The Other Rogers
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Everything will change
Nothin' stays the same
And nobody here's perfect
Oh but everyone's to blame

🎧 Listen Here

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Set in Bucharest after The Winter Soldier, but prior to Civil War. Bucky is hiding in a crowded city, trying just to exist, to understand who he is while The Winter Soldier still tugs at him from inside. He remembers bits of things, Brooklyn, the war, Steve-- You. Steve's younger sibling, a fellow Howling Commando, forgotten by history, never enough-- never in the headlines or the pictures, stolen by HYDRA before him. Everyone thought you were dead.

Except now here you are... and your eyes are dead, just like his.

House Keeping
LIKE HISTORICALLY I KNOW IT SHOULD BE A MAN, but I made it anypov anyways, be a lady Howling Commando, IT!

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Thank you Luan-Universe for the request! I was a little overwhelmed on how to start this one at first, but once I got going this one was effortless to write. I love the idea of Steve's forgotten sibling out there just trying to be cool like their big brother and ending up just like Bucky. My heart.

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Bucharest was a city that lived and breathed, a steady rhythm. Sometimes it felt a little like back home– the way New York had been so full of people that someone could turn invisible, like a ghost shifting into fog. That’s what he was here. Bucharest was the fog, and he was a ghost, a shell– barely a man at all. He hid in plain sight, a baseball cap on his shaggy, unkempt dark hair, a hoodie half zipped over a plain white t-shirt, nondescript jeans. Look like anyone, like a faceless, nameless man. Bucharest didn’t care who you were, and , Bucky needed that.

He didn’t know people here, he didn’t go to the same food stalls more than once or twice, he didn’t make friends– didn’t want them even if he could find it in himself to make them. He had an apartment with a shitty lock that stuck and a view of a crumbling courtyard, moss creeping in through the unsealed windowpane. He paid in cash, avoided view, slept for three hours at a time, and watched himself in every reflection– like a stranger he couldn’t trust.

Even now, he wasn’t sure if he was Bucky Barnes or some stranger wearing his face. Steve seemed sure, he’d seemed so sure– but Bucky couldn’t quite make the connection that Steve could.

The Winter Soldier hadn’t disappeared just because HYDRA had. He’d just gone quiet. There were times Bucky could almost pretend he had buried that part of himself for good– that the chair, the triggers, the kills, the blood, had all been left, buried back in Siberia. But all it took was one noise, one bad dream, one guy bumping his shoulder without meaning to and he felt all that training rise to the surface. Attack, neutralize, kill.The man in the newspaper wasn’t dead. He was him. Was him? Is him?

The truth of it never stopping itching under his skin, like some virus he had to carve out of himself. The Winter Soldier was always right beneath the surface.

But other things... softer things, made him feel more like Bucky. The small memories that had started to collect at the edge of the fog. Some came in flashes, others bled in slow, seeping over the surface of his mind. Steve, Brooklyn, the war. The Howling Commandos. {{user}}. Steve’s younger sibling, in some ways so like Steve– in others? {{user}} wasn’t born skinny and small like Steve, though god knew their ma had worried herself sick during the pregnancy they would be. No, they came out normal, healthy, and with all the fight that Steve had right from the jump. Still, they were younger, always a step behind Steve and Bucky, louder than Steve, a little sharper. The only person that could punch Bucky in the face, and an hour later be buying him a drink. They weren’t in the duo that was Steve and Bucky, no matter how hard they tried, they were always left behind.

They weren’t Steve. And the world never let them forget it. {{User}} went off the war when Bucky did, trailing after him while Steve was becoming Captain America. They’d been a commando with him. He remembered that. Them, so young and full of fire, but even then– always on the periphery, never in a headline, always out of frame or cut off in a picture. History didn’t need to erase them. It just didn’t bother to include them... The younger sibling of Captain America, never ever able to live up to Steve Rogers name.

He thought about {{user}} more than he wanted to these days. Not out of nostalgia, but out of guilt...

He remembered Steve storming the HYDRA facility, dragging commando’s out of cages, and as Bucky tallied the faces that left each cage– {{user}} wasn’t there. He’d known immediately, they’d been taken while all of them were right there trying to get break out. No one noticed until far too late.

The paper bag crinkled in his hand as he tugged his cap lower, taking his stairs two at a time, not out of any real urgency, just habit. Never be in the open for too long. The street food in the bag was hot, grease spreading over the brown paper appealingly.

His lock stuck– like always, and he had to force the damn thing. The door slowly creaked opened and his boots crossed into the dark apartment.

And then he stopped cold.

Someone sat at his table. Motionless, so still it was inhuman. They wore all black but tucked in the shadows he couldn’t tell if they were armed. It didn’t matter, he knew this was a threat immediately. The posture too rigid, too still, something coiled in his gut– a recognition, The Winter Soldier roiled beneath his skin. Soldat. It whispered as he stared with his piecing blue eyes. His hand shot out, turning on the light switch- and then he saw their face. A face he hadn’t seen in 70 years.

{{user}}.

No older than the last time he saw them, but shaper, colder. Their eyes met his like steel meeting steel- no warmth, no flicker of recognition, just calculation. They were sizing him up.

The last time he’d seen them in that fucking cell they’d been laughing– trying to make a stupid joke to lessen the stale air of fear everyone else had felt. They’d shot him a smile that had been infectious. Maybe history forgot them– but he didn’t.

But now they looked like him...

Like what HYDRA turned him into. A ghost. A weapon. He swallowed hard and The Winter Soldier clawed at his insides, threat, neutralize, KILL!.

“I thought you were dead.” His voice was low, rough — like it hurt to say it.

“Papers said you were dead.”

Papers had said he was dead, too.