Origin

Before there was the Winter Soldier, there was a kid from Brooklyn.

His name was James Buchanan Barnes — Bucky, to everyone who knew him — and he grew up on the same narrow streets as a skinny, stubborn boy named Steve Rogers. Steve was small and always sick and never, ever backed down from a fight he couldn't win. And Bucky, taller and stronger and always somehow in the right place at the right time, kept getting Steve out of those fights. That was who they were to each other: Steve was the heart, and Bucky was the hand that kept the heart safe.

When World War II came, Bucky shipped out with the 107th Infantry Regiment, fighting through France and Italy with his rifle and his courage and his Brooklyn grin. Steve, meanwhile, was being turned away from every recruitment office in New York — too small, too sickly, not what they were looking for. Bucky wrote him letters. Steve kept trying.

And then one day in Italy, something went very wrong.

Bucky's unit was captured by agents of HYDRA, a terrible organization that used science as a weapon. They took Bucky to a hidden laboratory run by a scientist named Arnim Zola. What happened in that laboratory was frightening — Zola injected Bucky with an early version of the Super Soldier Serum, the same kind of formula that would one day make Steve Rogers into Captain America. It should have ended Bucky. Instead, something stubborn in his Brooklyn bones held on, and he survived.

He was still in that laboratory, not quite himself, when the door burst open and Captain America came striding through. Steve Rogers — now tall and broad-shouldered and wearing a starred helmet — had walked into a HYDRA base alone to rescue his regiment. And when the men filed out of their cells, Bucky stumbled into Steve's arms, laughing in disbelief.

"You're wearing tights," Bucky said.

"I wear whatever I want," Steve told him.

They fought side by side after that, the two Brooklyn boys, until one winter day on an Alpine train when everything changed again. HYDRA struck. Bucky fell from the open side of a railcar, reaching back toward Steve's outstretched hand — and then he was gone, tumbling down into the white mountains far, far below.

Steve lunged and missed. He lunged and missed. And the train roared on.

Here is the part that is very, very hard: HYDRA found Bucky in the snow of those mountains. And instead of helping him, they did something worse. They replaced his left arm with a metal prosthetic. They erased his memory, piece by piece, using cold and chemicals and ten terrible Russian words that, when spoken in the right order, could switch off every thought Bucky Barnes had ever had and leave only a silent, obedient weapon behind.

They froze him. They thawed him. They sent him out across the world as a secret called the Winter Soldier, a ghost no one could catch or explain. And then they froze him again. This happened for seventy years — while the world went on without him, while Steve Rogers slept in Arctic ice of his own, while Brooklyn grew and changed and forgot them both.

But here is what HYDRA did not understand: you can bury something, but you cannot destroy it. Underneath all the cold and all the forgetting, Bucky Barnes was still there. Small and stubborn, like a Brooklyn boy who never gave up. Waiting, somewhere very deep inside, for someone to call him by his real name.

And one day, someone would.