August, 2014.

South of Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom.

We got comfortable in Aberdeen. I went to work in the mornings, and Bucky went to work at night. We got less sleep all of the sudden, or at least Bucky did. He slept twice a day, once from 3:00 in the morning to about 7:30 a.m. and again from about 4:00 in the afternoon to 7:30 p.m. He flat out refused to sleep if I wasn't around to stand watch, and I counted his trust as a blessing and a curse. Meanwhile, I just slept with a gun nearby whenever I had the time.

Gerald no longer fussed about Bucky working from home. He got regular reports from his dear friend Arty, the very same man who ran a shipping a business out of the small town we settled in. Bucky's work was simple but heavy labor. For six hours six nights a week, he loaded and unloaded shipping containers coming and going from Aberdeen. He continued to repair small appliances and eventually added car engines to his repertoire after I drug him to the store with me one afternoon. He fixed Gerald's little sedan and was paid for his work quite well. Suddenly, people were flocking to Gerald's store and begging me to ask my boyfriend to look at their dilapidated vehicles. I tried not to grimace each time I was thrown into a relationship with Bucky.

I kept working in the store and working on the cars that were brought in. Although Bucky was far better with the older engines, his lack of regular sleep kept him from working on them very often. I became a regular face in the store, and I knew every name in the small town we had chosen a few months before. But I started preparing myself to leave them.

A tourist's guidebook to Europe came with me to the store every day. Gerald thought I was planning the next leg of a whirlwind romantic journey, and he was half right. I wasn't looking at hostels or tourist attractions; I was looking at population densities and local languages. Bucky could speak a handful of the major European languages and most from Eastern Europe. He also had an uncanny ability for picking up new languages. He was almost as quick as I was.

Our plan was to wait out our welcome. Steve had stayed in Canada for a few days, gone west when he should have gone east, and then ended up in rural New York. We were under no illusions he would give up his search for Bucky, but Bucky wasn't ready for that reunion. Any mention of it spurred him into planning our escape route. He would sit next to me or behind me, always just inches from touching me, while I connected with people in the shadows who might be willing to help us. I kept Bucky's name out of it all. That was safer for him.

In between our jobs and trying to find time to sleep, I made it my more personal mission to introduce Bucky to all the pop culture he missed while he was being brainwashed. Most of them, at least. All the famous television shows, movies, and music that had come out after 1945 became our free time entertainment.

Star Trek entertained him, simply because the fight choreography was absolutely terrible. We skipped through the original series sporadically, but Bucky settled into Next Generation with a very humble excitement. I left him with borrowed copies of each Star Wars movie for a few days, and he half-heartedly watched them while he fixed things in the living room. We watched A Streetcar Named Desire and Twelve Angry Men on a Sunday morning when neither of us worked and neither of us wanted to sleep. I was hesitant to show him anything related to the military, but after he caught me watching M*A*S*H, he blew through that series and I racked my brain for other like it. China Beach and JAG came next, along with Top Gun, the old James Bond movies, and The Hurt Locker. He had opinions on all of them.

I let him skip through the decades when we watched movies, but I made him stick to chronological order when he listened to music. It was easy enough since my iPod, one of the frivolous things I brought out of my apartment in D.C., was already organized by genre and era.

Explaining an iPod was the most difficult part of that plan.

"Okay, you can't understand pop culture without understanding a little about Steve Jobs," I told him. I held up my iPod, a good ole classic I had bought before my first tour of duty. "He died a few years back, but he had this company called Apple."

"Like the fruit?"

"Yes," I said, suddenly exhausted. Language was one thing. Random company names seemed to be harder to understand. "They made computers, which isn't all that special nowadays, but they also made these things."

"An iPod?" he checked.

"Bingo. I bought this years ago, and I pay a little money and can put music on this thing. Then I can listen to it whenever I want," I explained. Bucky nodded as if he understood. I held out the iPod for him, and he reached out his left hand for it. I shook my head. "I know you're doing really well about not squeezing the life out of household items, but you're on right hand restriction with this thing."

"Got it," he accepted. He dropped his left hand and took the device with his right.

"That thing has a lot of music on it, and it's all sorted out into the major eras. I'm pretty sure I've got them in the right order," I said. I explained how to operate my iPod, threatened him once or twice more, and then showed him earbuds.

After a few clumsy minutes fiddling with the control wheel and nearly deafening himself, Bucky found the folder labelled "Post WW2 Jazz". He put the earbuds in and waited for the first song.

I couldn't hear it begin, but his reaction was pretty adorable. He smiled slowly, like he couldn't believe it, and held the iPod reverently. It was the first time I had seen smile so fully, like he really was the young, carefree man he looked like. Short hair and long sleeves could hide a lot of his trauma. But that grin made it really disappear.