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[He's a ghost.

He's a ghost or a ghost story, and it's funny in the saddest way because he is. He's Steve's personal ghost. When Steve woke up from being frozen and they played that baseball game - a game he went to with Bucky - he heard Bucky's laugh, and him yelling you got a lousy pitching arm! at just the right moment.

He swore it was real, would swear it up and down. When he slept, he dreamed of Bucky, heard him yell when he did something particularly stupid, or laugh when Steve said something sharp and funny. But that was weaker and weaker, his ghost was fading, the haunting ending. He thought maybe the loneliness would win one day, and that he would finally be able to sleep through the night without the bands of pressure from the feeling around his ribcage, worse than any bout of asthma.

But then Bucky came back.

He's a ghost, Natasha had told him, but Steve isn't any kind of fool. He knows the inside of Bucky's head better than Bucky ever did, and no matter what Hydra put in there, he knows that Bucky won't leave where he is (because for better or worse, he's not a mission anymore) and that if he's getting his memories back, there's a few places he'll be sure to go.

That's why Steve steps into the diner down in the old neighborhood, the one that hasn't looked like it's changed at all in the past seventy years (and with the way kids dress these days, Steve thinks it looks pretty much the same if a little like Howard Stark got a hold of fashion and the girls have tattoos), and he orders two pancake breakfasts.

And then he waits.

(Maybe he's done this 15 times in the last three weeks.)]

[When New York fell and America rebuilt it, slowly, bringing the streets of Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn back with the help of the great industrialists of the age and not the communist hand that the Soviet Union offered, it was more than just a blow.

And then people started fleeing there, political refugees.

Some of them more important than others.

He's been scrubbed clean.

They tried. They thought that they had cleared out everything, all the remnants of his patriotism, all the remnants of his morals. They found him wrapped around his best friend, both of them alive, somehow, miraculously, tied together. The other man, his arm had suffered irreparable damage, so they took off the bulk, and replaced it, but the good captain was almost whole when they dragged them back.

Steve Rogers, the great American hero, Captain America, wiped clean of all of that, loyal to the bone. They could not wipe away his loyalty but they could reroute it. And James Barnes, equally deadly. This is their first mission together since they found them, the first time they woke them up at the same time, and they're sending them to New York through a circuitous route: Paris then England, then back to New York to find their target and take them out. They speak English flawlessly. The pass for Americans. They don't even really have names for each other, because everything they are has been implanted.

It's been a few days when they finally reach London, and the larger of the two men finally speaks to say more than just confirmation of actions. The silence has given him time to think, which is never comfortable. He feels protective in a strange way to the man who is with him. He can't imagine why. He has no illusions about who he is. He's read the files.]

Have you been to London?

[He does not know his circumstances. He doesn't know anything except that the shape his face takes when he's sleeping is familiar.]