@spectter March. It was a boiling point, since the moment that he’d woken up in the new world. The same world, but it felt so new, he could barely see the time that he remembered under all of the technology, all of the changes. The layout of the Brooklynn streets was still the same, and he’d come home because it felt familiar in a way that no other place managed, but it still was different. And in the first nine days of his fifth March out of the ice, it grated at his body. Every reminder, brushed against him like a rusty file dragged across his nails. Not pain, not that. Just a grate sensation on his nerves the itch he couldn’t scratch, the knowledge that there was something missing- March 10. Five years after he woke up from the ice. Five and half years since Bucky died. Bucky’s birthday. The whole city isn’t right, and Bucky is dead and gone, and there’s nothing, nothing, N O T H I N G he can do about it. He wakes up at three am and goes out into the city and runs and runs and he can’t stop, doesn’t even know which way he’s going until his legs ache and he’s back in the old streets of Brooklyn. Where he once got cornered in every alley, pulled out of each one by a familiar arm around his shoulder- “Hey, no, stop!” Everything stops. That voice, he’d never forget that voice. Steve turns on the points of his feet, goes tearing back down through the streetlamp lit sidewalk, finding the alley he’d just past. The bricks have unfamiliar graffiti on them, there’s some Chinese laundry where Mrs Johnson’s grocery used to be, and it’s impossible, it’s impossible- There’s the goon, dressed in typical gangerster sloopy clothes, with someone much smaller pinned against eh trash bin, another figure struggling to rise from the ground. All Steve sees is Bucky’s face, Bucky’s hands, shoving at the ma lashing out, trying to get free without any success. “Hey! Why don’t you pick on someone you’re own size!”
