It was taking too long. Days stretched into weeks, and while Steve often had the feeling he was getting close, none of his leads ended up panning out. Still he never gave up hope, no matter how disheartening his search got. The Winter Soldier had avoided capture for decades, and if he didn’t want to be found then he wasn’t going to be easy to track down; Steve just hoped that maybe Bucky might want to.

He had gotten through to him. Maybe it was only for a moment, and maybe it wasn’t much, but Steve knew there was something there, some sense of recognition, and something like that was hard to ignore. With nobody giving orders anymore what else did Bucky have? Steve had given him a crumb, a hint of a different life, a hint of who he really was and maybe now both of them were searching for James Buchanan Barnes.

Sitting on a bench in the park, Steve flipped through the notebook he carried dedicated solely to his search. He had told Sam to take the day off, that he only planned to go over everything again and regroup before starting the next leg of the search, and for the moment he was enjoying the solitude until he felt that strange niggling at the back of his neck, that sense that he was being watched. He raised his head to look around.