bucky giggling and smiling so widely when he tells steve that he used to wear newspapers in his shoes
bucky having tears in his eyes while watching the winter soldier murder tony’s parents
bucky begging and crying out for zemo to stop when his winter soldier codes are being said
bucky buying plums in his spare time and keeping a picture of steve in one of his memory notebooks (which had chocolate bars on top of it)
bucky firmly telling zemo that his name is not james, it’s bucky
bucky saying that he remembers all of the people he’s killed while being the winter soldier
bucky protecting steve from tony and getting his arm shot off in the process and even when he’s down and in pain from losing his arm he can’t let tony get to steve
bucky thinking that he’s not worth all of this to steve
bucky deciding that instead of living his life in a constant state of fear and paranoia he’ll go back into cryo for the safety and protection of others and himself until t’challa can find a cure
August 1991 was the coup that eventually brought down the Soviet Union. Okay so Howard was killed in December, but also December 26, 1991 was the date the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
It was a chaotic time in Russia and one could argue that Hydra wouldn’t let a little thing like the dissolution of the Soviet system slow them down, but maybe they did. Maybe they kept up their experiments until the funding got pulled. Maybe they put the others on ice and locked the doors because better to keep the imperfect ones locked down then to let them fall into the wrong hands (and they might need them later).
They could take Winter Soldier because he was already conditioned and ‘stable’.
For one reason or another, they just never got back there, maybe some like the guy in America went into hiding, who knows. But a lot of stuff went missing when the Soviet Union fell, and that’s true in the real world too.
(and that was what jumped out at me when I saw the year 1991 anyway)
