As written by Ordis.

Searching

When Steve sees the news footage, he's chopping up onions for chicken soup.

The onions never do finish getting chopped.

Steve has no idea who the guy (partner?) was that Ms Susan Boyle's newest employee briefly manacled to a crate and coldly threatened to shoot between the eyes, but there's no mistaking Bucky's face. He's in downtown, Washington, twenty minutes later.

The trail's cold. It's disappointing, but not surprising.

He knows how fast Bucky can move.

It's still more than he's had in weeks. He introduces himself, and once they've gotten over the fact that Captain America is interested in this, they're very helpful.

"I hired him when I saw him turn down money for saving a kid," Boyle tells him. "He didn't talk much. Sorry I don't know more. Was he a criminal?"

"He is a friend," Steve says. "Was he okay?"

"He was better, once he had the job. Lived on the street for a while though, in a box. He used to go through garbage, sometimes, looking for food."

Steve's never been more grateful for the wasteful tendency of people nowadays to throw out perfectly good food just because they don't feel like it. An odd pain mingles with the gratitude though, inside, because Bucky would never have let that happen to him. Bucky had never let him go hungry, even during the worst days of the orphanage. He needs to find him. If he'd come down this street a day ago, he would have.

"There are worse things in life than living on the streets for a while, man," Sam tells him, when he gets there.

It's true. Steve knows it.

It's just that he let Bucky fall, and he didn't look for his body. If he had, could he have stopped HYDRA hurting him? If he'd fallen, would Bucky have left him?

You're my mission.

Steve doesn't know. He does know Bucky is his friend, and he doesn't want him starving, cold, and alone.

He searches the buses, the surrounding area, and four train lines.

Nothing.

He has better luck when he asks what Bucky used to do each day.

The library staff are helpful, like the police. They let him access Bucky's search history. It turns out to be a simple one. Clean. It has too much of Steve and not enough anything else. Bucky has watched nearly every YouTube clip there is of him, and read every news article, every blog post, and clicked nearly every photo. It's both worrying and oddly touching in a way that leaves him aching somewhere inside.

Why didn't you come to me? How much do you remember?

"Anything?" Sam asks.

"No. I'll keep looking," Steve says. His smile feels wrong on his face.

It probably looks so too, because Sam claps him on the shoulder, and tells him that that's exactly what they'll do, and they'll find him too.

They search all evening. The soup's burnt when they get back, and when Steve lifts the lid off, the smoke alarm goes off. Sam blames Steve. But since he also turns off the alarms and opens a window while Steve scrubs at the blackened mess inside his pot for twenty minutes or so (he gives up, then, and puts the thing in the sink to soak) Steve doesn't mind. They sleep with the window open. Who's going to rob him?

A part of Steve wonders why Bucky doesn't come to him. Wonders if Bucky would actually prefer it if Steve never found him, and if he's trying to leave the past behind.

Then he thinks of Bucky, on the street, and he thinks, when he finds him, he'll ask.

He returns the next day. Keeps searching.

Bucky doesn't return to Susan's warehouse, or to any of the streets Steve looks in. No one's seen him. He's starting to wonder if he's still in this city.

Where to go next, though, if he's not?

There are too many people, too many places Bucky could be.

That's pessimism talking though, not Steve. He gives himself a mental shake.

He's low on options, but he hasn't used up all of them, yet. Two more days. That's what he'll give himself. If he can't find Bucky then, he'll see if he can call in some favors with people who might have the sort of tech SHIELD did back before Steve shut them down. He's not going to let HYDRA find Bucky first. He knows one person, at least, who can probably do that. The problem is, he's also pretty sure Tony Stark, genius, billionaire, super hero, and Howard Stark's only son, doesn't know he exists. Still. What's the harm in trying? The worst he can do is be turned away.

Two days pass.

"I think he's moved on," Sam says.

"Yeah," Steve agrees.

They're both tired.

"Where to next?" Sam asks.

"New York."

"New York," Sam echoes, with the skepticism of someone who knows that everyone (like Bucky) knows that fully half the superheroes in America seem to live there.

It's a bad spot to hide. It's a bad spot to attack too.

Steve's not sure why so many super-villains do it anyway.

"New York," Steve says again, with confidence. More than he feels.

Sam raises an eyebrow at him. Steve steels himself, and squares his shoulders.

"We're going to Stark Tower."

Because he needs to do something more than looking in all the wrong streets at all the wrong times, and while he doesn't know Stark at all, maybe, just maybe, appealing on the grounds of sharing a friendship with Howard will be enough.