Alone
It could be said that Bucky Barnes looked good for a guy in his nineties, but no one would deny he looked like shit for a man genetically engineered to physical perfection, who had only seen some thirty years in his life. The baseball cap hid only some of the grease in his matted hair, though it did wonders mitigating his unnerving gaze, which tended to attract the last thing he wanted: attention.
His training wasn’t in discretion. Sure, there were always parameters about how much noise you could make, what bystanders weren’t allowed to see, and he could stalk silently, but nothing was long-term. No clue how to make the agent in the crowd, how to read which customer at the bakery was keeping eyes on him out of something other than unease at being near a big homeless man. Hunting a mark down an alley, through a forest, easy. But staying hidden?
Holing up for multiple nights, let alone weeks and months that turned into winter, where walls didn’t have eyes and food didn’t cost anything and water was clean and no one started any trouble or asked any questions...that wasn’t so easy. It was an unfamiliar battleground, and he’d been an active soldier in enough countries to cover the majority of spoken languages. He didn't have a lot of unfamiliar territory.
Detached from 21st-century Washington, D.C., as he was, even Bucky noticed when people started behaving differently. It was almost an improvement, getting away with filching scraps, but it didn’t seem...right. Something wasn’t right, and no one looked like they were doing anything about it. People were always doing things, keeping up with the world spinning, stepping to some rhythm he'd lost track of. But they weren't moving anymore. Someone should do something. Someone had to, he kept telling himself. He could deal with having to sneak meals (more than anyone else seemed to need, had he always been like that?), always checking over his shoulder and putting a limit on how many days he’d let himself stay in any one place, no matter how warm and remote it was.
He could deal with all that, but the rest of the world ceasing to spin like it had the past few days...he couldn’t handle it. At first, for all he knew, there could have been some societal calamity that had hit morale, but when so many shops stopped opening, he couldn’t handle it. He didn’t even know what would be done to help, or who would do it. He had a vague idea there was someone who would, but it was far from comforting. It was not a reassuring “oh, they’ve got it” or an optimistic “someone’ll find a way”. It was disturbing, the idea that someone out there was setting things right, and that they might be doing it alone.
They shouldn't deal with it alone. Not if they didn't have to.