Escape Attempt.

[onlyforthedream]

It's been over a week since I woke up in the clinic on this island, and I haven't set a single foot out of doors. Well, that ends tonight. I like to think I'm a patient man, or that at least I have the ability to be one, but it's really gone on long enough. It takes a minute of standing to get my legs under me, really under me. I'm creaky after being bedridden so long, but after a few steps across the floor, I feel practically limber again. Reaching for the scrubs is painful, sure, but I've felt worse. I pull them on, as silently as I may and more gingerly than I'd like, and move back to my now vacant bed. I bunch the sheets tellingly over each other and ride them up the pillow, just in case one of the doctors pokes their head in for a cursory glance. Anything more will reveal my absence, but then, I'll be gone so there won't be much they can do.

I'm not trying to set off for anywhere in particular, anyhow, although I would like to look at the ocean at night. I just need to breathe fresh air. I pause by the door, crouching a little and ducking out of the light cast from the hallway. Someone wanders past in the direction of the kitchen. I wait a few moments, then step out into the hall, straightening up and walking with a nonchalant ease-

The wrong direction, apparently. I arrive at a door that opens into a room with a jukebox, a pool table, some sofas and a bookshelf and a piano, but no door that leads outside. It's late enough that it's largely empty, some people on the far side of the room passing a news reel between them and talking. Not wishing to draw attention or interrupt, I back out of the room on silent footfalls to try the opposite end of the hall, turning back the way I came.

Comments

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

I fall easily into step beside Bucky, going willingly back to the compound. Not that I'm looking forward to more time spent lying prone, but I made a promise. I'm counting the hours, now, until I can leave the clinic and take up residence elsewhere, and hopefully leave off the painkillers for good.

My comment was no such thing, come to that, although I can see how it's easier for Bucky to think it is. I want to push the issue, reassure him that regardless of the amount of drugs in my system the statement was a true one, but I don't.

"Next time I make a run for it, I'm going during the daytime."

[onlyapassenger]

"Next time you make a run for it, it'll be because the army of bored doctors inside cleared you," counters Bucky, starting up the steps to the entrance. He keeps an eye on Steve with his peripheral vision.

"You weren't shot with a frigging BB gun, Steve."

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

"I noticed," I murmur with a grimace, daring to gingerly rotate my right shoulder a little. The result is immediate, dire pain, but I knew it would be. I'm not done healing yet, and it's the surgery more than the initial wound that's going to take the longest. Then again, apparently the initial wound was fatal, or near enough. I'm lucky. I haven't forgotten that.

"But I'll endeavor to keep it in mind. What are you doing with the rest of your night?" I ask. Anything that isn't 'reading in a hospital bed' will sound pretty good, admittedly, but I'm not just asking out of politeness. I haven't been able to see what Bucky's life here, is, but I want to know.

[onlyapassenger]

"I didn't have any specific plans," says Bucky with a slight frown, which is true enough, for all that it sounds incredibly evasive. All of his commitments are in the morning, leaving his afternoons and evenings to himself. Some are more eventful than others, but for the most part, if he doesn't go out to clear his head for a few hours, his nights are painfully dull, either spent playing cards with Jason or getting the occasional drink with Wolverine.

Opening the door for Steve, he steps to the side to let his friend in first. "Why?"

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

"Just curious," I reply with a faintly amused smile as I head up the stairs.

[onlyapassenger]

"There's not you'd call a hopping social scene unless you're a teenager or appreciate the novelty of free strippers," Bucky says frankly, keeping the door propped open with his foot. He's checked out the Catscratch Club in much the same way as he's checked out every other public building, but while Bucky Barnes is as red-blooded as they come, the very notion of a free strip club is unsettling more so than titillating. There are times he's distinctly reminded of the fact that he's from an earlier era than most of the others here; if the past is a different country, the future often seems like a different planet.

"About once a month or so, someone pulls together a big to-do for all ages. Those ones aren't too bad, provided you don't mind what they try to pass off as music."

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

Free strippers seems like it should be an oxymoron, but I'm not curious enough to pursue it.

"Head Radio," I murmur thoughtfully. There's been some wonderful music in the past fifty years, but a lot of it is still jarring. As talented a young lady as she may be, I still prefer Billie Holiday to Beyonce Knowles.

Shaking off the memory of Tony exposing me to Radiohead for the first time, I look at the ceiling of the hallway we're walking down, already familiar in its total blandness.

"I'll look forward to the next one, anyway. At least I'll be on my feet by then."

[onlyapassenger]

"I guess you won't have any excuse to play the wallflower, then," says Bucky with a knowing look. He's teased Steve enough about not having any fun to last a lifetime, and the thought of him getting dressed up in the finest the Island has to offer (which often isn't very fine at all) brings a smile to his face, however slight.

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

I sigh a little. If there's one thing Bucky has never given up ribbing me about, it's having fun. But, I can see in my peripheral vision, it's got him smiling. So I'll take it.

"We all can't be as winning on the dance floor as you, Bucky."

[onlyapassenger]

The comment earns a laugh, and the smile he flashes Steve is as brief as it is genuine; for a moment Buck's whole face lights up, washing away about a decade's worth of aging. It's been a while since he's had any occasion to dance -- at Mardi Gras, he resigned himself to just getting drunk and keeping an eye out on Jason -- but there's not a doubt in his mind that he'd be just as good now as he was in youth. He just needs the right girl to partner.

"Doesn't mean you can't try."

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

"A good soldier knows how to pick and choose his battles," I counter. Watching Bucky and Toro on the warpath the scant few times we weren't on the battlefield was always something to behold.

Fond memories, but they don't hold a candle to seeing Bucky let go, if just for a second, of everything he carries with him these days. He almost looks like a kid again, with that weight lifted, and though I don't let it affect me outwardly, I have to say: If anything, it reminds me of how daunting a task I have in front of me. Not just getting to know him again, but showing him that he doesn't have to shoulder that weight alone, anymore.

[onlyapassenger]

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I haven't heard that one before," says Bucky, waving off the argument. The smile's already gone, but there's a hint of it still behind his eyes.

"Where was that good thinking when you decided to pull a Houdini, huh?"

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

"Stuck somewhere on page eight hundred of War and Peace." This is a joke. I'm not actually reading War and Peace.

I finished it yesterday.

[onlyapassenger]

The choice of book strikes him as odd, but then, he doubts Steve had much of a say in his reading material, so Bucky doesn't dwell on it for long; his hatred isn't Pavlovian. He hates the bastards who brainwashed him, not every Russian on the planet; that would've been uncomfortable, given his girlfriend's nationality. (It's been months since he's seen Natalia, but his feelings for her haven't gone anywhere.)

"Hell of a bookmark," Bucky says, turning into the clinic.

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

"I can't argue that," I say, stifling a short, quiet sigh as we walk back into the room. The bed's not the way I left it, which means I'm probably going to get very sternly reprimanded by someone in the near future. I walk back to the damn thing and lift a book from the bedside stack, a copy of Papers of the Adams Family.

I haven't cracked the cover yet. I haven't read it since I was a kid. But it was in the pile, and I keep it at the top.

"...Did you read a lot of Mark Twain as a kid?"

[onlyapassenger]

"Some," says Bucky, fixing Steve with a curious glance before he notes the book he's holding. It's been a while since Bucky's read it himself -- as a kid, he picked more fights with the older soldiers than he picked up books -- but there's at least one passage that springs to mind that he can think might be relevant for Steve right about now. When he speaks again, it's with the slow, measured tone of someone probing their memory for the right words, his gaze distant as he tries to remember Twain's language; when it comes to giving speeches, he lacks Steve's charisma, but he makes up for it in other ways.

"'If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country -- hold up your head.'" Bucky pauses, because the last part is as much his own words as it is Twain's. He gives Steve a pointed look. "'You have nothing to be ashamed of.' That's how it goes, right?"

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

The words are haltingly spoken, maybe, but well spoken, too. I watch Bucky recite part of that passage that had burned itself so indelibly into my memory, so young, and remember saying the rest of it to Peter on a Manhattan roof top. I believed it, then. I believe it now, I know I do. I just don't feel that I do. They mean so much, these words. To hear them from Bucky's mouth seems like they should mean even more. But all that stirs is a sense of disappointment, in how I ended things, how I let them end, how far I let them get in the first place and how I couldn't see any other way. It's a far pricklier wound that tires me out more quickly and drastically than the one in my shoulder.

The look he shoots me is significant, but I don't react to it. I look down at the book in my hands, turning it over, then almost casually discard it back atop the pile.

"That's how it goes," I echo.

[onlyapassenger]

People tell me all the time that I'm too hard on myself. Hell, Steve told me, shortly before I showed up here, that when beating myself up isn't enough, I let the bad guys do it for me. Looking at him now, though, it's hard not to think him a hypocrite. Because I've worn the flag. I've shouldered that responsibility. And while I no longer view it as the burden I once did, I know what he's going through.

Easing himself down into the visitor's chair, Bucky's quiet for a moment. He's never been one for discussing his feelings, which is as much to do with the environment he grew up in as it is his own personality, but he wants to be there for his friend, even if he's not sure he's the right man for the job.

"The Act gets overturned, you know."

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

I'm still standing. After a few seconds, it's the only thing I'm certain of. I look at Bucky, hard.

"What?"

I wait for relief, for gratitude, something to wash over me. I'm a little surprised to feel angry though.

[onlyapassenger]

It probably speaks to their familiarity that Bucky doesn't flinch, that instead he makes himself comfortable in the chair, and gestures for Steve to get back in his damn already. The news is jarring, he realizes, which is why he hasn't spoken of it in any detail before this; a lot's changed since that bullet tore through Captain America's shoulder, and Bucky's only qualified to tell some of that particular story.

"I told you that you're the Head of National Security, Steve. You really think you'd take that position if the SHRA was still being enforced? If people hadn't realized what a piss poor idea it was in the first place?" he asks, his expression dubious. "The Act gets overturned. Not saying it was easy, but it does."

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

"I know I wouldn't, and I assumed it had to have been undone somehow but- how long," I demand, not taking one step more toward the bed.

"Until it was. Who made it happen?"

[onlyapassenger]

"A little over a year," says Bucky, straightening slightly in spite of himself, because old habits die hard. "And that's a complicated question to answer, which probably gives you an idea how confused the people were in the midst of all this madness. Bottom line is that it was you, but if you want the whole story, you're going to need to sit down."

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

It's a cheap move, but he made it because he's not stupid and I'm feeling in desperate need of some more fresh air. Bucky knows me, knows I need to know this, and so even though it rankles to return to it so quickly, I walk around the bed to sit on the edge of it, facing Bucky. I rest my elbows on my knees and watch him.

Possibly it's not a good thing, to press for this information, to learn so much about a future I'll never live for being here. I've made the choice, though. He offered, I'm taking him up on it.

[onlyapassenger]

"Stark didn't keep his job for long after your alleged death," Bucky starts, and in this, he's more comfortable than reciting another man's words. He's used to giving reports, used to condensing information to the barest essentials, and that his own part in this story is mercifully brief, there's no underlying hesitation. He's matter of fact. Direct.

"There was an incident with the Skrulls: a global, long term secret invasion in which they infiltrated every organization. Starktech was compromised, which meant Stark himself was compromised. This allowed for Norman Osborn to worm his way into power; his involvement in the final battle against the Skrull Queen was critical to our victory. The President recognized this, and through a questionable leap in logic, made him the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., which Osborn promptly dismantled, and renamed H.A.M.M.E.R. While popular with the public, Osborn didn't receive the same warm welcome from the people he was persecuting. Adopting the persona Iron Patriot, he led his own team of Avengers against us a number of times before laying siege to Asgard. You were resurrected, for lack of a better word, shortly before this, and as Captain America led the real Avengers against Osborn and his cronies. Once his insanity was revealed to the world at large, you were asked by the President to step in, and clean up the mess that Stark and Osborn left behind. The Act was thrown out, and the Avengers were restructured into a number of different teams, each serving their own purpose."

[onlyforthedream.livejournal.com]

A lot can happen in a year. I'll need time to digest that, to really turn it over in my head. What's most daunting is the sum total of what Bucky must be leaving out.

"God," I say quietly.