[closed] there's no sure footing

[3ofswords]

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."

Comments

[3ofswords]

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--

[freightcars]

"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."

[3ofswords]

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."

[freightcars]

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."

[3ofswords]

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.

[freightcars]

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."

[3ofswords]

"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."

[freightcars]

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.

[3ofswords]

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."

[freightcars]

"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."

[3ofswords]

"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.

[freightcars]

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.

[3ofswords]

"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."