Personality: Bucky is a layered person, more so than others. 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.
On the surface, Bucky is a gruff, hard sort of man. 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, with a sort of sadness about him that tends to linger. 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 for a time, Bucky was 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.
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 and who he's talking to, but he can also manage to be polite if necessary. He was raised with good old '30s manners, after all, his father trying to instill in him a good work ethic and politeness. Granted, it didn't always work out - Bucky was a headstrong, angry kid who got in a lot of fights, but he was always respectful of his superiors at Camp Lehigh. Still, nowadays, 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. He might not be book smart, having dropped out of school to join the Army, but he's very well trained and being on a battlefield is second nature to him. Of course, this means he won't always wait for instruction or take the cautious route, he has no problems barrelling into things head-first and without thinking. 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 consents to going to the gulag when the Russians show up to take him just as he's been handed a favorable sentence in American courts, and why he doesn't break out of the gulag until he finds what their real plans for him (plans that would hurt people ultimately) are. He felt he deserved to be punished, and he didn't want to cause an international incident for Steve, who was serving as the US's "top cop" at the time.
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.
The Facility: Really, the facility didn't change the core part of who he is. It just exaggerated or tempered what was already there, gave him new ideas about things. Most notably, his idea of redemption. In the comics, he goes on a mission to stop all the nasty things that remain in the world from his Soviet past, but in the Facility, he couldn't do that. He was trapped, at the mercy of Val and the Consortium, and essentially helpless in a lot of ways that never sat well. He could have closed himself off from everyone, but through the months, he chose to help people there as much as he could, with the experiments and with the constant struggle to get out from under their captors' thumbs. 'Redemption' started to be protecting people and becoming a leader of sorts (Even though he's a clone and he knows it, he still sees himself as Bucky Barnes, just not the only one in the universe - he still feels responsibility for crimes his hands have never technically committed, along with all the things he'd had to do in the Facility). As the only Captain America there in that universe for a while, he started to grow out of Steve's shadow, and started to network and talk to people willingly. He led a lot of groups in attacks and helped to plan a lot of defenses against the Consortium, he helped to lead the group of superheroes known as the capes, and slowly, he started to let certain people in.
He formed his own family there, because they seemed to need someone, and Bucky allowed himself to be that someone to help shield them from the harsh environment of the Facility. Most notably, there were his children, the ones he actually considered his - Accelerator, Timothy, and Yukina - and the ones he looked after as more of a mentor - Jason Todd (though he was Barbara's, and Bucky was sort of the uncle slash a teacher figure to him), Chie Satonaka, Eli Bradley, and Rikki Barnes, though Rikki was still family. He had friends for a change, friends he did more with than just work - Steve Rogers, Carol Danvers, Barbara Gordon, Dick Grayson, Eddie Riggs, Jim Hammond, Alfred Jones / America, others. This softened him a little, let him focus on something besides his own self-loathing. With help, he started to work through some of his issues, though he never made much progress due to the stressful nature of the Facility.
Bucky learned what a person could gain if they let the world in, but he also revisited the pain of losing it over and over as people died of clone sickness or were terminated by Val or the Consortium. He networked a lot, and he kept a lot of people at arm's length (though even that was him opening up a little more than in canon), but he still lost a lot of people he cared about very deeply, which made him more reliant on or protective of the people who remained.
The biggest example of this is his unheathily codependent relationship with Tom Raymond, who was his best friend and only friend his own age during the war. When Tom arrived in the Facility, there were decades between them and they were both different than they were, but they were still old friends and stayed close through the horrors of the Facility, helping to look after each other the way they'd done during the war. His relationship with Natasha soured while she was there, when she almost seemed to abandon him through a rocky patch, and he ended up being physically intimate with Tom for an experiment. Another experiment made it happen again, with no awkward memories attached to it, and they started up a friends with benefits situation after a lot of pain and a lot of loss. Tom became the only person he trusted enough to be intimate with, and to share the more vulnerable side of himself with. Carol saw a little of that vulnerability, but not nearly as much as Tom did. They started to lean on each other almost exclusively, taking care of each other mutually and relying on each other when things got rough so that they could both be strong for and protect the kids and teenagers they looked after. They never really put words to it, as if that would make it all dissolve in smoke and leave them bereft, but it was incredibly important to Bucky. Tom was his best friend, and some part of him grew to love him, even if he never really admitted it even to himself. It wasn't healthy but it was all they had - a lesson you learn early on in Facility is to take what you can get and enjoy it while you have it, because tomorrow it could be gone.
He also took this attitude when it came to the way his family formed. Bucky never expected to ever have children of his own, adopted or biological, back home, because of his situation in the gulag and because for a long, long time, he believed he was dead back home. This was his only chance to have anything remotely resembling a family, and when it happened, he just sort of let it, even though some part of him still believed the kids would be better off without him. But he was one of the few people who could really reach out to Accelerator, and to Timothy, and so he wouldn't have given them up for the world.
Eventually, Bucky sort of stopped reaching out to more people, hitting a plateau in his development and keeping to himself and his family. As the population of the station changed and the atmosphere on board it changed, from teamwork and 'we're in this together' to something colder and less appreciative of each other, Bucky's attitude toward them changed a little too. He stopped caring about the lives and wellbeing of those who had proven themselves to be willingly useless or malicious, and his focus narrowed more to the people he cared about and the people they cared about. This led to isolating himself a little more, though whenever something attacked the station, he was still there to fight and defend it, because it was all they had. So his relationship with Tom keeps him stable, but it can also be a hindrance in that he isn't sure how he would function without him at this point.
no subject
On the surface, Bucky is a gruff, hard sort of man. 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, with a sort of sadness about him that tends to linger. 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 for a time, Bucky was 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.
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 and who he's talking to, but he can also manage to be polite if necessary. He was raised with good old '30s manners, after all, his father trying to instill in him a good work ethic and politeness. Granted, it didn't always work out - Bucky was a headstrong, angry kid who got in a lot of fights, but he was always respectful of his superiors at Camp Lehigh. Still, nowadays, 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. He might not be book smart, having dropped out of school to join the Army, but he's very well trained and being on a battlefield is second nature to him. Of course, this means he won't always wait for instruction or take the cautious route, he has no problems barrelling into things head-first and without thinking. 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 consents to going to the gulag when the Russians show up to take him just as he's been handed a favorable sentence in American courts, and why he doesn't break out of the gulag until he finds what their real plans for him (plans that would hurt people ultimately) are. He felt he deserved to be punished, and he didn't want to cause an international incident for Steve, who was serving as the US's "top cop" at the time.
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.
The Facility:
Really, the facility didn't change the core part of who he is. It just exaggerated or tempered what was already there, gave him new ideas about things. Most notably, his idea of redemption. In the comics, he goes on a mission to stop all the nasty things that remain in the world from his Soviet past, but in the Facility, he couldn't do that. He was trapped, at the mercy of Val and the Consortium, and essentially helpless in a lot of ways that never sat well. He could have closed himself off from everyone, but through the months, he chose to help people there as much as he could, with the experiments and with the constant struggle to get out from under their captors' thumbs. 'Redemption' started to be protecting people and becoming a leader of sorts (Even though he's a clone and he knows it, he still sees himself as Bucky Barnes, just not the only one in the universe - he still feels responsibility for crimes his hands have never technically committed, along with all the things he'd had to do in the Facility). As the only Captain America there in that universe for a while, he started to grow out of Steve's shadow, and started to network and talk to people willingly. He led a lot of groups in attacks and helped to plan a lot of defenses against the Consortium, he helped to lead the group of superheroes known as the capes, and slowly, he started to let certain people in.
He formed his own family there, because they seemed to need someone, and Bucky allowed himself to be that someone to help shield them from the harsh environment of the Facility. Most notably, there were his children, the ones he actually considered his - Accelerator, Timothy, and Yukina - and the ones he looked after as more of a mentor - Jason Todd (though he was Barbara's, and Bucky was sort of the uncle slash a teacher figure to him), Chie Satonaka, Eli Bradley, and Rikki Barnes, though Rikki was still family. He had friends for a change, friends he did more with than just work - Steve Rogers, Carol Danvers, Barbara Gordon, Dick Grayson, Eddie Riggs, Jim Hammond, Alfred Jones / America, others. This softened him a little, let him focus on something besides his own self-loathing. With help, he started to work through some of his issues, though he never made much progress due to the stressful nature of the Facility.
Bucky learned what a person could gain if they let the world in, but he also revisited the pain of losing it over and over as people died of clone sickness or were terminated by Val or the Consortium. He networked a lot, and he kept a lot of people at arm's length (though even that was him opening up a little more than in canon), but he still lost a lot of people he cared about very deeply, which made him more reliant on or protective of the people who remained.
The biggest example of this is his unheathily codependent relationship with Tom Raymond, who was his best friend and only friend his own age during the war. When Tom arrived in the Facility, there were decades between them and they were both different than they were, but they were still old friends and stayed close through the horrors of the Facility, helping to look after each other the way they'd done during the war. His relationship with Natasha soured while she was there, when she almost seemed to abandon him through a rocky patch, and he ended up being physically intimate with Tom for an experiment. Another experiment made it happen again, with no awkward memories attached to it, and they started up a friends with benefits situation after a lot of pain and a lot of loss. Tom became the only person he trusted enough to be intimate with, and to share the more vulnerable side of himself with. Carol saw a little of that vulnerability, but not nearly as much as Tom did. They started to lean on each other almost exclusively, taking care of each other mutually and relying on each other when things got rough so that they could both be strong for and protect the kids and teenagers they looked after. They never really put words to it, as if that would make it all dissolve in smoke and leave them bereft, but it was incredibly important to Bucky. Tom was his best friend, and some part of him grew to love him, even if he never really admitted it even to himself. It wasn't healthy but it was all they had - a lesson you learn early on in Facility is to take what you can get and enjoy it while you have it, because tomorrow it could be gone.
He also took this attitude when it came to the way his family formed. Bucky never expected to ever have children of his own, adopted or biological, back home, because of his situation in the gulag and because for a long, long time, he believed he was dead back home. This was his only chance to have anything remotely resembling a family, and when it happened, he just sort of let it, even though some part of him still believed the kids would be better off without him. But he was one of the few people who could really reach out to Accelerator, and to Timothy, and so he wouldn't have given them up for the world.
Eventually, Bucky sort of stopped reaching out to more people, hitting a plateau in his development and keeping to himself and his family. As the population of the station changed and the atmosphere on board it changed, from teamwork and 'we're in this together' to something colder and less appreciative of each other, Bucky's attitude toward them changed a little too. He stopped caring about the lives and wellbeing of those who had proven themselves to be willingly useless or malicious, and his focus narrowed more to the people he cared about and the people they cared about. This led to isolating himself a little more, though whenever something attacked the station, he was still there to fight and defend it, because it was all they had. So his relationship with Tom keeps him stable, but it can also be a hindrance in that he isn't sure how he would function without him at this point.