Profile

Name: James Buchanan Barnes
Aliases: Bucky, Winter Soldier
Physical Description: Bucky stands around five ten and has dark brown hair given to curl and pale blue-gray eyes. A variety of scars crisscross his body in places but his most distinctive feature is the cybernetic metal arm in grafted onto him in place of his left arm.
Background: He grew up in the roaring twenties only to lose both of his parents within a few years of one another at an early age. One day while heading home from school to the orphanage he was placed at, he happened across a sickly young boy by the name of Steve Rogers standing up to some bullies who’d been giving all the kids at the orphanage a hard time. The grit Steve showed gave Bucky the courage to stand up to the bullies and he helped Steve fend them off. Afterwards, he and the boy became fast friends.

Once the Great Depression hit, everyone was hit hard but he and Steve managed to eke out a living through the lean and mean years of the Depression. James took up boxing in his free time and became a champion amateur boxer before World War Two broke out. He was the one who helped Steve train to pass the physical portion of the enlistment exams and while Bucky was accepted, Steve was rejected multiple times because of his scrawny form and frail health. Bucky was assigned to the 107th where he attained the rank of sergeant. During his last day stateside, he managed to help save Steve from being beaten up by a bully one last time. To celebrate his last night in America before shipping out, he and Steve went on a double date to the Stark Expo hosted by Stark CEO Howard Stark. Once at the expo, they parted ways one final time as Steve went to try his luck with the recruitment office.

A year later, Bucky was serving in Italy with the 107th in the Battle at Azzano. He and his company were cut off from the rest of the army and captured by HYDRA and taken back to their base in the mountains. There, a he almost died from a combination of walking pneumonia and the brutal conditions they faced being forced to work on the HYDRA missiles called Valkyries. Eventually he was taken to an isolation portion of the base and subjected to interrogation and precursors of the brainwashing techniques the Russians would eventually come to use on him.

It was Steve who’d participated in Project Rebirth and had been enhanced by the super soldier serum and now going by the name of Captain America who rescued both Bucky and the remnants of the 107th.

Bucky and a few of the 107th joined up with Captain America to form an elite strike force known as the Howling Commandos. Their mission was to track down and wipe HYDRA off the map. Something they all had a stake in. Over the coming months and years, they traveled all over the warfront from Europe to the Pacific hunting down HYDRA bases. Things changed in the Alps however as they were boarding Armin Zola’s train and Bucky was knocked outside the train thanks to a HYDRA soldier’s concussive blast. Barely holding into the ruined side of the train, he hung there foor a few agonizing seconds before the metal rail he was holding onto sheered away before Steve could grab hold of him. Bucky plummeted into the icy ravine and supposedly died upon impact.

But Bucky did not die and instead, his mangled and broken body was discovered by the Russians and placed in cryostasis until the fifties. Bucky’s left arm had to be amputated from the grievous injuries he sustained. And in the fifties when relations with the West seemed to be disintegrating, Bucky was brought out of cryostasis and they brainwashed him into believing he was not only Russian but that he was utterly loyal to Mother Russia. Making use of Bucky’s extensive training, they honed him into a killer and for the next fifty years, the Russian assassin known only as the Winter Soldier would pop up all over the map and assassinate targets who opposed the Communist regime.

In between missions, they froze Bucky in crysostasis and reindoctrinated him each time he was defrosted because the longer he was out, the more quickly his old memories and personality would creep back in. During this time, Bucky helped train the Russian operative known as the Black Widow in the famed Red Room programs and they were lovers for a brief time before the Winter Solider was forced back into hibernation once again.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Bucky and all trace of him disappeared until his cryostasis capsule was discovered by S.H.I.E.L.D. early on in two thousand and ten. They kept him on ice for almost two years as their scientists studied both him and the brainwashing techniques the Russians had used. The Winter Soldier project came to light after Tony Stark hacked the S.H.I.E.L.D. databases and he put two and two together. Outraged that Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. had kept Bucky’s survival a secret the Avengers strong-armed S.H.I.E.L.D. into releasing Bucky. The legal situation was somewhat sticky since the Winter Soldier was wanted by no less than fifteen different countries for political assassinations and after months of rehabilitation, debriefings and psychological evaluations Bucky Barnes was released from S.H.I.E.L.D. custody with all of his memories in tact an the weight of all the people he killed under Soviet brainwashing weighing down on his shoulders.

Please note: Both player and character are over the age of 21. Player is unaffiliated with Marvel Comics or the Cinematic movies in any way.