of weaponized armor in a cave out of a box of scraps and shortly thereafter announced his superhero status. Then some big green guy broke Harlem, New Mexico made first contact in several centuries with a group of aliens known as Asguardians, Captain America woke up from a 70-year nap, and totally different aliens called the Chitauri invaded New York, revealing the existence of all this stuff to the public.

This world is a just shade or two weirder than what we're used to, and the general public has started to learn how to roll with the punches. Superheroes are attracting fan followings, Captain America has a museum exhibit at the Smithsonian, complete chaos hasn’t broken out over the fact that we’re definitely not alone in the universe and some of those neighbors definitely aren’t friendly. In general, this a universe where slightly extraordinary things just kinda happen. Sudden advances in science and technology are viewed as a little more normal than in our world because they are a little more possible, an old man can easily shrug off the Hulk falling out of the sky because it’s not the craziest thing he’s ever heard of, and people are born with impossible levels of genius or innate marksmanship skills without any technological intervention at all. It’s possible for a human to reach peak physical fitness through training alone without any of the usual age limits or grueling exercise regimens required by real-world athletes. A guy can have a metal arm surgically attached to his body without rejection or infection, and it can have super-strength despite the physics of such a thing being pretty sketchy. MCU is bigger and brighter and a little more out-there than the real world, and it’s a place where these things just kinda work.

The differences between this universe and the real world have had particular impact on military and special intelligence groups. Specifically, the former deep-science division of Nazi Germany, an organization known as HYDRA, has been shaping the course of human history since breaking off ties with the Nazis after WWII. A shadow organization operating within international intelligence agencies, HYDRA has been inciting war and subtly nudging the world toward a state of hypervigilance, with the end goal of taking it over under the auspices of protecting it from itself. Integral to that effort, of course, has been the Winter Soldier. As the so-called Fist of HYDRA, Bucky has tipped the scales on an untold number historical events, carrying out HYDRA’s most critical assassination missions over the past seventy years.

Public fear is heightened in this environment, and people are increasingly willing to go to extremes in the interests of ensuring public safety. Because everything is bigger in this universe, the extremes are more extreme. That means handing over protection of the entire planet to a single counter-terrorism and intelligence agency, SHIELD, and international leaders somehow managing to agree on an offensive initiative against potential threats the world over. Which is great news for HYDRA, and that leads directly into the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Which is to say, P.S. SHIELD was infiltrated by HYDRA at its very onset, and both entities have to be destroyed to prevent the murder of 20 million people.

Oops.

In a post-SHIELD world, public opinion is starting to sway back to more traditional, less overwhelmingly powerful forms of national and international security. There have been congressional hearings, and one would hope checks and balances are experiencing a come-back! Somewhere over there in the television universe, a newly-re-founded SHIELD is still fighting the parts of HYDRA that didn’t actually die, and the existence of individuals with innate extraordinary powers has recently become more widely known in the intelligence community, although not publicly. For everybody else, though, life goes on, because these are comic book movies, and we’ve gotta make room for the next sequel.

As a Matrix, the most obvious candidate for Agents on Earth would be HYDRA operatives, although local authorities, national security organizations, and your typical real-world men in black are other options. In addition, the expansiveness of the world means more varied options like invading Chitauri exist, and on any other part of the galaxy, Agents would likely manifest as a species more appropriate to that context. The existence of Inhumans, humans that were genetically altered by the Kree centuries or millennia ago and apparently gifted with extraordinary powers, also provides a convenient structure for adapting anomalous abilities from other Matrices.

Real World:

Bucky has been in Reality for only about 2 to 3 weeks at game start, enough to be most of the way through his physical therapy but not quite mobile enough to go crawl into a dark crevice and disappear again. I’m leaving the exact circumstances of his extraction open for CR opportunities, but he may have been extracted at the insistence of some 95lb asthmatic.

While the in-Matrix portion of the extraction went well enough, upon being unplugged, he was found to have an advanced DVT in his left arm that had caused substantial tissue death, and a transhumeral amputation was performed. At this point the wound is not yet fully healed, but it is coming along without further complication, and he’s actually going easier on that injury than on the rest of him in physical therapy, where he tends to push himself to the point of exhaustion if left to his own devices.

ABILITIES AND SKILLS

Anomalies:

• Super Soldier: As a recipient of a HYDRA knock-off version of Erskine’s Super Soldier Serum, Bucky has enhanced strength, speed, durability, stamina, healing, reflexes, and agility on par with Steve Rogers. Like Steve, he also doesn’t age very much, if at all.


• Metal Arm: A bionic arm that is probably surgically attached to his skeleton. It reacts to his neural impulses, matching his other arm’s superhuman agility, with super-strength beyond even typical super soldier levels. Where normal super soldier strength is at log-ripping, wall-busting level, Bucky’s arm allows him to rip the doors and steering wheels out of cars in one pull, dig into concrete, or force a knife through the side of a van like it’s butter in a focused burst of torque. It also makes excellent electric noises. While it does seem to be made of an unusually durable alloy, the body of his arm can be damaged by vibranium (aka, Steve’s shield), and the circuitry is vulnerable to electricity, much like the rest of him. :[

Skillset:

• Hand-to-Hand: In addition to being supernaturally fast, strong, and agile, he is highly trained in unarmed combat in a wide variety of styles, from Krav Maga to parkour to tricking.


• Knives: Are his favorite. He’s experienced with practical knife work as it relates to human anatomy, where and how to strike to inflict specific damage, but he’s also straight-up comfortable with a knife, enough to flip it around as dexterously as his own fingers — unlike his PB, who repeatedly stabbed himself in the hand with his plastic knife.


• Explosives: Are his second favorite. While he mostly uses projectile explosives on screen, it’s likely he has had to construct a number of different types and magnitudes of explosives for varying purposes, from distraction techniques to actual means of assassination.


• Firearms: A crack shot since his initial enlistment in 1941, Bucky’s weapon of choice is a long-range rifle, but he caries five guns and uses more than half a dozen over the course of the second film, so it’s probably safe to assume he’s comfortable with a few dozen more.


• Resourceful: Everything is a weapon if you try hard and believe in yourself.


• Tactics: Accustomed to leading a small tactical team. While it’s not clear how much of his overarching mission plans were his idea (probably not much), he is used to making choices in the field in response to the situation, directing the men under him toward a goal, albeit without typically relying on them very heavily for mission success.


• Spycraft: Stealth, tailing targets, evading the authorities, lock-picking, avoiding surveillance, and short-term infiltration are all necessary skills for an assassin. It’s not clear whether he would have been groomed or programmed for long-term espionage missions like his comics counterpart, but certainly he has the skills to operate behind the scenes.


• Pilot: Can fly a quinjet and probably has some familiarity with other SHIELD aircraft, but no particularly high level of skill is demonstrated onscreen.


• Multilingual: English and Russian are the only languages confirmed on screen, but considering the breadth of HYRDA’s influence and the variety of locations in which his missions have taken place, it’s likely he knows several other languages.

Upload Capabilities:

Anomalous Skills: 2
Martial Arts: 4
Projectile Weaponry: 3
Technical Skills: 0
Wild Card: 1

SAMPLES

1. Training with Skye

2. Having the same argument with Steve Rogers for 80 years