[After]

[onlyforthedream]

My body is still in shock, or the memory of it, when I stagger and catch myself with one hand against a palm. My breath is pulling raggedly in my lungs and throat and every part of me feels raw, wind burned or frozen or scraped. The enormity of what we just went through is already slamming into me with the same kind of force as the waters of the North Atlantic and I feel such a powerful surge of nausea that I have to clench my jaw, breathe through my nose, and stay half bent against the tree.

Eventually my breath works itself free of the place it was coiled up and constricted in my chest and, eyes burning, I gasp, "Oh, God."

Comments

[onlyapassenger]

Experience should steady Bucky, but experience doesn't always matter. Where the return from Russia all those months ago was no less sudden or disorienting, the circumstances of the shift were, comparatively, more desirable. The darkening sky of Tabula Rasa at dusk is a a familiar sight, but not a comforting one, his body on this prison of an island, even as his mind is still struggling to tear itself away from the horrors of the North Atlantic.

Phantom pain explodes in his shoulder, and he clamps his flesh and blood hand over the joint, fingers pressing into the soft cotton of his dress shirt, almost clawing at the material until he hits the trigger that turns off the hologram, his skin seemingly melting away to reveal the gleaming silver arm of the Winter Soldier, metallic fingers flexing outwards as his knees give out, and he catches himself on the worn dirt path they'd been walking on before all this madness started. The nausea hits almost as an afterthought, but there's no stopping the bile that rushes to his throat. With a cough that's equal parts sob, he turns his head away from Steve at the last second before getting sick, not wanting to subject him to the sight.