dappered | (no subject)

[ It's Tuesday in Avengers Tower.

A lot of the particulars of this arrangement had gone over his head, given that he'd been all but catatonic from shock and exhaustion through half of it (turns out using the Cube for a major temporal displacement actually took a lot of energy from the bearer, in this case him) but it seemed to include a lot of shouting and posturing while he'd suffered a fatal disconnect over which Steve he was supposed to back up, the tiny angry one or the big angry one. But the gist of it, explained by Howard Stark's son, is this: the Tesseract fucks with time, and sometimes deigns to answers wishes. Even those not spoken out loud. One flash of blue light later it had dumped all four of them here in the future in some kind of 'temporal bubble,' whatever the fuck that was, and it's keeping them here indefinitely.

Stark promises he's working on fixing it, but the future has things like inhalers and endless amounts of hot water, so there's that. Bucky's not in any big freaking hurry to head back to the war front in any case, even if being stuck here means staring at the frankly terrifying person who is supposedly future-him, or one possible version of future-him.

They're all under what's effectively house arrest in Stark's future robot building, given leave to go wherever they want in the Tower. They've all got their own bedrooms, their own kitchens, even their own floors if they want them, but Bucky had shown up at younger Steve's door at first opportunity and hadn't left him since.

(Part of him thought that maybe, maybe he should be throwing in with the other one, the older one with shadows under his eyes and a look on his face like someone had just kicked him in the stomach, the one Bucky remembered from Europe, but stress had brought on one of Stevie's attacks and Bucky couldn't leave him alone for that.)

He'd been kicked out eventually, though, told to go do his worrying and hovering somewhere else and take his stupid glowing alien box with him, which meant that Steve wanted some space to be upset in peace and that was fine, that was all fine, Brooklyn Steve didn't really know him since he'd been taken off to the camp and. Yeah. He's different. He's killed a lot of people since then, has watched his best friend waffle between science experiment, propaganda darling and one man army with maybe 10% of the training he needs to do the jobs they've got him doing. He's got a glowing alien box that always comes back to him, no matter how he tries to get rid of it. It bothers Steve that he's different. Not a one of them really know each other right now.

He drifts into the kitchen out of lack of anything better to do, still dressed in yesterday's clothes because he hadn't gotten a wink of sleep while Steve rasped in the bed next to him, mechanically opening cabinets and going through drawers, staring in something like hopeless frustration at the array of supposed edibles. The packages are all brightly colored and there are three kinds of everything, all declared to be low-fat or pure organic or a good source of vitamin whatever, like it wasn't possible for a guy to just get milk anymore without having to make some kind of choice about it. The labels are in every kind of language possible, of which he can only read three with his fragmentary French, Italian, and German. There's butter, more than he knows what to do with, and real meat, impossibly fresh, and the house robot has told him that if there's anything he wants that isn't there, he just has to ask for it and it'll be delivered.

All he wants is a goddamn loaf of bread and some cheese to make a sandwich, jesus. ]

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[ now the look he's being given is very clearly disbelief, and the winter soldier slowly mirrors the movement of resting a hand over steve's heart, feeling it jump and stutter under his palm. ]

[ Steve's own heartbeat is fluttering, irregular -- it's always been like this; and it's not new when he's fighting against his own body for his life every day.

Bucky's hand on his chest still startles him, but it's only a moment after that that he relaxes, watching him easily, not moving his hand. Wryly, he comments. ] You used to do that. You'd put your ear on my chest to make sure that I wasn't giving up the ghost. [ He shrugs a little. ] Sometimes my heart rate gets messed up.

[ that makes him frown instantly and he moves his hand from steve's chest to cup carefully around his neck, evidently searching for the pulse beating there to count it out. ]

[ Steve stays very still, before his hand comes to rest gently over his. His pulse is still irregular, faster, and he shakes his head. ]

It's all right. I'll live.