onlyforthedream | [Rapture] For Bucky

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[Rapture] For Bucky

I realize- realized some time ago, long before the sun dropped below the horizon and the cooler night air set in- that I should not just be sitting here. What lacerations and bruises I'm sporting are minor; superficial. My skin is still warm from sitting in the last of the sun, though I'm stripped to the waist so it's leaving me, now. Even the heat soaked up by the sand all day is leaving, dissipating into the evening air and leaving the grains cool to the touch.

Not as cold as the body wrapped in the remains of my shirt and jacket. Between the two pieces of clothing, she's covered head to toe. I know I should move her, should bring her to the forensic team, not that I want to. Maybe straight to the cemetery. There's something I should be doing, but all I can do is watch the water for more bodies. I sit with my knees bent and my arms draped over them, feeling wasted but remaining vigilant, and bear witness as the ocean laps away at the stretch of sand I washed up on, continuing to shift and replace the pieces of shore that were disturbed as I tried uselessly to breathe life back into the lungs of a little dead girl.

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If pressed, I wouldn't admit I was worried. Steve Rogers is the most capable man I've ever met... That he was missing, earlier, shouldn't have been cause for alarm... But I've seen him on the brink of death's door too many times lately, and it's that niggling bit of concern over my best friend's whereabouts that sends me scouring the island when the chaos of the battle has settled into an uneasy peace, and the dead and the wounded have been gathered. The beach is one of the last places I check, so far from Rapture's depths that it's on a frustrated whim I come out here at all, but the relief I feel from spotting his familiar silhouette in the distance is... palpable.

Of the two of them, Bucky's undoubtedly in rougher shape. His ribs protest with every step, his hair and face are dirty with blood and grime, hiding any potential bruises. The shield, strapped to his back, has only been given the most cursory of wipe downs, and it bears, still, the traces of the fight with Atlas, dried blood caking along its edge. Guilt and shame are feelings he's too tired to process, but he knows they'll come in the days to follow. He takes no pleasure in killing, and even less so when the job's done so messily.

"Steve," he barks from about thirty feet away, voice hoarse. "Took a swim?"

Bucky's here. I don't look away from the water, but the lines of my face pull taught against a frown. It's not that I'm bothered by the fact that Bucky's seen me at most of my lowest points. I've been more fortunate than I've a right to, between Bucky and Sam and Sharon.

Still, I wish Bucky wasn't here for this. Since the courthouse steps, I feel like all he's seen me do is fall, and I wish...

Well, I wish that wasn't the case.

"A pane of glass was cracked during an altercation. I was pulled out by the pressure, into the sea." I look over at Bucky, then look Bucky over and frown at the state of him.

"Are you injured?"

"I'll live," he replies, coming to a stop not far from Steve, but hesitating over whether or not he should sit down. It's an honest answer, if nothing else; he's been injured worse and gone on to fight harder.

"What about you?" he asks, gaze sliding over towards the suspiciously body-shaped bundle at Steve's side.

"I'm fine," I tell him, then follow his eyes.

"One of the girls. She was caught up in the current with me. I pulled her to the surface, but... CPR had no effect. Tenenbaum had removed the... the slug that produced the ADAM, but I don't think the cure was taking. I was trying to get them topside."

Seeing as I'm alone on the beach with a corpse, the result of that attempt is clear.

"Dr. Tenenbaum is dead."

He doesn't ask how, though he knows he probably should, and not out of some sick sense of curiosity. Rapture was, effectively, the ITF's responsibility, Bucky's responsibility, and the whole thing's been damned to hell in just under a month. From what he knows, they haven't lost any of their own people through some minor miracle, but it's a small consolation for all the lives that were lost -- the children, the addicts, the brainwashed son.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there," he says instead, and means it. He recognizes the look on Steve's face, has seen it reflected in his own features enough, and wants more than anything to absolve his friend of the guilt he must surely feel, but hasn't the first idea how.

"You can't be everywhere at once, Bucky," I tell him, "and judging from the look of you, you were well occupied by whatever nightmare was happening on your end." I'm quiet for a moment and looking back out at the sea before I add, "I would have stayed with you, but I'd told Tenenbaum I'd help her. I had to go."

Not that my presence changed anything, in the end.

"I took care of it," says Bucky, brushing off Steve's words with a shrug. They make one hell of a pair, he thinks, the both of them so stubborn that it's a miracle they can work together as well as they do. In truth, Bucky was glad that he flew this latest mission solo; with Steve there, it would've been a different fight, and not necessarily for the better. Some jobs are better left to one person.

"I killed him. Atlas. Frank Fontaine."

I grimace a little. Bucky and I are very different fighters, for all that we fought side by side so much and for so long. Taking a life has always been a last resort for me. It had to be, because of what I carried and what I had signed on to be. Even then, though, a last resort is still an option you sometimes have to take. If Bucky killed Fontaine, I doubt he had any other choice.

Eventually I just nod. I'm not going to ask him why, or how the fight went down. If he wants to talk about it- which he won't- he can, but I trust his judgement and have no ability or reason to cast my own on his actions.

Edited 2011-08-02 21:59 (UTC)

Sighing, Bucky turns, and looks out at the huge expanse of water stretched out before them. He means to fall silent, to be as tight-lipped as Steve, but there's one pervasive thought that won't let him be, looping around his head like a broken record.

"I don't get it," he says on the rush of an exhale, needing the simple act of giving it voice to give himself some measure of peace. "This place. I don't... understand."

"I don't know that we can," I reply solemnly, thinking, unbidden, of digging through the wreckage of the World Trade Center, the chalky white dust thick and coating everything. I think of the state of Rapture below us, the bodies left behind, the rooms that have collapsed and caved in and flooded.

"Some things, you can't, because there's no reason to them and nothing to control. So you just..." I don't manage to stifle a sigh that goes as deep as my weariness.

"Try to do what you can."

"And if that's not good enough?" he asks, gaze staying stubbornly forward, save for a quick glance in Steve's direction that he's hoped is missed in the low light.

"The Council handed this off to me, Steve, and look what happened."

It's not entirely accurate; the Council left the ITF, as an entity, in charge of the goings on, but while a part of him still feels as though the force will always be Thrace's more so than his own, he won't share the failure, even if the strategist in him says they suffered acceptable losses.

"Bucky, they tasked you with exploring an unknown entity and you did so to the best of your ability given your resources and your opposition. You're one man. Even with the ITF behind you, Rapture is- was- an entire city gone mad with a poison it had been feeding itself for years. The Council unwittingly tasked you with winning a war. You can't ask that of one person."

I bow my head and run a hand over the back of it, feeling dried salt and sand fall away from my fingertips as I do. Without meaning for them to, my attention slides from the water to the girl I couldn't save.

"Did we lose anyone from the island in the fighting?"

They asked it of you, he wants to say, but he's smart enough to avoid navigating that minefield today. Reckless as he's often accused of being, there are some fights even Bucky'll run away from, if the timing isn't right. After everything that's happened in the past few hours, it'd be suicide to delve into those issues, now, and regardless of what others have said over the years, he doesn't have a death wish.

So instead he simply shakes his head, lips pursed. "No," he replies. "The clinic'll have some work to do, but we've suffered no known losses on our side."

"Then you got your people through it," I tell him.

"They used to give commendations for that sort of thing. When you're faced with an army of super powered homicidal lunatics, I'd say that's no small feat. You did good, Buck." I rub a hand tiredly across my eyes. The fact that I myself had a smaller task, a critical one, and failed utterly clings to me like the smell of the saltwater. I don't know that I'll ever shake it.

"Didn't get into this for the medals," he mutters, so quiet he's not even sure Steve'll hear him. Letting out a sigh, he finally takes a seat, sliding the shield off from his back, and setting it carefully down between them, though it'd take a helluva lot more than some jostling around to damage the thing.

"It wasn't your fault, you know. Tenenbaum. The girls."

"Bucky," I say quietly, and shake my head slightly after a moment, closing my eyes. I don't particularly like what I see superimposed against the backs of the lids, so I open them again.

"Of course it was."

"You did what you could," he says, purposefully parroting Steve's own words right back at him, struck again by the similarity of their temperaments. No one would ever mistake them for the same person, their approaches to all things too different to ever make such a presumptuous error, and still, in their stubbornness, they are very much alike.

"Which is a helluva lot more than most folks did or would do, and that much I know you know."

"It doesn't change the fact that I could have prevented Dr. Tenenbaum's death, and failed to do so," I say. I'm frustrated and disappointed and not angry, as such, but I'm sure that feeling will come around later.

"And the girls... I don't know that anything could have saved them, in the long run," I murmur, and reach out to hover a hand over the place my jacket is wrapped carefully about the little body's head- but I don't know what that would accomplish, and I draw the hand away again.

"But they deserved the chance. I told them I would give them one. And then I couldn't."

Edited 2011-08-04 06:42 (UTC)

"How?" he asks after a momen't silence, circling back around to the question his job would've had him lead with at last. He doesn't want to pry, doesn't want to make Steve feel any worse than he already does, but the story will have to be relayed eventually -- to Thrace, at the very least, if not the Times and the Council -- much as Bucky wishes that weren't the case.

"How did Dr. Tenenbaum die?"

"We were moving through a derelict part of the city. A more derelict part, heading for a bathysphere station that had been out of use but that we believed to still be in working order. Believed may be a strong word. That we hoped was in working order. We were passing through a causeway when the pressurized doors at either end closed and the room started flooding. As she went to work on the security override, what Tenenbaum referred to as a 'Houdini' splicer appeared, one of the ones who had the ability to teleport. Dr. Tenenbaum got the door open and I dispatched the splicer, but she was wounded in the altercation. Bucky, I didn't even see it," I say, rubbing a hand over my mouth and jaw.

"I didn't even know she was injured until later."

Edited 2011-08-04 19:54 (UTC)

"She didn't say anything?" says Bucky, more in confirmation than as an actual question, frowning. Much as hates to admit, the situation does seem pretty cut and dry, but that doesn't mean Steve ought to be beating himself up over it, either.

"No. I noticed eventually, but by then it was too late. She had decided that I was going to get the girls out and she was going to stay behind and close off the passageway so we couldn't be followed."

My voice sounds as grim in my own ears as my face must appear to Bucky's eyes.

"I lost her."

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