sixthiterationlogs | [closed] there's no sure footing

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[closed] there's no sure footing

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: Midland river island, ruins, southeast of the Southern Village.
WHEN: Late August / early September
OPEN TO: Bucky Barnes
WARNINGS: Possible drug mentions, definite snakes, hallucinations, peril, PTSD.

Lashing out at Frank hadn't exactly made him feel better, but it had reminded him that the only way to cope in this place is to do; to set up situations just dire and interesting enough that the mind can't stagnate in existential crisis. And if the uncertainty of river-travel can't accomplish that, silence and banter prove equally easy with Bucky. It's hard to imagine himself angry with the man, even in an unrelated sense.

They don't dig into each other. They don't dig into other things together. When Kira had planned to follow the river down to the shore and forage on the way back, he'd chosen the man as a kind of antidote to exploring those tree houses.

It didn't hurt that Bucky had fried the Wendigo queen. Alpha? Whatever the fuck they are. He's the brawn, probably a large chunk of the brains. Kira can settle for being the impetus, directing conversation and energy in his backhanded, teasing way. Point is, they enjoy each other. It doesn't have to be anything more than that, even as the salvaged and borrowed boat glides over the smoothing patch of river where it opens to meet several others, an island visible, some structure hulking between its trees.

"Anyway, that's why you always hit on the Catholic boys," he says, tilting his whole body against the rudder to get a better look across the water and aim them to cut across the current toward the shore. "If they aren't already freaks, they're desperate to try."

Try what, he'll wind his way back to on some other flight of fancy. Right now, he wants to know what else they've built this far south. "You see that? We should check it out."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If he minds being both the brains and the muscle he makes no mention of it; he's honestly glad for a little change of pace. He's settled into a routine of running with Steve in the morning and chopping wood in the afternoon, but most of the time he's got nothing to fill the gaps otherwise. Food, socializing, spending a little time with the people around him, but he spends a lot of it feeling aimless. Restless, looking for something to pour energy into.

Foraging, scavenging, exploring? He can do all those. Keeping Kira's ass alive and without a broken leg or a spider bite's going to be the bigger challenge, really, and why he agreed to it in the first place. Especially when it started out with let's take this boat followed swiftly by how does one boat. Yeah, it's a good thing he came.

He's content, also, to listen to the rambling life advice he's given, even if he does hitch an eyebrow up more than once at this speech on Catholic boys because every time he says it Bucky can't help but picture Steve as the subject of the lesson. Amusing as it is uncomfortable.

It's Kira that spots it first, the crumbling stone ruins of some kind of building - perhaps an estate, a mansion, maybe even a castle although it's frankly a little difficult to see through the trees still between them. It's definitely a break from the norm, something not green and not in town, and while Barnes doesn't expect it to be a treasure trove of knowledge or supplies he's got to admit it's interesting.

If they aren't freaks, they're desperate to try- nope, nope, nope.

"Yeah, sure. Steer us aground, Cap'n." He says slyly, shifting to shoulder the pack of provisions he brought because he's a god damn soldier and not an idiot.

Edited (i caught a typo 10 years later this isn't a pa edit i swear) 2018-08-26 04:26 (UTC)

Catholic boys are just the topic of the hour: Kira has plenty of demographics in his library to discuss the finer points of flirting with, and it won't be until he's safe in bed, staring at the ceiling, that he even thinks about how he's probably never done that. How Bela probably, technically, popped his new clone cherry back when they swam into this bigger, more corporeal habitat.

It feels like something they'd be mutually horrified with, but also laugh off. He'll bring it up over drinks someday.

Or he'll die on a river jaunt and scrub this whole run, who the fuck cares anymore. Shifting, he puts his back to the rudder, braces with his feet on the boat's side. It wedges them against the push of the current, strong enough that they still come aground south of the structure, not quite able to point the boat against it.

Getting the boat home is a project for future Kira and Bucky. At present, he's absorbing the new feeling of sand and shale under boat. With Bucky hefting supplies, Kira slips over the side, judging the distance from prow to treeline, and the weight of the boat itself. "I think we can just pull it up a bit," he says, as if he has any input Bucky would need impressed upon him. Squinting through the trees, it's enough of a find for him to fish out his glasses and put them on, which don't help to discern much more about the structure. "It's very grey."

Frankly, Barnes is all for abandoning the boat entirely. Temporarily, at least, because the idea of dragging it on their hike back without his super soldier serum while also carting a load of whatever provisions they find out here? Yeah, not exactly appealing. He's not so sure how well Kira will do trying to haul the damn thing for literal miles, he's never seen the guy chop wood so he's got no real mental stock of his physicality.

Even for someone in great shape, though, it'd be a pain after half an hour. They'll figure something out another time, it's not like boats are in high demand back in the village.

Barnes hops out of the boat easily, wraps a metal hand around the bough and gives it a nice solid pull. It slides up a rough, frictiony few feet onto the bank and seems to sit solidly. Even a rising tide wouldn't budge it-- at least nothing sort of a good couple of feet anyway. If they get a storm and flood like that they'll have bigger concerns.

As soon as that's set, he shifts to stand shoulder to shoulder with Kira, loosely fondling the strap settled on vibranium with the opposite hand.

He studies the structure, lips turn down as he considers it, and--

"Yep." He's got to agree, sounding wholly unimpressed and more than a little dry. And then he glances over, realizes Kira's dawned specs, and arches an amused eyebrow at him. "You been blind this whole time?"

Why the hell was he steering the boat without them? Jesus, kid.

On some level, for the same reason he offers haircuts and shaves back in the village. If this place wants to fuck with his sense of identity, he'll at least maintain some control over his appearance. Sliding a look to Bucky, through the wire rims, he negotiates an unspoken pact: he talks about the glasses, Kira will leave him on this island.

Somehow. By force of spite alone.

"Yeah," he says, "like a fucking samurai." While Bucky secures the boat, Kira walks closer to the tree line, catches no immediate signs of human entry. The shale and sand are unbroken, the forest has grown over any old paths. "I do better when I can't see how fucked I am."

Kira shoots him a look and on instinct his hands come up in a gesture of surrender; he may be able to drop kick a mule off a cliff but he knows that's one battle he isn't trying to fight. You do you, pal. He'll even huff out a little laugh at the quip, but after that he's more than happy to shift gears and focus on the looming problem at hand; giant fucking ruins of mystery.

Hanging from the pack on a precarious side strap is a singular machete, which he gladly foists out as he takes point. Watch him perpetuate every stereotype from every jungle exploration movie ever, he picks his way forward hacking at low-hanging branches or waist-high briars and brush.

"Any ideas what we're expecting to find in here, or are we flyin' by the seat of our pants?" Not that he minds. Something to do, after all.

"We're not flying fucking coach," he says, because he is always flying by the seat of his pants. He used to have a kind of autopilot at least, kept the plane from crashing, but he hasn't felt that sublime rhyme and reason in his life since the badger threw down during that fated breakfast.

"But at least we're flying."

Leaving the glasses on, he peers ahead while Bucky, like he's in some Dwayne The Rock Johnson vehicle, hacks a path through the brush. Then, when even the bunching of Bucky's shirt over his back muscles can't stifle his impatience, Kira ventures left, ventures right, until he finds a gap his skinny, unladen ass can slip through. Next Bucky hears from him, he's up ahead, a spot of golden yellow fabric between the leaves.

"The tree houses we found, those looked hand-made, even more than the shit in the village. Maybe this isn't like that. I know shit from the simulation can't be trusted to count, but they showed us things. Surveillance equipment, specimen rooms."

There's no suppressing the answering snort that rips from him at the answer; yeah, okay, hashtag relatable. Sounds about right. It's alright, truth be told flying by the seat of his pants is a more familiar and easy way to go about it than anything strategically planned; it's almost like being on the lamb again. Comes with a certain pleasant (almost nostalgic) kind of freedom.

He shoots an eye at Kira's retreating back, but at half his broadness in the shoulder, there's no damn way Bucky's going to be able to take the path of least resistance.

On the bright side, he doesn't even really seem to be sweating by the time he catches up. He may not have the serum anymore but he chops a hell of a lot of fucking wood these days.

"So you're saying it was cobbled together by people and tools, not- I don't know, prefabricated?" He's not even so sure he's making sense, not articulating it the way he likes, but he's seen prefabricated housing, he's seen artificial construction done by machines and 3D printers as opposed to a hammer and a nail and human error.

"Prefabricated," Kira echoes, trying out the word as he looks at the greenery he's ass deep in without much thought. The glasses let him see the world ahead, but those foraging books didn't exactly prepare him for alien poison oak. Mark's seminar hadn't covered anything that made you itchy, so: blindly ahead it is.

"Now I just feel lucky the village doesn't look like some Shady Acres suburb with matching floor plans."

Unencumbered, he continues ahead, over and through the split of a tree, holding moss and vines back for Bucky to follow. What he thought were small red blossoms scatter in a cloud of butterflies, beautiful, and yet his only thought is what bullshit do those do?

"I guess it's all kind of set up for us, but it's--places that look lived in, and places that don't. And that--" he says, shaking himself a bit as they clear enough brush to see the concrete blocks of the main structure, chipped and cracked by the elements, "doesn't look like it has many homey touches inside."

An eyebrow slides up a little in amusement at the thought of the Village changing to be some kind of 'burb. Frankly, the thought fills him with a kind of visceral horror he can't even describe. Everyone living in a house in a culdesac somewhere, peeking out through their blinds at the other neighbors and muttering catty things behind drapes someone ordered out of a Sears catalog.

God, the horror.

They draw up to a pause once they finally make it to the entranceway, largely intact though pieces of the wall on the far left seem to crumble inwards upon itself like a star collapsing and then freezing midway through the process. Yeah, he's gonna have to agree on the no homey touches part.

"Looks like a god damn insane asylum, actually," He comments, tilting his head to the side like he's looking for a shape in the clouds rather than taking stock of a building. An insane asylum, but one of those old ones like back before construction took off and they resembled churches instead of fortresses.

Ominous.

It really does look like the set of a horror movie--set, specifically, because it's just sitting there in the daylight. No ominous caws from fuckoff birds, no rolling mist. The specimen room had kind of been like that, just a crack in the cliff walls that didn't move like the rest of the canyon. Just an empty cave, a wooden door set in stone, and an empty room behind thick glass.

He can deal with it empty, he thinks. Dust on old carts, or maybe pews from the shape of the thing. He can deal with a lot of things, if the last week, or six months, or year are any indication.

An asylum doesn't rank. New York Kira would be climbing the fence right now. "Well jinkies, Scoob, we're gonna poke around in it anyway." The door is the kind of thing he doesn't want breaking off the hinge, so when he approaches, it's to stick half of his body through a stone window, the wooden frame rotted out of place and glass visible on the floor inside. Older than the tree houses, then. "Looks empty, through here."

Any association Bucky might have had between this place and a horror film goes out the window when Kira goes in the window. He splutters, caught between a warning, a protest, and a laugh. God, what a stupid fucking idea, but too late now. If either of them were to throw themselves inside maybe it ought to have been the guy with the metal arm and the machete, but here we are, Kira's ass hanging out and wriggling as he kicks himself in like a damn unbirthing.

Barnes shakes his head and ambles over once he's sure he isn't going to be kicked in the face, peering over the frame and down at the fallen glass and dust.

Well, if there was something in there aiming to eat a man it'd get the main course real quick after the apetizer.

He enters with a fair bit more grace than Kira. Pulls himself up onto the ledge, grips the top of the frame, swings in feet first and lands like a dancer. Breaking into houses creepily and sexily is kind of his thing.

"Guess you didn't bring a flashlight or a lantern?" He muses, flicking his eyes to Kira's... lack of any supplies whatsoever.

"No, I did not venture tens of miles into the mountains to pick up the only lanterns we've ever had," Kira rejoins, grabbing his jeans by their excess around his knees and shaking off bits of glass. "And I did pack shit, I just elected to add it to your bag."

This is what happens when you grow up with your life in an iPhone: if it doesn't fit in his pockets, it isn't immediately relevant.

Kira digs into the pockets of his worn out parka, kicking around the debris until he finds an old stick. There's some light in the immediate room, between the windows and caved in bits of roof. "Soaked these in alcohol before drying them out," he says, revealing and adding the remains of an old shirt to the torch. It lights in a plume of blue flame.

"Here. Add sconce to the Swiss army uses for your metal hand."

Okay, so, admittedly yes that is impressive. He conveys as much with a downturn of his lips and a little tilt of his head, considers it foresight enough that he won't even protest at being used as a god damn sconce. And thus they venture forth, with a torch in one hand and a machete in his other, his faithful companion doing... something in some general vicinity.

Detritus and broken glass crunch beneath their feet as they walk, and the place seems... bare. Incredibly bare, in fact, lacking in rugs or portraits or any of the weird stuff Bucky would have assumed it to have. For some reason his mind was filling it in with the details of a creepy haunted mansion, eyes that follow you wherever you walk, velvet furniture. For the most part, though, it's just rubble and hanging vines.

Debris. He leads them from the room and out of the open door into the foyer, muttering, "Just me or is this kind of underwhelming?"

"Underwhelming is my drag name," Kira quips, mouth running autopilot while he takes in this new piece of the universe's worst ARG. "But in a bad German accent." Chew on that mental image while he roots around in garbage: he's got the moles, he once owned the cigarette holder.

He's also standing in torchlight, studying a decaying floor, cheeks chipmunked out in a breath he raspberries around his teeth.

"Drag marks," he finally says, revealing some of how the little weed-greased gears of his brain whirl. Kira points at the shells of a set of lockers, then down to where pale scars arc from their corner, across the floor. Grabbing the frame, where one of the doors has rusted off its hinge, he digs in his heels and throws his weight into shifting it, then puts himself in the wedge and kicks it wide enough for Bucky to follow behind.

"So like, do you prefer this murder hallway," he asks, backed unashamedly up against Bucky's chest as the torch illuminates a secret tunnel, marked immediately with a paint-drip black flame symbol as tall as Kira himself.

Undavelmin, he turns it over in his head with a hitch to his eyebrow. Is thoroughly distracted by both the word and by imaging Kira in a dress and lipstick that he doesn't pick up on what the hell Kira's talking about until he's already throwing himself into secret trap door lockers.

Well, damn.

He edges in, torch held high above them and unphased by the presence against his chest. Too busy taking in the sight of that black flame, ominous and foreboding before them.

"You know..." He starts as he studies it, an absent muttering that takes a back seat to the symbol itself. "There's no word for underwhelming in German. Just enttäuschend which is like... disappointing. Ich bin nicht enttäuscht."

A beat, and the torch dips a little.

"I feel like now might be a good time to make sure you actually wanna keep going. Just- you know, checking in, considering-"

Vague motion at the creepy tunnel before them.

Kira takes that little German lesson and tucks it away for, well, immediately, even if one hand does go back and hip-check Bucky for a shot of courage. Big machete man who knows German at his back. Probably once used a torch to set Hitler's corpse on fire. Death is just another reset on his emotional instability.

They've got this.

"Ich bin enttäuscht that you even have to ask," he says, mouth only a bit dry as he steps forward. His finger draws down the changing texture of wall and paint, and he motions Bucky inside. "Jar," he requests, when dust and paint crumble off under his hand. He spends a moment chipping pieces into it, for the science types to look at later. Acrylics aren't going to last longer than window frames, and if it isn't something durable--begs the question of who came along later and put it here.

Kind of like his lighter, begging the question: what if another Kira came through here, same as he's doing now? "Don't worry," he says, going first into the passage. "I"ll leave my glasses on."

Maybe not Hitler's corpse, per say, but the unfortunate reality is that Barnes has in fact set a number of Nazi corpses on fire. An unspeakable, uncountable amount - some of which weren't corpses until after that whole fire thing. Such is life in world war two, such is life in occupied France.

If that's a prerequisite for confidence in a dark tunnel then yeah, sure, they got this.

Barnes has to holster the machete to search through his rucksack for jar, shooting Kira baleful looks as he does so. Bodyguard, sconce, pack mule, now he's handing over shit like a surgeon's assistant. Scalpel, tongs, sponge, sutures. Suction. Nevertheless, he hands it over and holds the torch up high enough for Kira to see what he's doing.

Except that it's boring, and so he scouts ahead a bit, clearing a few dusty feet of empty tunnel to round it toward a dark and damp chamber. It smells of- something, of dead rats and mildew.

He hovers there in the doorway, peering through the flickering torchlight, waiting until he hears Kira shuffle behind him before he steps inward.

Great tressels of hanging ivy fall like curtains toward the center of the room, stone pillars crumble into one another making for covered partitions waiting to be disturbed.

"What kind of Indiana Jones shit is this," Kira murmurs. Not quite cowed from pressing forward, but not about to shout into the strange courtyard they've found. A structure within the structure--did someone carve this out of the old facade, or was it always like this? What was the fucking point?

He'll put it to his diary later: for now, Kira edges into the first square of grass. It's tall in most places, bisected by stone inlays or held back by dark bushes.

Would that he could still pull on a pair of wings when he wanted. It would be nice to know what's on the other side, without having to put his feet in all the unknowns. Good thing he isn't especially large as a man either: he puts his toe to one of the stone paths, and when it doesn't immediately sink and send a boulder rolling their way, slides along it between the overgrowth.

"Some kind of garden," he guesses aloud, walking on his toes and craning his neck, wanting to see what's at that center. "I hear water."

"I actually know that one," He muses more to himself than to Kira. Indiana Jones was one of those flicks that apparently international copyright law didn't give a shit about, so he'd been able to watch it in a hostel in the Ukraine on a cell phone late at night when someone in the next room over wouldn't stop having sex long enough for him to sleep. Headphones and Netflix were a life saver that night.

Kira's right, it does look a little temple of doom in here.

"Careful," he mutters, casting an uncertain glance at Kira's feet. He'd say it's ridiculous to worry about setting off booby traps, except that they're in a hidden room behind a secret door in the middle of a magical fucking island, so. Really, it's almost ridiculous to assume there won't be any. Barnes edges forward, torch held aloft and his free hand edging toward his bag again for the machete. Tugs it out so he can reach out with it and just barely graze the hanging curtain of ivy. The second metal touches he draws it like a drape off to one side, peers through with squinted eyes for the source of the water. "I don't..."

"When am I not careful," Kira sends back down the path, edging closer to the sound. It's stranger that Bucky doesn't even hear the river--and Kira doesn't either, once he widens his focus from the trickle. It speaks to the thickness of the walls, and how many there might be between them and the wilds, now.

The sun is high enough outside that beyond the torch light, beams of light pierce the ceiling and encroaching moss. Soft patches of it sit at the bottom of the pillars, brighter, deeper green than Kira's seen in any park back home.

There's a beauty to the place, juxtaposed with the dread of that tight hallway. "Over there," he says, finding the source of the sound. A thin aqueduct in the stone feeds water into the center of the space, a basin made of narrow steps, the water feeding clear but gone brackish under lily pads and red blossoms. "Maybe--a courtyard of some kind," he theorizes, looking back over the blocks of shrubbery and grass. The flowers no longer seem to follow any plan, but he catches familiar patches of gold and violet.

He ambles over, some of the tension easing off now that they've traversed a chunk of the room and not been shot with poison darts or attacked by some kind of secret hidden wall lion. His guard drops just a bit and with it his arms, settling by his sides as he falls into step near Kira before the basin.

"Wonder what kind of bullshit those do," he mutters, nodding his head toward the red blossoms. Everything around here does something, right? Maybe they make you fly, or turn your fingernails into ice or something ridiculous like that. "Give you five bucks to eat one."

"You're going to have to sweeten that pot; I know you don't have five bucks."

In a way, this trip is just a new kind of bender: one fed by absurdity and reckless action instead of moonshine and--whatever he can roll up and smoke. Awaiting the new offer, Kira braces a hand at Bucky's metal elbow and stoops to scoop a blossom from the pool--if not for the state of that water, he'd probably just do it.

As it stands: "What'll you offer me if I take this home and smoke it?" Still arm-in-arm, he glances back at a new sound, red blossom going unceremoniously into his pocket. "What was--" there's a trail of wet, leading up the steps and into the grass, where there wasn't before. The blades move slightly on some movement, and he thinks he knows what of. From the hanging moss, there peels the searching head of a glossy-green snake.

"Let's table that for now. Fuck."

He can't help the snort; Kira isn't wrong. Even before he arrived he didn't have five bucks to his name, and even if he did it's got about as much use as kindling in a place like this. Kira scoops a flower up anyway to Bucky's utter amusement, and he searches his head for a viable substitute for currency-

But the thought is cut short because he hears it the same instant Kira does. A rustling, a wet sort of shifting sound, friction on stone, wet, sliding-

Shit.

It's with that arm looped through Kira's that he slowly pushes the other man behind him in the world's slowest body block. It means losing the protective shield of a metal arm, but that thought takes a back seat to the notion of protecting over fighting. He doesn't heal so well anymore, and his reflexes aren't exactly on snake levels these days. If they can edge out...

"Step back slowly," he murmurs, easing back himself even as he says it, an unshakable instinct to get out of striking range. A low, deadly hiss fills the air like a warning. The flickering flame crackling and shifting does them no favors. It pops abruptly, and that's about when James knows he's fucked.

It all happens rather quickly. Barnes drops the torch the second that head snaps forward, and if he'd still been boosted on serum he thinks he'd have had the agility and the precision to catch it where he'd been aiming to - some safe space just an inch below the head where he could snap spine with even flesh fingers. He's not, though, not as good as he once was, and he miscalculates the snake's aim by just an inch or so.

The end result is a pair of fangs sunk deeply into the place between his forefinger and thumb, fist clenched around it so it can't pull back to lash out again, but-

"Fuck!" the best-laid plans of mice and larger mice if you're a snake often go awry, his ideas are short-circuited by the sudden flooding of a startling amount of pain. It feels like a bullet wound rather than a snake bite, and when he brings his fist down on the stone ground as he drops it's less about killing the thing and more a physical expression of pain venting forth in a frustrated sort of punch.

One in the vines, one in the grass--who knows how many more they haven't seen. Even a year in these wilds, Kira's experience with snakes is largely through glass and potentially simulated. When Bucky edges him back, he goes; when he tells him to move slow, he does.

Until it doesn't do them a damn bit of good.

He's all but holding Bucky, arm still in arm and his other hand pressed in the center of his back as they try to move in tandem--when the man cries out and starts to double, smacking his fist down with the snake wriggling out from the blow. Kira slips around, hand drawing his presence across Bucky's back and side, kicking at the thing until it flops down into the water.

Which just sends another one out, startling him deeply enough that he doesn't think--if he ever does--lifting his foot entirely and driving his heel down hard. It catches behind the thing's head and it flips, writhes in its own pain, long enough for Kira to do it again.

He's still not really thinking, not in the slowed down way that leads to conscious decision, when he grabs the limp body in one hand and Bucky in the other, clamping down hard on the wrist of his bleeding hand. Gotta have the snake to make the cure, he's pretty sure, but--"We don't know what the fuck that's going to do," he says, voice pressed flat with the sheer need to be calm. "So we need to fucking move, and I need you to tell me right now if sucking the poison out is just in movies."

The torch has long since spluttered out, splashed and dusted into a barely-burning ember - but they don't need it. Barnes has seen this before, this line fading into his field of vision. Saw it with Benedict at the Inn, and just like then he trusts it now blindingly and instinctively.

His hand radiates pain, sharp and pulsing - burning, oh hell, bites don't burn unless there's something to them. Venomous, without question, fire in his veins spreading heat up his arm- fuck-

"I'm running out of god damn hands," he snarls at nothing in particular, surging forth to wrap a flesh arm around Kira's waist. They're leaving. They're leaving now, even if it means all but carrying the smaller guy out in his hurry. A flash of blue to his left gets a metal hand shooting out to catch a striking snake mid-thrust toward Kira's face. Fangs meet vibranium instead and snap on unbreakable metal, not that the snake has time to process it. It's crushed in a singular second and thrust to the floor like nothing.

He ushers them toward a hallway that's pitch black now, except the illuminated little line of blue that only he can see. "Movies. It won't help, you just wind up sucking in tainted blood for no fucking reason."

And if he grunts, if he sounds pissed, it's not at Kira. Obviously.

Fucking snakes. Fucking eight heads of Hydra. Fucking torch this place to the ground.

Torch it later: Kira lets Bucky drag him out, his only resistance a moment of instinct--those ever turning gears processing the present with the past, now that they're untethered from the future. Now that nothing's going to tell him how this ends but his own attempts to deal with it. When they crush together into the hall, breaking like cue balls in a pocket and stumbling on, Kira has a dead snake in one hand, a handful of goldbells in the other.

He's squeezing both like his life depends on it.

Coughing in the return to dust and dark, he pushes on to lead Bucky with his voice, unaware that anything else might aid him. "Come on, we'll get outside. Maybe we can tie your arm off, I'll fucking--text the doctors, or we'll try some of that moss."

If it seems like he's throwing a lot of pasta at Bucky, right now it's all he has to give.

Bucky's bag scrapes the wall, the machete tied to it makes the most god-awful metal on rock scratching noise known to man and for a moment - a ludicrous moment - his mind morphs it into the sound of the loudest hiss so far. A snake, it must be a snake, god, how big of a snake must it be to make a sound like that-

It repeats in his head like a skipping record, and then devolves into a singular pulsating tone like tinnitus but stronger. He staggers at the top of the stairs, one knee buckling and cracking on the concrete, his balance thrown by the fucking noise. As he goes down his arm slips from Kira, moves instead to press against his ears, palms flat and pushing to try and block it out, mouth opening and closing like working his jaw might somehow help.

"What the hell is that?" And if he almost shouts if, if it's a little too loud like he's talking over a concert instead of someone next to him, it's because he can't hear the sound of his own fucking voice over it.

What is--Bucky's arm slips from his side, he moves on, Bucky doesn't follow. Kira's lost in the grind of what do I do what do I do until Bucky exclaims, and he realizes how far he's fallen behind. Kira stuffs the goldbells in one big pocket, affords himself one moment's squeamishness before hanging the snake off his neck like a scarf. Very dead, very smooth and slightly wet scarf.

He'll lose his shit later.

"Out of the gross secret hallway first," Kira says, both hands on Bucky's metal arm when he tugs, tries to move him. "Out of the hallway and talking," at whatever volume he needs to do it. "What is what, it's just us in here." Not that snakes can't climb stairs, but--

"That- that, that noise-" He says, and each syllable seems to get a little louder than the last. Even so, he allows himself to be pulled to his feet, allows himself to stumble, though his equilibrium seems to be going out with the ringing in his ears. An oscillating, constant, binaural sound that seems to circle his head from different directions. The louder it grows, the more he can hear behind it, like there's a message or a sentence waiting to be discovered. He can't help but search for it with his consciousness, which is probably what's creating it in the first place. You make your own dreams, your brain decides your trip.

Time to leave. Got to get out. Snakes can climb stairs.

His hand burns, his right hand aches and burns all the way up to the bicep-

He only makes it back into the lobby before he's faltering again, coming down hard on that metal palm and staring down at the right arm now. The words behind the tone become clearer. The tone becomes a whirring, mechanical sounding noise like a- like some kind of- saw- Sergeant Barnes, the procedure has already started.

"That's not real," He declares, because he knows, because he knows it isn't. It's just audio hallucinations, it's just burning from the venom, it's just hot as hell- His head shakes, a slow back and forth, a breathless murmur falls out but it's actually intended for Kira this time. "You gotta go, you gotta get outta here."

There's no noise, save the faint echo of wind in wood and rushing water through the building, now that they're in an open space. Save each suck of breath and bitten off response to something Kira can't hear, and if there is something in the pack sufficient for a tourniquet, if that would even work--Kira thinks they're too late for it.

Bucky very probably saved his life, dragging him out of there, and Kira frowns at the assertion. Men like Bucky are always--it's always like this. Karen would know the cycle, he thinks.

Peril and safety, punctuated by some knock-down-drag-out sacrifice. "Jesus," he sighs, a little gentler as he fits under Bucky's metal arm and levers his weight with his whole body. "I'm fine, it's my fault we're even in here; I wouldn't leave you." Slipping his arm between the pack and Bucky's back, he grips the strap to slot himself in, as good a crutch as they're likely to find. "Eyes up soldier, we're walking this part off."

Kira slides in and tugs him along, but all the while Barnes is shaking his head. The sound fades out, but it's replaced with something else. It's not screaming, but it's like metal. The brakes of a train, maybe, or his own voice, or a baby crying, some mix of the two.

"No, you don't, you don't get it-" He starts slowly, carefully, something that might sound absent, exhausted. They make it almost to the window, their passage out, before he whirls abruptly, the strap on his bag full on ripping beneath him in his hurry. A metal fist snatches Kira up by the front of his shirt, dragging him up so he can see the whites of Kira's eyes through vision that's going too cloudy and blurry around the edges. He's all flop-sweat now, a wide-eyed wild expression. "I'm not- a good person- and I'm- hearing things. Do you understand? I'm hearing things that aren't there, and I'm- I might-"

He's losing his train of thought even as he says it. It's like the setting-in of a high, it's like when the mushrooms start to take hold. It's like looking through a set of old-school 3D glasses, where everything is in threes, red, blue, normal in the overlapping center but there are still three of them superimposed and just off from one another.

He's never been a paranoid stoner when he smoked, but he feels it now with the flush of a fever and the pain in his arm, with the nonstop noise.

What was he saying a second ago?

Shit, this isn't good.

He's still there, though. Still cognizant enough to know where he is and what's happening, and he shoves Kira back with a firm warning push.

Were they speaking German a second ago? He - what? Das ist nicht gut. Keep it together, Barnes.

Because fighting a trip is always a good idea and totally works every time.

"Oh, fuck."

It's been a year since Kira consistently felt the world beneath his feet, the rhythm just slightly ahead and predicting its next moves, telling him his own. But he'd had twenty-six years of it previous, that bone-deep understanding of how much of life had to do with timing, and the little things you could notice, and the foresight to cling to certain things in the present.

He grabs the bag, even as Bucky drags him like he weighs no more than their supplies. Even as his heart sinks in his guts and starts to really beat.

Bucky's out of his head, and he can break Kira like a dry stick. Yeah, he gets it.

Just doesn't change where he is, and how little he can fucking do about it. Kira tosses the pack out of the window first, then goes with the momentum of the shove, rolling out over the sill. Old ironwork catches, scratches his back--but he's had worse. He's had worse recently. "Right," he says, popping back up and half-in like a gopher. "Fuck. Now get your ass out this window and chew on this for me." His hand not recollecting the pack holds out a portion of the goldbells.

"I can't make you tea for the walk home," he adds, hoping Bucky is lucid enough to grasp--this is the shit he gives him when he doesn't want to sleep off the weed and hooch on Kira's couch.

Kira thrusts himself forth out the window, and for a moment Bucky's mind travels with him. Vividly sees himself vaulting out that window, only to snap back into his own head the second he was supposed to have it the ground. The abruptness of his return to his own perspective makes him sway, settles vertigo into his bones and he staggers to the left under the weight of his own arm.

Everything is hyper-realistic. Too vivid, shining, bright. The broken glass on the ground, the gaping window, the green outside, all of it punctuated with a pulsing rhythmic thudding that, dimly, he admits might just be his own heartbeat. Either way, the world shutters back and forth a few inches constantly, which would be fine if it weren't also listing slightly to the left.

Nope, that's just him.

He forgets how much time passes between when Kira goes out and when he pops back in. Honestly, it's just a handful of seconds - but to Bucky? It's an entire mental journey, it feels like he's been gone minutes instead of seconds, and he's fucking sweating his balls off.

His stomach rolls, and only a miracle spares him from dry heaving, from upturning the contents of his breakfast. Sergeant Barnes. Ssssssssssarsarsarargeant-

Tea?

Swimming vision takes a second to focus on goldbells.

What? Those are for-

"You're a fucking genius," He mutters, and it... takes a few tries to actually grab them because there are three hands and his hand-eye coordination is tits up. He thrusts them into his mouth in a graceless, sloppy maneuver. It is, apparently, just enough to send him careening a little until a metal hand clamps down on the window sill. By way of explanation, he says, "Everything is left."

"It would be great if you could remember that, sober," he says, taking the nonsense that follows and adjusting his hand accordingly. Left, right. Move to the right, there's Bucky's hand, fucking bingo.

Now they wait and see if snake venom is worse than peach mash whiskey, inexpertly brewed.

Different bingo card, Kira will take the free space and over-correct for Bucky's case of vertigo. Chase the hand to the left, grip the wrist while he chews. "Come on, out of the musty snake castle. I believe in you."

Chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing- moving. Right. The goldbells pull him forth from the recesses of his mind, well enough at least to clamp down a little more on the bottom windowsill and thrust his feet out in a graceful sort of vault. He'd look like a god damn gymnast if he'd have at least stuck the landing, but instead, he pulls left again, foot crossing over foot as he struggles to regain his balance, and catches himself on the rough of a nearby tree.

"Musty snake castle," he mutters to himself with a huff, and somewhere in a trench in 1942 Dum-Dum is cackling like the vagrant that he is. "Your sister."

Not his finest hour. Not his best quip. Not his favorite tree.

God, he's sweating.

If Kira doesn't laugh, it's because he's holding back the hysterical chitter of it. Also: he fucking misses his sister. Somewhere between the humor and the melancholy, he slips a little bit back toward even. It's not a small thing to be thrown, by someone of Bucky's size and skill. It's not a small thing to stay close to him, in the face of that warped by an unknown substance and little else for it to act upon.

It's fine, he's fine.

If the shit brickhouse comes at you, go to his right, problem solved.

He digs out another handful of the flowers, puts them against the flesh of Bucky's remaining knuckles. "My sister's probably long dead, Barnes. Every part of her is musty."

"Mine too," he agrees vaguely, unsympathetically. That's what happens to sisters, Kira. They die, they rot in the ground and you live on for another couple decades and eventually, it's like they never even existed. They were just a story you told yourself to justify who you are sometimes.

The tree he's leaning against, on the other hand, is very real. Solid beneath metal shoulder. Rough against flesh fingers. Keeps him firmly planted to the skin of the earth as the planet spirals to the - still the left. Why always left?

He glances down startled as flowers are pressed into his fingers, and grips them so tightly he almost crushes the petals. He doesn't want them to spiral off and float away.

Tree, wind, crickets, birds, dirt, snakes, all of it is loud and cacophonous in his ears. In his mind. He declares abruptly, and with great certainty, "I fucking hate nature."

"If it could, that tree you're hugging would probably resent that."

Kira comes up on the other side, arms coming around lower than Bucky's, within easy reach if the man needs--something. A spectrum of assurance and physical support that Kira will struggle to provide, all of his qualities feeling lacking now that they're alone on snake island.

"Hey," he says, head leaned around to look at Bucky along the curve of the trunk. "What was her name?" Look at him, think about her; something real in the present and something real from the past, known to be past. From these angles, if they both go left they'll separate.

It sort of works; looking at Kira keeps the back of his mind grounded while the front of it searches his memory for a sepia-toned version of his sister. She fades into view just a little foggier than most things, the last time he saw her was before they pumped his brain full of serum and gave him an eidetic memory. One day she'll fade out entirely along with everything else before the war — everything but Steve, who's still around to remind him.

"Rebecca," He says finally, throat sticking, flower petals under his tongue. Is he meant to swallow them? They've got a terrible fucking texture, and he has the presence of mind to duck his head and spit them dryly out onto the dirt. "We gotta... Move. Go. Somewhere."

Not left.

"Becky and Bucky," Kira says, gently clapping his hands over both of Bucky's on the trunk. "That's fucking awful. Come on." Kira takes him by the left hand, pulls him in a circle of the tree to re-disorient him, right there to correct when he makes it over the roots.

"We'll get back in the boat," he says. "Either it turns around this island, or we'll hit shore and hike. We're not in the marsh yet, so--a day if you punk out overnight?"

He's not going to, if force of will can be taken into consideration. Bucky isn't either, if nagging has the desired effect. He'll put him in the little canvas lifeboat and drag him, if he has to. "I'll signal some people to meet us halfway."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[closed] there's no sure footing

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