consignment app ★ oh lazarus how did your debts get paid

[lostsoldier]

PLAYER INFO.
✖ Handle: Jenni
✖ Contact: PM + plurk @ jennibeans
✖ Are You Over 16: Y
✖ Other Characters Played in Consignment: N/A

CHARACTER INFO.
✖ Character Name: Barnes, James Buchanan
✖ Canon: Marvel Comics (616), post-Winter Soldier: Black Widow Hunt
✖ Character Appearance: Butch Guice chic.
✖ Character Age: Chronologically 87, physically around 29 forever.
✖ Pick A Number: 013 or RNG me.

✖ Canon Setting:

Marvel Comics Universe (specifically Earth-616) is based in the real world, but with several large differences. Real-world geography, historical events, and popular culture all exist in this universe, but there are numerous fictionalized nations run by fictional politicians, fictional pop culture icons, fictional military organizations, etc. in addition to real-world elements. Additionally, most major science fiction and fantasy concepts have a basis in reality in this universe. Although the general public isn’t always aware of them, things like vampires, zombies, aliens, gods, and magic exist and have existed in the background of the rest of the world for centuries. It’s a weird, over-the-top, comic-booky place. Alien species such as the Kree, Skrull, Asgardians, and Inhumans exist in a wider populated universe that regularly interacts with Earth. Additionally, Earth-616 is understood to be just one hub from which many alternate universes branch out to form a Multiverse, although frankly most normal people don’t put that much thought into it.

The core concept of the universe, which is not known to the general public, is that millions of years ago beings known as the Celestials visited Earth and experimented on humans’ prehistoric ancestors, laying the groundwork for superhuman abilities to develop naturally through the course of human evolution or due to external influence. In the 20th century, mutants (individuals who have superpowers due to a difference in their genetic code) have come into the public eye, and with them a swarm of social and political turmoil that has persisted to the present day. Mutants are discriminated against to some degree in most places on this world, and their treatment is analogous to real-life minority groups. In recent years, the size of this minority group was axed down to one-tenth its former size due to an event called the Decimation in which many mutants lost their powers, but many have had their mutations restored in the aftermath. In addition to mutants, superpowered individuals without genetic mutations have been part of the public consciousness for most of this time, typically without the same public scrutiny. Superheroes are an established norm in this universe, as are vigilantes in general. Most relevantly, the superhero team the Avengers have been operating since the 1960s with varying levels of official government sanction. The prevalence of superheroes has raised questions about whether masked vigilantes and individuals with superpowers can be trusted to work within the boundaries of the law and in the interests of public safety without transparency or regulation.

Bucky does not have superpowers and did not initially have much to say about superhuman politics, but the tension between the general public and the hero community has been relevant to his life. Bucky’s friend and former partner Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, led the resistance movement against the Superhuman Registration Act (SRA), which would have forced mutants and others with superhuman powers or technological advantages to register with the government as “living weapons of mass destruction,” revealing their real identities. Although Steve ultimately surrendered his position, he was subsequently assassinated, and that event led to Bucky becoming Captain America himself. As Captain America, Bucky sided against the SRA and offered a home base to the New Avengers, an unofficial group of unregistered heroes who operated outside registration. Once the SRA was repealed, Bucky rejoined the official Avengers for a time.

In addition to superheroes, mutants, supernatural beings, and magic, technology in this universe is also drastically advanced. On a day-to-day level that isn’t necessarily a part of most people’s lives; people still drive regular cars and use toasters and travel by plane, and issues like world hunger and the energy shortage still exist albeit in a less dire state, but flying cars also exist and helicarriers are possible and radical scientific experimentation takes place in government and privately-funded venues. Androids exist, advanced prosthetics have been around since at least the 1950s, and brainwashing is both possible and precise. Most relevantly for Bucky, an espionage and law-enforcement agency known as SHIELD (Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate) serves as an organ of the United Nations, incorporating advanced military and espionage technology into a global protection schema. Its roots are real-world, but essentially anything anyone can dream up seems to be achievable in this world.

✖ Character History:

(Note: Due to numerous retcons and ambiguity re: whether the original Captain America comics actually occurred as written in 616 continuity, what follows is primarily based on Ed Brubaker's 2005 rewrite and the 2011-2012 Captain America & Bucky series, followed by subsequent comics. For characterization, I do try to take everything into account, but I prioritize Brubaker’s perspective and Marjorie Liu’s Black Widow run over other sources.)

Bucky was born in Shelbyville, Indiana, in 1925. His mother died when he was young, a few years after the birth of his younger sister, Becca. Bucky's father raised them on his own while he was stationed in Camp Lehigh, Virginia, but given the demands of his work, Bucky often ended up taking care of himself and his sister. Bucky learned to put on a brave face, to pretend to be happy even when he wasn't, a lesson that proved tragically more useful a few years later, when his father was killed during a training exercise when his parachute failed to open. Becca was adopted by their aunt and shipped off to boarding school, but due to Bucky's age, love of the military, and familiarity with the base, he was allowed to stay on at Camp Lehigh.

Bucky became something of a camp mascot, busying himself selling non-requisitioned supplies to soldiers stationed at Camp Lehigh. Prone to flirting with local girls and getting into fist fights with their less-than-pleased boyfriends, Bucky proved to be a natural fighter, and just before his sixteenth birthday, he was chosen for special assignment. He was sent to the UK for several months of rigorous training. By age sixteen, the Army had taught him six languages and twice as many ways to kill a man, before shipping him back to Camp Lehigh and introducing him to the 20-year-old Steve Rogers, who would be his partner.

From 1941 to 1945, Bucky and Cap went on hundreds of covert missions for the Allies, teaming up with a variety of other heroes including Namor, the original Human Torch, and his side-kick Toro as part of the superhero team The Invaders. Bucky also led several youth hero groups. To the public, in the accompanying news reels and in-universe comics, Bucky was Captain America's plucky teenage side-kick, intended to provide an American answer to the Hitler Youth movement in the same way that Captain America was an answer to Red Skull. However, the reality was a bit darker. Due to his smaller stature and natural talent for stealth, Bucky was the team's scout, which often meant sneaking ahead and slitting throats before the enemy had a chance to attack. The real war wasn't as glamorous as the news reels, and Bucky became responsible for the jobs that were considered too unsavory for Captain America and other high-profile heroes to be associated with. Cap was the hero, and Bucky did the dirty work. He didn't complain; he'd been putting on a brave face for most of his life, and he wasn't about to let it slip, but exposure to the full horror of World War II, from combat kills to concentration camps, probably didn't do great things for a teenager's psyche.

Near the end of the war, when Bucky was 20, he and Cap tracked a villain named Baron Zemo to an island in the English Channel where Zemo was preparing a drone strike. They were captured and tortured, which mostly meant Bucky was tortured and Cap was forced to watch. Zemo then strapped them to the drone, but they were able to escape as the drone was launching. Cap and Bucky hopped on a motorcycle and caught up to the drone, grabbing onto its tail, but discovered the drone was booby-trapped. Cap was able to let go and fell into the English Channel, where he remained frozen until his re-discovery decades later. However, Bucky's sleeve got caught, and he had only just freed himself when the drone exploded.

Since Bucky's remains were never found, the US military assumed he had been attached to the drone when it exploded, and he was presumed dead. However, in reality, Bucky was picked up by a Russian submarine helmed my a man named Vasily Karpov, who was searching for the remains of Captain America in hopes of recreating his super-soldier formula. Bucky was severely injured, his left arm gone, but due to the temperature of the water, he was still alive in a suspended animation state. Karpov sent Bucky back to Moscow, and a team of scientists was able to revive him successfully; however, he was found to have no super-soldier formula in his system and to be useless for interrogation purposes besides. A head injury had left him with total amnesia, except for reflex memories of his combat skills, which he turned against his captors. Karpov decided to put him back on ice until another use for him arose.

In 1954, it did. He was brought out of stasis as an early test subject for a Soviet brainwashing and spy-training program under now-General Karpov's Department X. Bucky was fitted with a bionic arm and brainwashed through sensory deprivation and mental implantation, a process made substantially easier by his preexisting memory loss. Department X made him loyal to no one but them, then trained him in espionage and assassination. Code-named the Winter Soldier and believing the nickname "James" to be a joking reference to Captain America's side-kick rather than his actual name (not funny, guys :c), Bucky performed outstandingly in the field, able to pass for American seamlessly and take out vital targets without drawing suspicion.

(As an aside, Bucky has been credited with killing various important targets during this period, including Hitler and Wolverine's wife Itsu Akihiro, but neither match his timeline; he was still in stasis when both died. Since the connection to Wolverine is a little better substantiated, I consider this canon, but assume it didn't occur until the 1950s when Bucky was revived.)

Until 1957, Bucky was the perfect Soviet killing machine. However, between missions, he was tasked with training other Red Room spies, one of whom was Natalia Romanova, aka Black Widow. What started as casual flirting on the training field escalated into a whirlwind romance behind closed doors, and something changed in Bucky. He started to remember his humanity again, to question his orders, and to disobey his superiors. At first it was only small infractions, carrying out the forbidden relationship at all and later sneaking away to see Natasha once she was betrothed to someone else. However, in a subsequent assassination mission, Bucky balked at the prospect of shooting a target in front of his young daughter. He missed his shot, ended up having to run the man down on foot with substantial collateral damage, and was lucky Natasha had been trailing him and was able to take the girl to safety so he could finish the mission. The whole thing was a disaster, and it proved to their superiors that the relationship (which they had of course known about already) was damaging to Bucky's programming. As punishment to them both, they were separated, and it was decided that Bucky would be put in stasis and brainwashed between all future missions, erasing his memories of Natasha along with everything else.

For the next fifteen years, the Winter Soldier continued to carry out assassinations of the most pivotal Cold War targets. (Except Kennedy — that was SHIELD.) In 1972, after completing a mission in the United States, he failed to appear at his extraction point. His handlers tracked him back across the country, following reports of witnesses seeing a suspicious, paranoid man who seemed confused about the year. After weeks off the grid, he was found at a New York City flophouse with no memory of (or no interest in divulging) what he had been doing. It was recommended that he be excluded from future missions on US soil, but he was returned to active duty as needed.

In 1983, Major General Karpov requested the Winter Soldier as his personal bodyguard in his final years. Karpov had been shamed by Captain America and Bucky during WWII, and he appreciated the irony of a former American hero protecting Mother Russian. Bucky was tasked with disrupting American interests in the Middle East during this period, and in 1988 he was returned to stasis indefinitely after Karpov's death.

However, Karpov passed the Winter Soldier on to his protege, Aleksander Lukin. In 2005, Lukin revived the soldier and sent him on a mission to kill Red Skull, retrieve a power source and all-around powerful object called the Cosmic Cube, and help him take over a small country. Bucky set up an elaborate framework of fall-guys to deflect blame from Lukin, including kidnapping Sharon Carter, killing Jack Monroe (the stand-in Bucky Barnes from the 1950s), and framing Monroe for Red Skull's death by bombing an occupied building in Philadelphia. Along the way, Bucky had a few run-ins with Captain America, and SHIELD began to suspect his real identity. Bucky also began to question Lukin's orders, although only superficially.

Unfortunately, when Bucky had killed Red Skull, Red Skull had hopped bodies into the cube and subsequently into Lukin, slowly beginning to control him. Lukin, realizing the cube's power and attempting to rid himself of Red Skull's influence, asked Bucky to take the cube to a nuclear fallout shelter for safe-keeping. Captain America and Falcon descended on the base, and Bucky set out to intercept them, but he missed his shot at Falcon, suggesting his mental programming was beginning to destabilize. However, when Cap confronted him directly, Bucky denied all memory of him, to the point that Cap told Bucky, if he really doesn't remember him, he should just shoot him. So Bucky shot him. (/jazzhands) Fortunately, Sharon Carter stepped in and yelled at Steve for being such a dumbass, Steve deflected the bullet with his shield, and in the ensuing struggle he gained control of the Cosmic Cube. Using the cube’s power, he restored all of Bucky’s memories.

Then a whole bunch of comics happened.

Bucky will be coming in from the end of the Winter Soldier: Black Widow Hunt. Shortly before that event, Bucky was tried for treason against the United States for crimes committed as the Winter Soldier. While his lawyer initially argued that Bucky was not responsible for his actions due to brainwashing, Bucky changed his plea to guilty at the end of the trial. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but the sentence was considered time served and he was set to be released. However, the Russian government had convicted him of murder in absentia twenty years earlier, and he was extradited to a Siberian prison instead. While there, he was set against other prisoners (and b...ears) in pit fights, as the prison warden hoped to bring out the old Winter Soldier’s killer’s instincts and with them his memories, including activation codes for several long-lost Soviet sleeper agents that Bucky had trained. This was successful, the activation codes were sold on the black market, and Bucky broke out of prison to track them down. But before he could do so, the Fear Itself arc happened, and Bucky got a hammer shaft through the chest during a fight. Which, it turns out, is a difficult thing for a normal human to survive!

Luckily, someone gave that kid some Infinity Formula, which gave him enough of an edge to recover from his wounds. Natasha Romanoff and Nick Fury allowed the public to believe Bucky was dead, though, and once recovered, Bucky took up the mantle of the Winter Soldier once again, joining up with SHIELD to track down the Soviet sleeper agents whose activation codes had been extracted from his mind. He and Natasha foiled the plans of the individual who had bought the first three agents, but discover the fourth agent, Leo Novokov, had been wakened by an earth quake decades earlier — and was unfortunately gunning for Bucky, the man who man who made him into the weapon he is.

Through an elaborate series of fake-outs, Novokov kidnaps Natasha and brainwashes her to return to her former Soviet assassin self. Bucky confronts her and is able to bring her in, only to discover a second layer of programming  had been implanted in her to kill Nick Fury. Her attack on Fury fails, but she does kill several SHIELD agents, including Jasper Sitwell, who had been her friend. Bucky and Clint Barton follow Novokov’s trail to a hard drive containing a brainwashing program that Novokov wants Bucky to implant in his own head — which Bucky does, because he’s an idiot. Once subdued and returned to his sanity, Bucky follows Novokov’s trail to a graveyard where he fights Natasha and corners Novokov into surrendering. SHIELD retrieves Natasha and is able to undo most of the programming Novokov had put in her head, but her memories of her relationship with Bucky have been permanently severed. After SHIELD makes several unsuccessful attempts to retrieve these memories through scientific means, Bucky tells them to stop messing with her head and sad-cats into the night, deciding that Natasha is better off not knowing him anyway.

✖ Character Personality: 

Bucky has been a lot of different people in his life — a soldier, a scout, a killer, a trainer of killers, a spy, a hero. He’s died twice, three times if you count the ‘death’ of the brainwashed Winter Soldier when he regained his memories, and he’s constantly changing, reflecting on the lives he’s lived and the choices he’s made in hopes of finding a sense of self that fits, that feels like him. His identity is therefore something of a work in progress. At this point in his life, he’s realized he’s not a hero; he’s not even sure he’s a good guy. He’s a former assassin, a murderer, someone who has done terrible things and regrets those terrible things, but who understands that regret isn’t enough. Atonement is necessary for him right now, and he’s figured out he’s not the kind of guy to do that from the spotlight, but from the shadows.

In all his lives, Bucky has shown a particular tenaciousness. He’s the kind of guy to never give up in a fight and never let go, like an attack dog with its jaws firmly locked on your leg. He’s scrappy, resourceful, and focused, it has gotten him out of a lot of jams in his life. He’s always been the badass normal amongst superpowered friends, and he’s spent his life determined never to be the weak link, never to need any special treatment, even though he is, in a basic physical sense, weaker than a lot of the people he fights alongside. Even as a teen, he grit his teeth and bore it through getting beaten to a pulp by an enemy with all of his teammates’ superpowers combined, because his friends needed his help, and he wouldn’t allow himself to fail them, even if it just about killed him. As a brainwashed assassin, that same relentlessness was part of what made him an effective killer, an unstoppable force. As Captain America, his tenaciousness often crossed the line into stubbornness, a determination to protect people despite not always being confident in his own ability to tell right from wrong. Carrying Captain America’s shield didn’t feel right for him, though, and after standing trial for treason due to his crimes as the Winter Soldier, Bucky has realized that he doesn’t belong in that uniform either. In the aftermath, particularly during his time in a Russian prison, Bucky’s determination to survive has blended with a sort of bitter resignation to the fact that his life always ends up going exactly this badly. Every time things are stable and good, something sudden comes along to wreck it, and as bitter as he may be about that, he’s getting used to it, too. There’s always something he’ll have to grit his teeth and bear his way through. That’s just the way his life goes. And it may suck, but after this many near-death experiences, he’s glad to be alive and living it, too, and he’s not the type to give up now.

Bucky can be pretty broody in general, though. He doesn’t allow himself to fail, period, and he’s tremendously hard on himself when he does. Since his mother’s death, he’s been practicing putting on a happy face and pretending to be fine, determined to take care of the people around him and keep anyone from wasting time worrying about him. He’s never been very good at it, though — even as a youth he got into a lot of fist-fights, when all those emotions he’d been trying to keep out of view bubbled to the surface. As an adult, Bucky has lost the ability to put on that plucky facade at all. When life gets really tough, he will still insist that he’s fine, that there’s nothing wrong, but his behavior makes that lie pretty obvious. Prone to depression and self-destructiveness, he is already carrying the weight of all the people he’s killed and the lives he’s ruined as the Winter Soldier, and it doesn’t take much to tip the scale from believing his life to be worthwhile because he can still do good things, to believing himself to be worthless (and his continued livelihood to be an offense to the people he’s harmed) when he fails to accomplish the redemptive tasks he’s set out for himself. When he fails to meet his own moral standards, he beats himself up over it — sometimes literally, by putting himself in situations where the bad guys will take care of the punching for him. His self-worth is tenuous, and it’s not hard to send him spiraling into a broody mess at the back of a bar.

Bucky can be patient and even-tempered when he’s not emotionally invested in a situation. He’s a well-trained spy, and he knows better than to flinch at every little thing. However,  once he is emotionally invested, he is notably prone to making egregiously bad decisions. Emotion-driven, impulsive, and with a temper to match, he reacts badly when his loved ones are in danger. He lets anger drive him and acts without consideration of long-term consequences. He doesn’t like to hold back and wait; he wants to do something, and do it himself, and he doesn’t want other people taking care of things for him. Because of his guilt complex, it’s important to him that he take responsibility for fixing all his own mistakes on himself, sometimes beyond the point of reason. When he’s on trial for treason, he reacts to his enemies’ threats by breaking out of jail to help save Natasha and Sam himself, because he can’t just sit back and let his friends handle it, even though his friends are superheroes who handle this kind of thing every day. When Natasha is kidnapped and her kidnapper gives Bucky a hard drive to implant in his own brain to get her back, Bucky ignores the valid advice of his friends and colleagues, steals the hard drive, escapes, kidnaps a scientist, and brainwashes himself into becoming a murderer again, on the off chance that playing by the kidnapper’s rules will get Natasha back. He gets desperate under that kind of stress and starts acting without thinking.

Of course, sometimes he doesn’t need anybody’s help to not think things through. Bucky is very good at the first couple steps of a plan, intricately navigating short-term goals like surviving prison or breaking out of said prison when survival looks impossible, but not great at considerations like said prison being in the middle of Siberia in winter and him not having a jacket, let alone a means of transport. He can take out five bad guys with a helicopter because that’s an effective way to take out five bad guys, but he might well fail to consider whether he needed that helicopter to get home. Surviving so many things has made him a little cocky about what he can get through by sheer force of will — and so far he’s usually been right, but that doesn’t mean it’s a smart way to go about things. Bucky, no is a common sentiment amongst those who know him, and on more than a few occasions he’s been lucky to have someone around to save his ass. Good thing he’s cute.

When things are going well, though, Bucky does have a lighter side to him. His sense of humor is more subtly sarcastic than in his teenage years, characterized by shit-talking with his brothers at arms, casual flirting, and occasionally saying things he knows will get him slapped. (Making Natasha shoulder-punch him is one of many joys in his life.) There’s a certain mischief to him when he’s happy, a little thrill-seeking and risk-taking edge to his joy that brings to mind the catty, rambunctious young man he used to be, albeit only rarely. It takes a little coaxing these days to get him to stop brooding and start enjoying things, but the potential is there, if not always the desire.

While Bucky cleans up well for serious spy business, he is actually the least pretentious person. He is intelligent, adaptable, and capable of lying with the best of them, but he doesn’t feel the need to present himself as classy or eloquent on a day-to-day basis. While he’s cocky as a joke, he doesn’t have much of an actual ego, either; he’s completely content to be the nagging spy house-husband in his relationship with Natasha, calling to see when she’s coming home and what she wants for dinner and how her interrogations went that day. Simple domestic moments like that appeal to him in the midst of his high-octane spy life, and neither aspect of his life is ill-suited to his personality. He likes long odds, he likes adrenaline, he likes having a job where he gets to backflip through secret terrorist compounds and dodge bullets, but he also likes pancakes and baseball and hanging around the house in his pajamas with his girlfriend eating take-out on their days off. Bucky tells Natasha they’re the same sort, he’s just better at hiding it than she is — and that’s true to the extent that, despite all appearances, he is capable of thinking in just as tortuous and duplicitous ways as she is and he is no less dangerous. (He may not be a killer on first instinct anymore, but if you back him into a corner, you’re not going to like what you find.) But Bucky is also just a more casual person, unbothered by the contrast between being a super-spy and just being Some Guy — which works to his advantage, really, because it’s easy to underestimate him.

Morality has never been Bucky’s strong suit. That’s more Steve’s thing, to the point that Bucky has taken to referring to the better part of his own nature as his inner Steve. When faced with tough situations, he tends to ask himself what Steve would do, and try his best to act accordingly. Being mocked and/or beaten by his guards in prison? Steve wouldn’t snap and wipe the floor with them, so Bucky doesn’t. He uses Steve’s example as a method of self-control, because he respects Steve and still looks up to him as a role model after all this time. He acknowledges that Steve has a stronger moral compass than him, and knowing the man helps him map out his own morality. This works out less well for him in complex moral situations, though; when he asks himself what Steve would do, Bucky doesn’t always have an answer. He struggles, and while he spent several years rising above his own doubts to be a perfectly good Captain America himself, as of his current canon point, he’s decided he just isn’t cut out for it. He’s always been better at doing the dirty work and letting somebody else have the spotlight, and at this point in his life he’s coming to accept that about himself. The moral high ground isn’t where he belongs.

When it comes down to it, Bucky is just not necessarily a good person. He tells Natasha she’s the only one who understands that, and it’s easy to see how people might forget, given that he usually comes off as the kind of guy whose heart is in the right place. And honestly, it is, more often than even he believes. But that isn’t all there is to him. He’s not naive about the way the world works; he’s been a trained killer since he was 15 — the US Army made him that, the Soviets just made him better — and he is very familiar with the moral grey area in which espionage necessarily takes place. He killed plenty of people for his country during wartime; he may deeply despise the things he did as the Winter Soldier, being brainwashed into fighting for the wrong side and killing noncombatants as often as not, but not every kill he makes weighs on him as heavily. He doesn’t kill when he doesn’t have to, he chooses not to work as an assassin anymore, but he has fewer qualms about the use of lethal force than ninety percent of the superheroes he works with. Most heroes in his universe don’t use guns; Bucky not only does, but doesn’t understand why they don’t, because to him the threat of lethal force is warranted when the people you’re fighting are using the same, and he thinks of combat in too practical terms to deny himself an obvious advantage. Those who can’t kill will always be at the mercy of those who can, and although Bucky’s moral compass is definitely too strong to take that sentiment into supervillain territory at this point, he doesn’t pull his punches either. If he can subdue someone without killing them, great; if not, that’s just the way it goes sometimes. Protecting innocent people is a lot more important to him than protecting his enemies. Though distinctly less mercenary than, say, Wolverine, Bucky doesn’t feel obligated to be kind to people who are trying to kill him or anyone else. He isn’t going to hesitate to kill a terrorist who’s pointing a rifle at him nor lose much sleep over blowing up a prison full of old enemies who’ve been dropping him in death-traps all week. Honestly, he’s got plenty to feel guilty over already.

Being aware (and even complicit in) the moral ambiguity of his line of work doesn’t mean he’s not conflicted or critical of it, though. At this point in his canon, he’s gone back to working with SHIELD and being a part of the international espionage scene. His goals are personal, he was trying to keep machinations that he set in motion from harming innocent people, but he’s not blind to the fact that SHIELD is a player in a larger game that involves unsavory compromises, like allowing child assassin training camps to operate unchecked for decades because they turn out good recruits. Although he doesn’t find out about that specific indiscretion until after this canon point, he’s not surprised when he does; he knows SHIELD aren’t saints. He’s willing to take Fury to task for it when it does come to light, though, because the things SHIELD is willing to turn the other cheek to are not things he believes should be left unchecked. He’s been through the ringer of governmental manipulation, molded into a weapon by the US before he was old enough to vote and then brainwashed into the perfect killing machine by the USSR, so to say he has some strong feelings about the subject would be an understatement. He believes in the idea of his country, but not necessarily the actions of his government, nor any other government for that matter. Bucky doesn’t think he has all the answers when it comes to these kinds of issues, though; he has a lot of feelings, but given the kinds of things he’s done in his past, he can’t find a lot of room to judge either.

Due to his background in brainwashing, issues of personal agency and choice hit home for Bucky from both a wider political perspective and a smaller, more intimate one. Bucky wants people to be free to make their own choices, and he’s capable of taking even his own emotions out of the equation to allow that to happen. As we see during Black Widow: The Name of the Rose, he’s sensitive to the fact that Natasha has her own demons to face. He doesn’t ask her about it, he doesn’t try to stop her, he just follows her far enough to ask how he can help, and even if he doesn’t like her answer, he is willing to step back and do what she asks because it’s important that she do some things herself. From someone who usually runs straight into a fight with anything that threatens his friends, this is a pretty distinct display of reservedness, and it shows that while Bucky is deeply protective of his loved ones, he is also respectful of other people’s agency, less interested in fighting people’s battles for them and more interested in supporting people so they can fight those battles themselves.

As of his current canon point, though, Bucky has had a major blow to his confidence in his ability to help anyone. For the course of his most recent story arc, Bucky thought he had found his path to redemption, not by idly submitting to punishment for his crimes, but by using his skills as a spy to prevent more harm from coming to innocent people. He was chasing ghosts of his past with the intent of stopping them, and even if that may not have made up for the bad things he’d done, at least he would have been doing some good to help offset all the bad. But that backfired. While he did stop three of the assassins he’d trained years before, the fourth came after not just him, but the people he loved — specifically Natasha Romanoff, who was brainwashed into killing someone she cared about and then had all her memories of her relationship with Bucky wiped as a result of inadequately-justified fridging tropes being close to Bucky. Given Natasha’s parallel history of brainwashing and how hard they’ve both worked to reclaim their personal agency and control over their lives in the aftermath, there’s not much that would be a bigger violation than being brainwashed again, regardless of which memories she lost. And in Bucky’s mind, that’s his fault. This horrible thing happened to the person he loved most because he involved her in his redemption quest and that made her a target — as if Natasha Romanoff wasn’t already a target for a thousand different people for a thousand different reasons all her own. It’s a not an entirely rational conclusion to come to, and Natasha herself would probably smack him upside the head and call him an idiot for it if she knew, but she doesn’t remember him right now, and without that anchor, he’s fallen into another depressive, self-destructive spiral. He’s convinced himself it’s better if Natasha doesn’t remember him because he’s done nothing but get her into trouble as long as she’s known him. The combination of losing her support and being wracked with guilt over what’s happened to her has created a perfect storm of self-hatred for Bucky; right now he considers himself a danger to people, unable to truly help anyone and more likely to get them killed, and he had enough guilt issues to contend with already. As a result, he’s turning into his own worst enemy again, drinking and fighting and wandering adrift through the remnants of his life. He’s reached a low point, and it will take something big to snap him out of it. Like, say, consignment.

✖ Character Powers:

Bucky is 100% baseline human, but he ranks amongst Marvel's top assassins in a world where superpowers are par for the course, so he's a pretty damn good fighter. He is proficient in hand-to-hand combat as well as armed — guns, knives, poisons, explosives, weapons of opportunity, whatever. An expert marksman, his weapon of choice is a long-range rifle, but he has extensive and varied training in the use if lethal force. While his fighting style is certainly less graceful than Natasha's, for example, there is a similar gymnastic quality to it that suggests more than your average level of agility. Combined with his stealth, he's a pretty effective killing machine, able to avoid detection and make assassinations look like accidents.

Outside of straight-up assassination, Bucky has mastered the usual hallmarks of spycraft. He's an excellent actor, multilingual, proficient in code-making and breaking, resourceful, observant, and practiced in deception. A virtual ghost, he's known for his ability to blend into his surroundings, slip past security unnoticed, and walk away without anyone sparing him a second thought. While a little iffy on the popular applications of technology, he is excellent at security systems, bypassing even SHIELD's with relative ease, although his general hacking ability is only about middling. (He slept through the 90s and 2000s, ok, give him a break.) Instead, his methods tend to be a little old-school, Cold War techniques that involve ingenuity more so than technology. Similarly, his Soviet training ran a full gamut of old-school survivalism; while wandering out into the middle of Siberia without a jacket is still not a brilliant plan, he can survive in harsh conditions with minimal supplies, because Mother Russia was pretty darwinist in its training methods.

In addition, now that he has all his memories back, Bucky is difficult to mind-read or mentally control. Recovering from all that brainwashing and amnesia has left his mental landscape a mass of scar tissue, so while he has no supernatural defenses (just your average mental defense training, telepathy being a known threat to spies in his universe), his head is too much of a mess for most to get a good read on. Which is great for him, because man does he not like people in his head!

Finally, Bucky has been given the Infinity Formula used by Nick Fury to prolong his life, which slows the aging process down to nothing if taken in repeated doses over the course of many years. Bucky has only had one dose, though, so it just makes him a little more likely to survive life-threatening injuries, and it could well wear off and kill him in a few years. Because making Steve watch Bucky die never gets old, I guess.

CHARACTER SAMPLES.
✖ First Person POV: These all ended up quite short, but:

• With Mulder
• With Jack Benjamin
• With Hope Estheim
• With Clan-Clan Aisha
• With Winnifred.

✖ Third Person POV:

He’d figured it would be Fury. Not this soon, of course; Fury had always been good at giving him a minute — a week, a month, six months to do his thing, even if his thing meant drifting to a safehouse in Minsk and from there to the back corner table of wood-paneled bar in the basement off an alleyway, where he’d sunk beneath a dim haze of cigarette smoke and bad vodka and disappeared. (There had been a crumbling woman in a home off Gorky Park whose thick fake nails had bit sharp into his cheek when he’d told her that her brother hadn’t committed suicide in 1971, and he’d thought pain would be better than numbness, but it didn’t feel like closure; it just felt like pain.) Sooner or later, though, a certain shadow would cast over his table, drop a file folder beside his shot glass, and tell him to get back to work.

This isn’t exactly that.

There is a file. On a tablet, his face alight with information as he thumbs through, silent and sharp-eyed behind the swirling remnants of liquor adrenaline-flushed from his veins. The Cosmic Demolition Crew. Intergalactic clean-up. World-destroyers is what they didn't spell out in so many words, but between the videos they show him and the videos they don't, the intel they provide slotting neatly into place between words unspoken, it's enough. This is real. This is happening. Of course it is. And why not him? James Barnes, resident expert in destroying everything you touch. He ought to start teaching classes. (He ought to never touch anything again.)

“So what d’you say, sport?” The man opposite him feigns warmth well enough, but there's something off about his understated smile, lips too wide and eyes drooping too low, and when he cracks his neck it's like adjusting the folds of a human-shaped suit. 

“Go to hell," murmered low as one hand rakes back through his hair, metal fingers cold against scalp. This is real. Jesus. He can't do this right now, he can't - he wants to crawl back into his hole and never come out. 

“Now,” tsk, “There’s no need to be like that. You’d be surprised the things we can do in exchange for your cooperation—“

“This isn’t an exchange.”

“—Or your noncooperation,” he adds with a weighty incline of the head. One hand moves to smush a bit of cheek skin back into place. "Don't underestimate us, James. Do you really want that on your head, too?"

He doesn't answer. A hand drags down through twisting features. In 1971 alone he killed seventeen people. Seventeen. What's a few billion more, right? Does it matter if he tries to save anyone?

"Think about it. We could fix everything, James. Make it all like it was before." A beat, careful. "We could give her her memories back."

He stops.

He could have everything back. Just one deal, one planet, a few plant and animal species in a place nobody knows or misses with even a pale shadow of the intensity that he does the curve of her smile or the smell of her hair after a firefight —

—And she would hunt down and annihilate the kind of people who thought her mind was anyone's to alter but her own. There are a lot of things people don't understand about them.

Conveniently.

The hand over his mouth disguises the strained flicker of a smile.

(Maybe he can't save anyone, but destroy? Well.)

"Alright. I'll come. But you're going to do me one better."

CHARACTER ITEMS.
✖ Pick a Team: Red team
✖ Mission Freebie: A stack of pancakes no, uh. The Cosmic Cube please. :)
✖ Personal Item or Weapon: M4A1 Carbine rifle with night-vision sight

✖ Character Inventory:

1 black impact-resistant tactical suit
1 black light-weight sweater
1 pair black combat boots
1 pair black gloves
1 diver’s watch with stop watch
1 utility belt with holsters
1 thigh pouch
1 thigh knife-holster
1 double-sided shoulder holster
1 set of socks/underwear/undershirt
1 metal left arm, painted with Captain America’s shield design.

This bionic arm responds to Bucky’s neural impulses like a real arm, allowing him a similar or greater level of dexterity. It's made of an unnamed alloy comparable to Captain America's shield, allowing him to do dramatic things like punch said shield and decimate other metal objects, but it is not actual vibranium and therefore can take damage. His metal arm has super strength and speed, built-in EMP capability, metal detector and x-ray deflection, and holographic capabilities that make it look and feel like a real arm, although he doesn't use the holographic features all the time, so I assume they are power-sinks or otherwise impractical for constant use. The arm is easily detachable. (As a note, I’m fine with any of these capabilities being nixed if that makes the arm seem too much of a weapon vs. armor. It’s not clear what capabilities Bucky's arm still has as of his canon point; he hasn’t used any of the weaponized elements on-panel since his last arm was destroyed during his most recent “death.” However, he’s working with Nick Fury, who made the original EMP-capable, holographic, x-ray deflecting arm in the first place, so it seems reasonable to infer that Fury didn’t give him a downgrade.)

Confiscated:

3 pistols
4 knives
2 smoke bombs
1 spool wire
1 set lock picks
1 black domino mask