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May. 3rd, 2016 05:25 amThe Basics
Canon: Marvel 616
Character Name: James "Bucky" Barnes
Character Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
anotheroldsoldier
Player Name: Nekky
Best contact method: Plurk @![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
nekky or AIM @ xnecronomical
Character Details
Canon Point: Post-Siege
Species: Human
Timeline of Important Events in Canon History:
Born in 1925, Shelbyville, Indiana, to George and Winifred Barnes. Older brother to Rebecca Barnes.
Mother dies at an unknown young age, leaving him to be raised by his father. They moved around because George was in the Army.
Age 12, his father dies in a parachuting accident on base, in what was supposed to be just training.
The Major sends his sister to boarding school and keeps Bucky on at the base. He's raised here for 4 years at Fort Lehigh, Virginia.
Age 16, he gets into one too many fights, and the Major sends him overseas to Britain for SAS training.
After his training, he's shipped back to the States.
He meets Steve Rogers, and becomes partner to Captain America as his "sidekick", Bucky.
They fight in WWII together, and with other teams, such as the Invaders, which is how Bucky met his best friend Toro Raymond.
Months before the end of the war, Bucky "dies" in an explosion of a drone plane over the English Channel - he loses his left arm and his body is frozen in the cold water.
His body is found by a Russian submarine and thawed out to test for Captain America's super soldier serum. He manages to be resuscitated, but has no memory and bad brain damage, and lashes out wildly.
They freeze him again until the 50s, when he is thawed, given a mechanical arm, and trained for the KGB as an assassin.
During the 50s, he trains the Black Widow girls, including Natasha Romanoff, whom he falls in love with.
He's frozen again when he starts to disobey orders 4 years after his first thawing.
Until present day, he is thawed and re-brainwashed with a sensory deprivation machine several times over the decades, to go on missions and then to be returned to cryo.
The Winter Soldier is decommissioned in the 80s.
Present day: Aleksander Lukin "inherits" the Winter Soldier, and thaws him out for another mission.
The Winter Soldier shoots the Red Skull in the head, and retrieves the Cube. He kills Jack Monroe and frames him for the Skull's murder. He also kidnaps Sharon Carter to set up Steve, and sets off a bomb in Philadelphia to use the deaths to charge the Cosmic Cube.
He is apprehended by Captain America and the Falcon while transporting the Cosmic Cube on Lukin's orders.
Cap uses the Cosmic Cube in the struggle to wish Bucky's memories back to him. Bucky destroys the Cube in a fit of guilt and anger and vanishes to Camp Lehigh.
Bucky goes off-radar for six months, volunteering in Philly, trailing supervillains and taking out threats.
It's another six months before he works with Steve again to stop a giant robot in London, Bucky comes in to SHIELD, working directly for Nick Fury in secret.
Bucky largely stays out of the superhero civil war, until Steve Rogers is shot on the courthouse steps. He goes after the villains responsible.
Underground, he can't go to the funeral, gets in a bar fight, and decides he's going to kill Tony Stark.
He steals Cap's shield from SHIELD, and ends up fighting his former flame Natasha for it.
He goes after Lukin and the Red Skull while biding his time to get to Tony. Dr. Faustus kidnaps him and Sharon Carter, and he tries to escape. He's apprehended by SHIELD after being rescued by Sam and Natasha.
He escapes SHIELD custody and fights Tony Stark with the intent to kill him. Tony talks him down with a letter from Steve. Bucky agrees to be the new Captain America.
As Cap, Bucky works on a large plot between Lukin, the Red Skull, and some others to ruin the US and foils a presidential assassination plot by Sin, the Skull's daughter.
He fights the Skrull invasion of Earth with a lot of other heroes, and invites the New Avengers to use his apartment as a safehouse, since Norman Osborn has risen to power and the New Avengers are fugitives.
Steve doesn't turn out to be dead. Bucky and Black Widow help to bring him back, and Steve resigns the Captain America title to Bucky.
Osborn attacks Asgard, and Bucky and Steve both join the battle as Captain America. The Superhero Registration Act is abolished, and Bucky is officially inducted as a sanctioned Avenger.
Personality:
The two things that drive James most, serving as his basic motivation for most of his actions, are guilt and redemption. He feels a crushing guilt for the acts committed with his hands as the Winter Soldier, even though he no memory of anything outside what his commanding officers told him, and he wants to make up for those heinous acts, in any possible way he can. He wants to be worthy, of being Captain America and of working with the heroes he's surrounded by. He wants to be a better man.
Either you die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Except for Bucky Barnes, who died a hero and was still twisted into the exact thing he had died to fight - a monster.
Bucky's upbringing contributed a lot to his personality before his 'death'. He was raised within the little microculture of Camp Lehigh, amongst a thousand older 'brothers', appeasing his superior officers like a normal boy would try to appease his parents. He was brash, charming, and beneath it all, angry - having lost his parents young, and having watched them send his sister (his only other family) away to a proper boarding school, he was always full of a rage he couldn't quite quell. It egged him into fighting with the other kids around the base, with other soldiers, usually people much bigger than him, and he nearly always got in trouble for it. The superiors directed this anger by training him, starting at age 16, to join his fellow soldiers in the field, and he took to it like a fish to water. Finally he had direction, and that was important to him, just like being Captain America's partner was important. He wanted to prove his worth, wanted to fit in, wanted to be a part of something. And he did become that hero he wanted to be, to make his father proud. He gave his life in service.
The Russians twisted that when they recovered his broken, frozen body off the bottom of the English Channel. They turned him against his country, made him into nothing. Where Bucky Barnes was a fiercely shining star trying to find his place in the sky, the Winter Soldier was nothing, a ghost, a legend and a killer.
James Buchanan Barnes these days is a mixture of everything he used to be and the weight of the world's expectations for him. At the very heart of it is the man he used to be when he liked himself, the man he used to be that he hates surrounding that, the man he is now and the man he wants to become on top of that. At his core is a genuinely good person - or at least, a person who tries very hard to be good, though he isn't the ideal hero and he knows it. He's still picking up the pieces of himself, finding his footing and learning to live with himself and everything he's done. It isn't easy, but he isn't wholly broken - he's picking himself up and putting himself back together and coming to grips with the world, trying to find his place and who he is now, since he can't be little Bucky Barnes or The Winter Soldier anymore. Steve saved him in a way, but he's also saving himself every day that he keeps moving on, showing a resilience and a strength.
On the surface, Bucky is a gruff, hard sort of man, and can come off as distant or coolly detached at times. He finds it difficult to show affection except with the people he's close to, and he gets right down to business instead of making small talk about the situation. He can be quite sullen, actually, and brooding, with a sort of sadness about him that tends to linger. He isn't exactly knowingly malicious to other people, he just... tends to come off as brusque, clipped, and it's easy to mistake his self-hatred for hatred of other people. But those who know him better, who get in underneath that facade he puts on to conceal his own perceived weaknesses, he's a little awkward, a little quiet. He makes morbid jokes about killing Hitler that other people don't seem to find funny. He tries to do good for the world and for his team to make up for everything he's done in the past. He's awkward around babies and girls.
On the field, he hasn't lost the confidence he had as a teenager, though - he's well trained and he knows it, so he tends to be reckless and do whatever he thinks best at the time instead of waiting for orders. Despite being Captain America now, Bucky is never really the perfect, ideal hero like Steve was; he's more ruthless, more willing to get the job done even if it means getting his hands dirty. That's what he trained for since he was sixteen, and he slips into the role easily, though he shows more restraint in modern times when it comes to killing, likely because of his guilt issues. Lives are not taken lightly, but incapacitating is another story.
It's hard to guess from how Bucky goes on with his life, from how he presents himself to other people, that he actually hates himself more than anyone. He has a lot of self worth issues and guilt issues that come from decades of being a brainwashed KGB killing machine who took a lot of innocent lives at his handlers' behest. He remembers everything, thanks to the Cosmic Cube, for better or worse - this means he remembers most of the war, which were his happy years despite the horrors of WWII raging around him, and he remembers all the things he did as the Winter Soldier, horrors that meld with the rest of his memories and give him horrible nightmares. This, though, doesn't mean that he can always remember everything at every one moment. The Cube never healed his brain damage from his death and resuscitation, and so his memory can be spotty sometimes, with things fading in his mind until they're brought up.
He's primarily serious and subdued, though he still has a sense of humor, if a dry, sarcastic sort of one. Bucky can be a bit snide depending on the situation. He's kind of bitter and jaded from his experiences.
Another thing he deals with constantly is his anger issues. When he was a child, after his mother died, he was angry at the world and took it out on other kids at the base, beating up anybody bigger than him just to prove he could. It disappointed his father, who used to be a roughneck himself and wanted something better for his son, but that anger in Bucky never really went away. The Army channeled it into punching Nazis instead, and it actually worked pretty well. The discipline and the training the Army gave him helped to mellow him out a little, to give him a focus and something to do with his restless self. Being Cap's partner meant the world to him, and he took his job very seriously, even though he knew what he was doing was dirty work (but he did the dirty work so that Steve wouldn't have to). He's clever and quick-minded even still, and he trusts his instincts on the field. The anger still remains even lately; when he first got his memories back, he went after Lukin, his former handler, with the intent of killing him for what he'd done to Bucky. When Steve "dies", he goes after Tony, who he blames for Steve's death. Blind, overwhelming anger and rash, poor decisions.
Speaking of rash, poor decisions... He also tends to be a bit of an alcoholic when he's thrown into a depressive swing by a traumatic event. When Steve dies, for example, he drinks heavily in a bar, takes his anger out on a bunch of rednecks, and then decides it'd be a great idea to go kill Tony Stark. He's not exactly the best at handling his own emotions; he's a product of the 40s and macho army culture, where men were not supposed to show weakness or feelings. He grew up surrounded by this sort of attitude, learning it from his soldier father and all the soldiers at Camp Lehigh, and so he resorts to handling his feelings the only few ways he knows how. Which tends to be self-destructive behavior. It ties in again to the self-loathing, he cares a lot less if his decisions negatively affect him than he cares if they affect other people.
Extremely important to him are the few people he's close to and trusts. He isn't an easy man to get to know, primarily because he distances himself from people to protect them (and because he sees himself as someone unworthy of their friendship), but Tom Raymond, Steve Rogers, the rest of the Invaders, Natasha Romanoff, Sam Wilson, and some of the New Avengers did manage it, and he thinks highly of them. He's extremely loyal to the people he cares about, going to great lengths for them just because they care about him, like the time he fought to save Sharon Carter even though he didn't know her and, in truth, she had actually wanted to kill him at one point, just because she's Steve's girl and he would do anything for Steve. The New Avengers were the closest thing he had to a family after coming back to the world, and Sam Wilson the closest thing to a best friend who wasn't his best friend before the war. Steve brought him back to the world and tried to give him a place in it, and he's grateful for that, even if he doesn't feel like he deserves it, or much of anything.
Bucky primarily chases redemption for the things he'd been made to do in the past. He wants to be deserving of the love he gets from the people who care about him, he wants to be a good person who feels like he deserves to be part of the world, but at the same time, he isn't sure he can ever make up for the weight of his guilt. This is why he tends to be so rash and reckless, some part of him feels like he should be punished with pain while he tries to make up for his sins on the field, making the world safer. The weight of the world's expectations for him as the new Captain America also tend to weigh very heavily on him.
Ultimately guilt and redemption are the main themes of his character, and he's been subdued and matured by his years, from a cocky, brash teenager to a determined, deeply traumatized man who just wants to do some good and feel like he belongs in the world. He has a tendency to rely on one or two highly important people in his life for comfort and keeping himself grounded. Usually this is Steve, and/or Natasha, sometimes Sam. Mostly Natasha. Despite his upbringing and his inability to deal very well with feelings, he's actually a very sentimental man, who places a lot of emotional importance on certain people and things and feels for those very deeply. Natasha is an obvious example, in Winter Soldier he thinks naively that his love for her can help to break her brainwashing even though he knows better, he knows intellectually and deep in his soul how deep the programming can go, and yet he wants to believe that love will conquer anyway. He also idolizes Steve, putting him on a pedestal. The shield got similar treatment - he went to a lot of trouble to steal it from Tony and SHIELD, because after Steve "died", he didn't want anyone else touching the shield. He didn't think he deserved it, but he knew no one else did because in his mind no one else knew what Steve had meant to the world.
Abilities, Magic and Supernatural Skills/Afflictions: Bucky is essentially a Badass Normal, though he does get some extra boost from his bionic prosthetic left arm (which will have to function on magic in the game). His prosthetic's abilities in canon include: enhanced strength on that side, EMP pulse emitter to disable technology, targeted electric shock. The port for the arm would require surgery to remove, but the arm itself is removable and can be remotely controlled.
His mundane abilities include being an Olympic-level athlete and acrobat, a master at hand to hand combat in several different styles, considerable skill with several different weapons (including knives, firearms, explosives, and garrotes), espionage, marksmanship with guns or throwing knives, shield fighting (Captain America's style, and difficult to pull off), and scouting and stealth. He also picks up languages easily - he's fluent in English, Russian, German, Japanese, and speaks a little bit of French.
Dragon & Magical Element
Elemental Alignment:
Dragon:
His dragon will be female, and eventually reach an adult size of large, at about 2.75 to 3 meters tall. She'll be more of a Western-mythology-type dragon, with a reptilian body and blunt-nosed head atop a long, graceful neck. Her back legs are strong and sturdy, tipped with three large claws on each foot, and her front two "legs" are more like the wing-arms of a bat, with more prehensile (though not as dexterous as a human hand's) "fingers" at the tips of the wings, also clawed. She walks generally on fours, the wing parts of her "arms" curving up in graceful arcs against the sides of her body. She has a long tail as well, tipped with short spines at the tip and broad fins that unfurl, which assist in flight navigation. At full size, she should be able to carry the weight of two grown men on her back, and flight comes naturally with her broad, leathery wings.
Her body is entirely scaled, and a dull, vaguely metallic gunmetal grey. The scales on the more visible parts of her body are a little on the small side, and harder than the finer, smaller, softer scales that cover her belly and throat. These belly scales are much less protective, a lighter shade of soft grey, and have a bit more shine to them, in certain lights taking on a vague rainbow shimmer like an oil slick. On her head are four black bone horns, one set longer and curved back, curling a bit at the tips, and between them a shorter set, more like nubs. The sides of her face have a set of short fins that mostly lie against the skull and only flare out when threatened. She also has a "mane" of black, short, blunt spines that get smaller, to barely nubs, as they reach the base of her neck. Her teeth are on the shorter side, and razor sharp for tearing, the same black as her horns and spines, and she has two rows of them on top and bottom, similar to a shark. Her eyes are a pitch black with no visible pupil or iris in the sclera. Reflections and light shines in her eyes can give the impression of stars in a night sky.
She's an omnivore, but prefers meat when she can get it. Still, she can eat certain kinds of fruits and vegetables, and does not like leafy greens, grass, or fibrous stalks, the kinds of things that need to be chewed with flat teeth instead of torn.
Her egg is ostrich-egg sized, and a tarnished silver sort of color, with some spots still shiny but others a dusty black. It's mostly smooth but with little dips and indentations, similar to beaten metal. Like this in color and this in shape.
Personality traits inherited from Character Bond:
Reckless
Determined
A little socially awkward
Sentimental
Writing Samples
First Sample: TDM 1, TDM 2
Second Sample:
It isn't that Bucky doesn't believe in magic. He's met Stephen Strange, after all. He knows, logically, that magic is a thing that exists in the world, but he's never really had to face it before. He's never felt it before the way he feels it so keenly now. His last memory, a huge shape blocking out the sun, a world-ending nightmare the Avengers were powerless to stop. They never even saw it coming, did they?
When he wakes in this strange new place, his suit and his shield and his weapons are gone. He feels small and exposed in a white linen tunic with short sleeves, white linen pants, a leather belt and simple leather boots. Unarmed, unshaven, the metal of his arm gleaming and bared, he feels... incomplete. The city looms before him, intimidating, sprawling, and his training, deeply ingrained, says to scout the area, find information. Something else in him says no, though, and keeps his feet moving steadily down the road into the heart of the city.
Something is calling for him.
It's like he knows instinctively where to go, and the thought is troubling - what's been done to me? What magic has messed with my mind? I said never again and here I am. But it doesn't feel like conditioning, it doesn't feel like he's making the slow march to his own demise. He's in search of something, beginning a journey.
His slow walk into the heart of Nuren, dressed in loose white clothing, it feels like a pilgrimage of sorts. Bucky takes very little notice of the people around him, the architecture, the entrances and exits and potential weapons or escape routes. That can wait. This feels important. The cavern entrance looms above him, the inside massive and the ground littered with... eggs? Eggs set into the ground like a massive hive, small as a chicken egg or as big as an ostrich's. He doesn't understand the symbols that glow and pulse around each egg.
His feet bring him to one in particular, a large egg with a tarnished silver surface like hammered sheet metal, and he kneels in front of it, cautious. "What are you?" He whispers, reaching out slowly with metal fingers. The runes around the egg pulse and glow, briefly, before they fade, and allow him to settle his hand on the smooth surface of the egg. He can't feel if it's warm or cold to the touch; flesh fingers settle atop the egg, and unbidden, a smile pulls at the corners of his mouth. There's a sense of completeness, holding the egg in his hands, and he brings up to cradle against his chest.
The walk outside of the cavern feels a lot less lonely, holding that smooth, round object to his chest. Bucky pauses outside, glances down at the sunlight dappling the dimpled metallic surface of the egg. It starts to crack.
It cracks, and it breaks, and it falls away like eggshell, not like metal at all. Inside half the shell still, she pokes her little black-scaled head out, and stares at Bucky with unblinking dark eyes. Something like warmth suffuses throughout his chest as he feels the first inkling of emotion from the baby dragon, something that feels like 'partner'.
"What the hell," he mumbles to her, helping to peel away the pieces of eggshell that cling to her damp scales and leathery wings. "I always did have a soft spot for strays."
Canon: Marvel 616
Character Name: James "Bucky" Barnes
Character Journal:
anotheroldsoldierPlayer Name: Nekky
Best contact method: Plurk @
Character Details
Canon Point: Post-Siege
Species: Human
Timeline of Important Events in Canon History:
Personality:
The two things that drive James most, serving as his basic motivation for most of his actions, are guilt and redemption. He feels a crushing guilt for the acts committed with his hands as the Winter Soldier, even though he no memory of anything outside what his commanding officers told him, and he wants to make up for those heinous acts, in any possible way he can. He wants to be worthy, of being Captain America and of working with the heroes he's surrounded by. He wants to be a better man.
"I never asked -- never wanted -- to be Captain America. But that mask, those stars and stripes, that shield...they change you. I can see now the burden that Steve's always carried. And it feels strange to admit I want that burden back... But underneath it all, what I really know is...I want to deserve it...somehow."
Either you die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Except for Bucky Barnes, who died a hero and was still twisted into the exact thing he had died to fight - a monster.
Bucky's upbringing contributed a lot to his personality before his 'death'. He was raised within the little microculture of Camp Lehigh, amongst a thousand older 'brothers', appeasing his superior officers like a normal boy would try to appease his parents. He was brash, charming, and beneath it all, angry - having lost his parents young, and having watched them send his sister (his only other family) away to a proper boarding school, he was always full of a rage he couldn't quite quell. It egged him into fighting with the other kids around the base, with other soldiers, usually people much bigger than him, and he nearly always got in trouble for it. The superiors directed this anger by training him, starting at age 16, to join his fellow soldiers in the field, and he took to it like a fish to water. Finally he had direction, and that was important to him, just like being Captain America's partner was important. He wanted to prove his worth, wanted to fit in, wanted to be a part of something. And he did become that hero he wanted to be, to make his father proud. He gave his life in service.
The Russians twisted that when they recovered his broken, frozen body off the bottom of the English Channel. They turned him against his country, made him into nothing. Where Bucky Barnes was a fiercely shining star trying to find his place in the sky, the Winter Soldier was nothing, a ghost, a legend and a killer.
James Buchanan Barnes these days is a mixture of everything he used to be and the weight of the world's expectations for him. At the very heart of it is the man he used to be when he liked himself, the man he used to be that he hates surrounding that, the man he is now and the man he wants to become on top of that. At his core is a genuinely good person - or at least, a person who tries very hard to be good, though he isn't the ideal hero and he knows it. He's still picking up the pieces of himself, finding his footing and learning to live with himself and everything he's done. It isn't easy, but he isn't wholly broken - he's picking himself up and putting himself back together and coming to grips with the world, trying to find his place and who he is now, since he can't be little Bucky Barnes or The Winter Soldier anymore. Steve saved him in a way, but he's also saving himself every day that he keeps moving on, showing a resilience and a strength.
On the surface, Bucky is a gruff, hard sort of man, and can come off as distant or coolly detached at times. He finds it difficult to show affection except with the people he's close to, and he gets right down to business instead of making small talk about the situation. He can be quite sullen, actually, and brooding, with a sort of sadness about him that tends to linger. He isn't exactly knowingly malicious to other people, he just... tends to come off as brusque, clipped, and it's easy to mistake his self-hatred for hatred of other people. But those who know him better, who get in underneath that facade he puts on to conceal his own perceived weaknesses, he's a little awkward, a little quiet. He makes morbid jokes about killing Hitler that other people don't seem to find funny. He tries to do good for the world and for his team to make up for everything he's done in the past. He's awkward around babies and girls.
On the field, he hasn't lost the confidence he had as a teenager, though - he's well trained and he knows it, so he tends to be reckless and do whatever he thinks best at the time instead of waiting for orders. Despite being Captain America now, Bucky is never really the perfect, ideal hero like Steve was; he's more ruthless, more willing to get the job done even if it means getting his hands dirty. That's what he trained for since he was sixteen, and he slips into the role easily, though he shows more restraint in modern times when it comes to killing, likely because of his guilt issues. Lives are not taken lightly, but incapacitating is another story.
It's hard to guess from how Bucky goes on with his life, from how he presents himself to other people, that he actually hates himself more than anyone. He has a lot of self worth issues and guilt issues that come from decades of being a brainwashed KGB killing machine who took a lot of innocent lives at his handlers' behest. He remembers everything, thanks to the Cosmic Cube, for better or worse - this means he remembers most of the war, which were his happy years despite the horrors of WWII raging around him, and he remembers all the things he did as the Winter Soldier, horrors that meld with the rest of his memories and give him horrible nightmares. This, though, doesn't mean that he can always remember everything at every one moment. The Cube never healed his brain damage from his death and resuscitation, and so his memory can be spotty sometimes, with things fading in his mind until they're brought up.
He's primarily serious and subdued, though he still has a sense of humor, if a dry, sarcastic sort of one. Bucky can be a bit snide depending on the situation. He's kind of bitter and jaded from his experiences.
Another thing he deals with constantly is his anger issues. When he was a child, after his mother died, he was angry at the world and took it out on other kids at the base, beating up anybody bigger than him just to prove he could. It disappointed his father, who used to be a roughneck himself and wanted something better for his son, but that anger in Bucky never really went away. The Army channeled it into punching Nazis instead, and it actually worked pretty well. The discipline and the training the Army gave him helped to mellow him out a little, to give him a focus and something to do with his restless self. Being Cap's partner meant the world to him, and he took his job very seriously, even though he knew what he was doing was dirty work (but he did the dirty work so that Steve wouldn't have to). He's clever and quick-minded even still, and he trusts his instincts on the field. The anger still remains even lately; when he first got his memories back, he went after Lukin, his former handler, with the intent of killing him for what he'd done to Bucky. When Steve "dies", he goes after Tony, who he blames for Steve's death. Blind, overwhelming anger and rash, poor decisions.
Speaking of rash, poor decisions... He also tends to be a bit of an alcoholic when he's thrown into a depressive swing by a traumatic event. When Steve dies, for example, he drinks heavily in a bar, takes his anger out on a bunch of rednecks, and then decides it'd be a great idea to go kill Tony Stark. He's not exactly the best at handling his own emotions; he's a product of the 40s and macho army culture, where men were not supposed to show weakness or feelings. He grew up surrounded by this sort of attitude, learning it from his soldier father and all the soldiers at Camp Lehigh, and so he resorts to handling his feelings the only few ways he knows how. Which tends to be self-destructive behavior. It ties in again to the self-loathing, he cares a lot less if his decisions negatively affect him than he cares if they affect other people.
Extremely important to him are the few people he's close to and trusts. He isn't an easy man to get to know, primarily because he distances himself from people to protect them (and because he sees himself as someone unworthy of their friendship), but Tom Raymond, Steve Rogers, the rest of the Invaders, Natasha Romanoff, Sam Wilson, and some of the New Avengers did manage it, and he thinks highly of them. He's extremely loyal to the people he cares about, going to great lengths for them just because they care about him, like the time he fought to save Sharon Carter even though he didn't know her and, in truth, she had actually wanted to kill him at one point, just because she's Steve's girl and he would do anything for Steve. The New Avengers were the closest thing he had to a family after coming back to the world, and Sam Wilson the closest thing to a best friend who wasn't his best friend before the war. Steve brought him back to the world and tried to give him a place in it, and he's grateful for that, even if he doesn't feel like he deserves it, or much of anything.
Bucky primarily chases redemption for the things he'd been made to do in the past. He wants to be deserving of the love he gets from the people who care about him, he wants to be a good person who feels like he deserves to be part of the world, but at the same time, he isn't sure he can ever make up for the weight of his guilt. This is why he tends to be so rash and reckless, some part of him feels like he should be punished with pain while he tries to make up for his sins on the field, making the world safer. The weight of the world's expectations for him as the new Captain America also tend to weigh very heavily on him.
Ultimately guilt and redemption are the main themes of his character, and he's been subdued and matured by his years, from a cocky, brash teenager to a determined, deeply traumatized man who just wants to do some good and feel like he belongs in the world. He has a tendency to rely on one or two highly important people in his life for comfort and keeping himself grounded. Usually this is Steve, and/or Natasha, sometimes Sam. Mostly Natasha. Despite his upbringing and his inability to deal very well with feelings, he's actually a very sentimental man, who places a lot of emotional importance on certain people and things and feels for those very deeply. Natasha is an obvious example, in Winter Soldier he thinks naively that his love for her can help to break her brainwashing even though he knows better, he knows intellectually and deep in his soul how deep the programming can go, and yet he wants to believe that love will conquer anyway. He also idolizes Steve, putting him on a pedestal. The shield got similar treatment - he went to a lot of trouble to steal it from Tony and SHIELD, because after Steve "died", he didn't want anyone else touching the shield. He didn't think he deserved it, but he knew no one else did because in his mind no one else knew what Steve had meant to the world.
Abilities, Magic and Supernatural Skills/Afflictions: Bucky is essentially a Badass Normal, though he does get some extra boost from his bionic prosthetic left arm (which will have to function on magic in the game). His prosthetic's abilities in canon include: enhanced strength on that side, EMP pulse emitter to disable technology, targeted electric shock. The port for the arm would require surgery to remove, but the arm itself is removable and can be remotely controlled.
His mundane abilities include being an Olympic-level athlete and acrobat, a master at hand to hand combat in several different styles, considerable skill with several different weapons (including knives, firearms, explosives, and garrotes), espionage, marksmanship with guns or throwing knives, shield fighting (Captain America's style, and difficult to pull off), and scouting and stealth. He also picks up languages easily - he's fluent in English, Russian, German, Japanese, and speaks a little bit of French.
Dragon & Magical Element
Elemental Alignment:
- Ice - Ice is fitting for irony's sake, really. Bucky was kept in cryosleep for decades and trained in Russia - he can weather the cold easily. He was the Winter Soldier for a reason.
Shadow - As the Winter Soldier, Bucky was a feared assassin, to the point of being legendary. No one could confirm if he existed or not, and he never left evidence behind on a kill, like a shadow.
Wind - Another for irony's sake. Bucky is shown to be afraid of heights, and having to conquer this fear, since his father died from a fall in a parachuting accident. A wind element would be interesting to make him embrace heights and the open sky.
Dragon:
His dragon will be female, and eventually reach an adult size of large, at about 2.75 to 3 meters tall. She'll be more of a Western-mythology-type dragon, with a reptilian body and blunt-nosed head atop a long, graceful neck. Her back legs are strong and sturdy, tipped with three large claws on each foot, and her front two "legs" are more like the wing-arms of a bat, with more prehensile (though not as dexterous as a human hand's) "fingers" at the tips of the wings, also clawed. She walks generally on fours, the wing parts of her "arms" curving up in graceful arcs against the sides of her body. She has a long tail as well, tipped with short spines at the tip and broad fins that unfurl, which assist in flight navigation. At full size, she should be able to carry the weight of two grown men on her back, and flight comes naturally with her broad, leathery wings.
Her body is entirely scaled, and a dull, vaguely metallic gunmetal grey. The scales on the more visible parts of her body are a little on the small side, and harder than the finer, smaller, softer scales that cover her belly and throat. These belly scales are much less protective, a lighter shade of soft grey, and have a bit more shine to them, in certain lights taking on a vague rainbow shimmer like an oil slick. On her head are four black bone horns, one set longer and curved back, curling a bit at the tips, and between them a shorter set, more like nubs. The sides of her face have a set of short fins that mostly lie against the skull and only flare out when threatened. She also has a "mane" of black, short, blunt spines that get smaller, to barely nubs, as they reach the base of her neck. Her teeth are on the shorter side, and razor sharp for tearing, the same black as her horns and spines, and she has two rows of them on top and bottom, similar to a shark. Her eyes are a pitch black with no visible pupil or iris in the sclera. Reflections and light shines in her eyes can give the impression of stars in a night sky.
She's an omnivore, but prefers meat when she can get it. Still, she can eat certain kinds of fruits and vegetables, and does not like leafy greens, grass, or fibrous stalks, the kinds of things that need to be chewed with flat teeth instead of torn.
Her egg is ostrich-egg sized, and a tarnished silver sort of color, with some spots still shiny but others a dusty black. It's mostly smooth but with little dips and indentations, similar to beaten metal. Like this in color and this in shape.
Personality traits inherited from Character Bond:
Writing Samples
First Sample: TDM 1, TDM 2
Second Sample:
It isn't that Bucky doesn't believe in magic. He's met Stephen Strange, after all. He knows, logically, that magic is a thing that exists in the world, but he's never really had to face it before. He's never felt it before the way he feels it so keenly now. His last memory, a huge shape blocking out the sun, a world-ending nightmare the Avengers were powerless to stop. They never even saw it coming, did they?
When he wakes in this strange new place, his suit and his shield and his weapons are gone. He feels small and exposed in a white linen tunic with short sleeves, white linen pants, a leather belt and simple leather boots. Unarmed, unshaven, the metal of his arm gleaming and bared, he feels... incomplete. The city looms before him, intimidating, sprawling, and his training, deeply ingrained, says to scout the area, find information. Something else in him says no, though, and keeps his feet moving steadily down the road into the heart of the city.
Something is calling for him.
It's like he knows instinctively where to go, and the thought is troubling - what's been done to me? What magic has messed with my mind? I said never again and here I am. But it doesn't feel like conditioning, it doesn't feel like he's making the slow march to his own demise. He's in search of something, beginning a journey.
His slow walk into the heart of Nuren, dressed in loose white clothing, it feels like a pilgrimage of sorts. Bucky takes very little notice of the people around him, the architecture, the entrances and exits and potential weapons or escape routes. That can wait. This feels important. The cavern entrance looms above him, the inside massive and the ground littered with... eggs? Eggs set into the ground like a massive hive, small as a chicken egg or as big as an ostrich's. He doesn't understand the symbols that glow and pulse around each egg.
His feet bring him to one in particular, a large egg with a tarnished silver surface like hammered sheet metal, and he kneels in front of it, cautious. "What are you?" He whispers, reaching out slowly with metal fingers. The runes around the egg pulse and glow, briefly, before they fade, and allow him to settle his hand on the smooth surface of the egg. He can't feel if it's warm or cold to the touch; flesh fingers settle atop the egg, and unbidden, a smile pulls at the corners of his mouth. There's a sense of completeness, holding the egg in his hands, and he brings up to cradle against his chest.
The walk outside of the cavern feels a lot less lonely, holding that smooth, round object to his chest. Bucky pauses outside, glances down at the sunlight dappling the dimpled metallic surface of the egg. It starts to crack.
It cracks, and it breaks, and it falls away like eggshell, not like metal at all. Inside half the shell still, she pokes her little black-scaled head out, and stares at Bucky with unblinking dark eyes. Something like warmth suffuses throughout his chest as he feels the first inkling of emotion from the baby dragon, something that feels like 'partner'.
"What the hell," he mumbles to her, helping to peel away the pieces of eggshell that cling to her damp scales and leathery wings. "I always did have a soft spot for strays."
