to escape a world so great -

[dislocked]

Who: Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers
When: During the August event
Where: Bucky's barracks
What: Steve has questions, Bucky sometimes struggles to answer them.
Warnings: No warnings.



[ Bucky likes to think that he's getting better at dealing with things that come out of left field; unexpectedly horrific memories that surface like shards of jagged glass, the sound a skull makes when it splits open like a very ripe melon. It's the things that take you out of the moment, inexplicably dragging back to the days where it's relived, over and over.

Steve Rogers, small and sickly but ferociously determined, is one of them. Bucky doesn't generally like lying, but in the few days he's here he's lied more than he's ever had in his entire life -- which is saying something. But there's everything complicated about dealing with someone you care for who's blessedly in the dark about all that's happened; and Bucky can never bear to tell him the truth, to watch the way it will inevitably sink into those shoulders.

He keeps a close eye on him on the ship, the age-old instinct to protect what he holds closest to his heart still a powerful force that he doesn't always understand. Today, however, they've just stepped back into his room at the end of a long day. ]

You hungry?

Comments

[anyless]

[ He's been fighting with something so glaringly obvious for the past few days that it's starting to make him itch with a strange sort of insecurity. When they'd been younger, he'd quickly gotten it out of Bucky's head that he had to lie to him to preserve whatever delicacy might have still been in him at that age, and since then, there had only been those minor things he'd seen right through and called him out on. Now, being stuck in this strange place with his best friend almost half a year without him says a lot for what might have happened and hardly anything at all at the same time. He knows he's not telling him something, and maybe Steve's figured it out, pushing into Bucky's room and pulling at the collar of the uniform he'd gotten that fits better than any of the clothes in his own room. ]

Nah. [ And he's careful about watching him even as he sits on the edge of Bucky's bed. (It's a lot softer than anything he's ever slept on.) A second or two goes by, Steve staring the other man and fiddling with the sleeves of his shirt. ] I've been thinking... If we're gonna be here a while, I wanted to tell you what I was doing in Jersey. Figured no one would have bothered to tell you that all the way over there.

[ Because last he knows, Bucky had still been fighting with the 107th, and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of Steve's own honesty would get him to open up enough to tell him what was wrong. ]

[dislocked]

[ Steve is a scrapper, fierce and never letting anyone else get the better of him, even if those people were the ones beating him down. Bucky would be just as enraged, and they'd take on the bullies together -- him defending his smaller friend even though he knows that Steve hates thinking about it that way.

No, they were thick as thieves, each one getting the other into trouble whenever the situation presented itself, always challenging each other to be better. Bucky remembers this, even more so now that he's looking at him, the physical embodiment of days long past.

Bucky knows what's happened -- he'd gleaned all of it from the Smithsonian's exhibits, but he wants to hear it from Steve himself, when he comes in and fiddles with his sleeve the way he always did, and Bucky would tut and adjust it for him, talking about the girls they'd met that day, and which one fancied Steve.

He fingers the smooth shell Steve had given him weeks before, an unconscious gesture that soothes him, and he nods, sitting beside him. This way, Steve doesn't get the chance to pretty much put him under the microscope. ] All right.