WHO Chris Pike & Bucky Barnes •
WHERE Ink & Paint Club • 1940s LA •
WHEN Week 38 Toon Town '45 • Day 7 Evening
Two men spill their backstories and trauma over drinks and food.
WARNINGS Mentions of torture & trauma
Word around town was that the Ink & Paint Club was the place to meet for drinks. Bucky had cashed in a small amount of his gold coins and diamonds, ending up with a small fortune by 1940s standards. Christopher had provided horseback riding, camping, and a hell of a good time, so the least Bucky could do was provide dinner and drinks.
He sent an invitation through the network, along with directions, but went early to do the usual rounds and make sure he knew all the routes and sight lines. Bucky’s suit was fitted and sharp, and perfectly tailored - his sheath of knives was invisible under his jacket, and, as always, the Infiltrator’s Key was in his pocket.
Once he was satisfied he knew all the exits and the most direct routes to them, he followed an extremely curvy black-and-white bombshell toon waitress to a table. After seating him, she placed two menus on the table, and blew him a kiss, dark gray as her lipstick. The kiss grew wings and fluttered to his cheek to land. Bucky brushed it away gently. “Sorry, Betty. I’m taken.”
The toon shrugged a shoulder. “Can’t blame a gal for tryin’,” she said, and headed back to work.
There was something about Bucky that was easy to talk to for Chris. Maybe he reminded Chris of some of his Academy classmates - folks who had seen a lot and survived despite the odds being stacked against them. Then again, it could have been all the apples and sugar cubes Bucky fed Pike when he was a horse. He’d scrounged up a three piece suit from the costume department - Hugh had been more than happy to help him out - and although he felt a bit like a peacock, it was no worse than full dress uniform.
The waitress led him to where Bucky was sitting and Chris couldn’t help giving her his trademark smile and a bit of the twinkle in his blue eyes. “Thanks ever so much.”
He gave Bucky a genuine smile (not the one reserved for diplomats). “This is quite the place.” Glancing at the menu, his eyebrow arched. “No shortage of cocktails though. Part of me was just expecting drinks in a dive bar, but I will never turn down dinner. Too many meals of rations and bad replicated food.”
Bucky gave Chris a smile as he sat. He felt comfortable around the captain - it seemed a recurring thing, gravitating towards captains with good hearts and shameless generosity. Steve, Sam, and now Christopher. “Nice to take advantage of a week when we have clubs and fancy drinks and actual steak,” he said. “I made a fortune last week, so I’m ready to splurge a bit. Already got plenty of booze and smokes to restock for the dry weeks.”
The first round of drinks arrived - whiskey on ice for each of them. Bucky browsed the menu quickly before ordering a rare steak with all the trimmings. He gave a nod to Chris. “Whatever you like, pal, it’s all on me.”
“You really don’t need to.” Chris smiled as he glanced over the menu before ordering lamb chops. “But my mother taught me to never look a gift horse in the mouth. So thank you.”
He raised his glass of whiskey and clinked it against Bucky’s. “Stockpiling sounds like a good idea. Seems Derleth isn’t as lively as this most of the time.”
Taking a long sip of the whiskey, Chris cocked an eyebrow. “Thanks for coming out to the ranch. I hope you had a good time, even with the dramatic dismount. I still say, I haven’t seen grace like that while riding in a while. That’s skill and not just luck.”
Bucky’s smile grew at the mention of the ranch, but it faded quickly at the comment about his skill. “I did have fun. A lot of fun. It felt good, to be… out of my own skin for a while.”
He picked up his own tumbler, the vibranium fingers of his left hand clicking sharply against the glass, and hesitated for a moment, then tipped back the whiskey and swallowed the entire amount. “I was captured for the first time in ‘42. Italy. Never thought I’d make it out. There was a man there, a doctor, and he liked playing with needles. Everyone knew that if he took you to the back room, you weren’t coming out. No one lasted more than three days. The screams we heard coming from there…” Bucky shook his head, grimacing. “I went and caught pneumonia. Couldn’t work. My… my friends tried to help me as much as they could, but eventually I collapsed and Dr Zola took me.”
Bucky shut his eyes. “I don’t remember much. Pain. A drug-filled haze. Name, rank, serial number. It became my mantra, the only thing I had to cling to. Then, we were saved. By my best friend, of all people, who showed up looking like the Greek God of Muscles. He’d been about 90 pounds when I’d left.”
Bucky’s story reminded Chris of Lorca and Leeland, and all of Section 31, which shouldn’t exist in his opinion. Torture had no place in Starfleet or the Federation. Chris’ empathy showed on his face, revealing a man who was all too familiar with men like the ‘Doctor’ Bucky was referring to. Thirty years as a Starfleet bridge officer meant experiencing torture on more than one occasion, it was one of the risks of the job. There was a look of understanding as he sipped the whiskey and listened.
“That’s a damn good friend,” Chris acknowledged. “Was this Thor?” he asked, trying to complete his mental map of how many of the people here were connected.
Chris took another long sip of the whiskey, savoring it. “I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t change anything, but it sucks that you went through that. No one should endure anything like that.”
Bucky beckoned for another whiskey, this time without the ice. He was promptly obliged. When he downed the glass in a single pull, the toon waitress left the bottle on the table with a look of sympathy.
Bucky poured out another glass. “Steve Rogers. Thor is an actual Norse god, though he’s really an alien, but that’s… his story. Steve was my best friend since we were kids. He was an asthmatic, heart murmur, ear infections, everything you could think, he caught it. Scrawny, short, and a hard wind would set him wheezing. But the moral compass of a fucking saint. And the guts of a Mongol warrior. Like someone stuffed fifty pounds of Doberman into a sickly five pound Chihuahua.”
Bucky couldn’t help but chuckle. “He was the best pal I could have ever hoped for. Always getting into fights. I’d be walking my sisters home, and checking every alley, looking for the one where some gorilla of a bully was pounding on him. And he never ran away. Never backed down.”
He sipped at the whiskey this time, his jaw tensing. “I thought I was dead. Just ‘Yup, this is it. I’m dead, Steve died without me there to get his medicine, and this is Heaven.’ Only I knew that couldn’t be true, because I wasn’t going to Heaven. I was a soldier, a sniper, I was in a war, and no one in a war was going to Heaven because we were already in Hell.”
At that, Bucky laughed, bitterly. “I didn’t know what Hell was. Fuck, I was so young.”
He sighed. “Steve had volunteered for some fucking experiment that turned him from a 90 pound asthmatic into this two hundred pounds of pure muscle picture of utter health, and he rescued me and over 400 POWs from that place. I’d been in the back room for 6 days. Didn’t know it at the time, but Zola’s experiments had been turning me into a super soldier like Steve.”
With the bottle now on the table, Chris topped off his own glass as he listened. It was clear how much Bucky valued and cared for Steve and Chris smiled at that type of relationship, chuckling at the ‘fifty pounds of doberman into a sickly chihuahua.’
“Reminds me of this admiral in Starfleet - always had this bulldog with him…”
He sipped the whisky. He’d had asthma and space sickness as a kid but had overcome both those things thanks to time and medical technology.
“That’s got to a number on you, that level of torture and messing with your mind. Torture’s never a fun experience, but…” Chris faltered, the vision of his future coming front and center in his mind along with memories of the Talosians and what they’d done to him. His voice was a bit more hoarse when he spoke again. “Messing with someone’s mind fucks them up.”
He ran a hand through his hair and took a long drink.
Bucky nodded, unconsciously mimicking the gesture to his own hair. “You can say that again,” he said, looking at Pike. There was a look of pained recognition in his eyes, genuine sorrow and empathy. People could imagine, but not many could understand. He got the impression Chris was the latter.
He pulled out the cigarettes, took one for himself, and offered another to Pike. “Spent another three years, now part of Steve’s personal squad. Called us Captain America and his Howling Commandos. Then we got a mission to board a train in the Alps. Wall of the train got blown open. My ass got knocked out. Steve tried to save me, but…” Bucky shook his head. “Not that time. James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant First Class, KIA.”
He took a slow drag from the cigarette. A Russian patrol found me at the bottom of the ravine, bleeding out. Left arm torn off at the elbow. I remember being carried through the snow. Some… hacksaw surgery to amputate the rest of my arm. Then a… cage.” His face tightened with distaste, lips working as though he’d tasted something bitter.
“They tried drugs, first. Telling me how the awful Americans had abandoned me, and how good, kind Mother Russia had saved me and nursed me back to health. How Captain America had left me behind. But they didn’t know Steve, and so they didn’t know that if Steve Rogers even had a glimmer of a dream of a hope of a thought that I was alive, that he’d claw through fucking steel to pull me out of there.”
There were tears shining in his eyes now. “They eventually found the chair. Massive electric current through the brain. The only reason I could survive it was because of the experiments Zola had done. I would forget. Forget my hometown, forget my father’s name, forget what year it was. Forget my own goddamn name. But I’d remember Steve. And that Steve was coming for me. So one day they showed me the New York Times. The World.New York American.The Chicago Tribune. Captain America Lost Over Arctic. Hero’s Final Act to Save His Country.” Bucky swiped at his eyes, shaking his head and gruffly picked up his drink. “After a while, I stopped fighting the chair.”
Chris took the cigarette and lit up from the lighter Bucky held. Smoking wasn’t one of his habitual vices, but some situations called for it. This was definitely one of those. The smoke made a good pairing with the whiskey.
He listened quietly, attentively, his own face showing that he too knew the horrors of war, even if on a lesser scale. His own eyes glistened in sympathy. When Bucky paused, Chris topped off both their drinks.
“Fuck, Bucky. I’m not sure how anyone could survive that.” His thoughts went to Lorca and Phillipa - or well, the Terran versions of them, and he shuddered at the memories. Chris met Bucky’s eyes. “I know I wasn’t there, but that sort of torture… it’s designed to break a person. And if it broke you, that doesn’t mean you’re a moral failure or any less of a man. Some things can’t be resisted, only endured.”
His voice caught on the last word and he took a long drink to try and keep errant thoughts at bay.
Bucky down the rest of his drink, his hand trembling slightly as he lifted the cigarette to his lips. “Once they killed Bucky Barnes, they filled me with training. Weapons, fighting styles, survival techniques, pain mitigation, command words to make me obedient, stress tests to push the limits of the serum, my regenerative capabilities, strength, speed, reflexes. Constant upgrades to the hardware they supplied.” He lifted the fingers of his metal hand. “Made me into a weapon. A tool.”
His eyes were distant, cool. Blank. “That was… the next seventy years. When I wasn’t needed, they put me in cryogenic sleep. Like storing Christmas lights in the attic. When I was awake, it was… at their bidding. Always, in the chair first thing, and last thing. Until one day, I was told to kill a man on a bridge. And he said a name. He called me Bucky.”
“I can’t imagine what that was like. Must have been awful, even if you weren’t really aware of what was going on.”
Chris’ hand slid across the table, letting his knuckles brush the back of Bucky’s hand - a simple gesture intended to ground the other man if he needed it. Chris knew how easy it was to get lost in experiences of the past - and now the future as well.
“I’m guessing that’s when things changed?”
Bucky smirked. His hand shifted to cover Christopher’s for a moment, squeezing in a gesture of grounding, and in thanks. “It was. And, can you fucking believe it, it was Steve again. His plane had gone down in the arctic, but he’d been frozen in it, kept alive in the ice, in the poor man’s way I’d been frozen in tanks. After he said my name, I… remembered that I knew him. That scared my handler so badly, he wiped me mid-mission, but damn if Steve didn’t pull me back the next time he saw me. I nearly killed him, but he got through to me.”
Their food arrived then, the plates steaming. “Careful ya don’t burn y’selves, boys,” commented the waitress, leaving with a wink.
Bucky took one last puff of his cigarette and then set the butt into the ashtray. "I kinda ran away after that. Took a long time for my memory to come back. To remember how to… be a person again."
Chris gave Bucky an encouraging smile before trying to follow the rest of the story. “So, wait, you’re telling me that both you and Steve, who fought in the second world war in the 1940s, both basically got cryogenically frozen before that technology was well developed and then found each other again in…” He scrunched his forehead as he did some quick calculations. “...in what, the early 21st century? That is some friendship.”
He chuckled, taking a drink and finishing off his cigarette before the food came. He gave the waitress a little smile and turned his attention back to Bucky. “Reminds me of my Number One and me - can’t count the number of times we’ve rescued each other - she has a habit of defying my orders to rescue me. And I’m pretty sure she’s wanted to kill me on more than one occasion.”
He smiled as he thought of Una and cut into his meat. “Well, whatever you did when you ran away - it seems to have worked. I wouldn’t have guessed any of what you told me - not even with the super reflexes at the ranch. Pretty sure even my friend Kat - she’s a - she was a therapist would say you’re incredibly well adjusted.”
Chris took a bite of his lamb, making an appreciative noise - real food always tasted good after months or years of replicated food. “You’re a damn fine person, Bucky, from what I know of you.” He gave the other man a wink. “And assessing character is part of my job.”
Bucky himself had nearly purred at the taste of his steak. There were too many weeks of fending for themselves, or strange places with alternate realities, and having some damn fine steak and potatoes was glorious.
The comment about the friendship between him and Steve made Bucky smile. “The amount of sheer coincidence is boggling, and tends to make one question the concept of destiny. I’ve had a lot of therapy - a few years of peace where I was just living on a farm in a country so isolated most people didn’t know it existed. But I still have night terrors, some really dangerous reflexes, and I can’t register pain the way people normally do. And my boyfriend is a therapist, so he really understands a lot of what I’ve been through and is amazingly supportive and patient and wonderful.”
The compliment took him by surprise, and he found himself staring at his steak, biting his lower lip for a moment. Then he took a breath, and looked at Chris. “Thank you. I… appreciate that. I try damn hard every day to feel worthy of it.”
“You can tell a lot about a person by how they interact with animals. Especially horses,” Chris said as he made another appreciative noise while eating. Had he really been away from real food for this long?
“Your boyfriend sounds like a good match and you both are incredibly lucky. Is he here?” It had only been two weeks and Chris was still getting to know everyone - and making his habitual mental spreadsheet of the crew. Even if this wasn’t his crew.
“Whenever I’m planet side - which isn’t very often as usually they have the Enterprise on five year missions - I try to spend time on the ranch. Away from comms, people, the fleet - all of it. Just me, the horses, and open sky.” The comment about destiny made him pause. He set his fork and knife down and took a long, slow sip of whiskey.
“I know a thing or two about destiny, fate, what have you,” Chris said, voice slightly hoarse and not from the whiskey. “And nightmares and flashbacks. I’ve been known to sleep with a phaser under my pillow.”
He swallowed, staring at the table where his finger traced the pattern on the cutlery. “I know my fate. More than know it. I experienced it. It’s not what I would have chosen. No, that’s not right. I did choose it. I had the chance to say no, but I said yes. But it’s not what I would have wanted and it ends my life as I know it.”
Bucky smiled slightly. “He’s here - Sam Wilson. He’s… a cartoon wolf this week.” Bucky sighed and rolled his eyes. “Last week, he couldn’t lie and I couldn’t speak without vomiting precious gems. This week, he’s a toon. Makes making out a little annoying.”
His smile faded as Chris went on, until he pressed his own knuckles to the captain’s, to return the grounding gesture. “Do you want to talk about it?” It sounded like he wanted to. Hell, it sounded like he needed to. Bucky wasn’t going to push, but Chris had listened to Bucky open up, excising all that pent-up darkness like cutting away a tumor. He could do the same; listen, support, stay on hand to keep the other grounded and safe.
“I imagine choking on gems while making out would not be a fun way to go,” Chris chuckled. “Even though I’ve been kissed by dogs and horses, I doubt I’d want to make out with one. I’m glad you have him here though.”
He stopped from saying anything too maudlin. His lifestyle didn’t really allow for serious relationships. (Although Kat would accuse him of sabotaging them himself.) He gave Bucky an appreciative smile, squeezing his hand in gratitude.
“The nightmares and flashbacks - those aren’t anything new. Thirty years in Starfleet, there’s always going to be things that haunt you. When I wasn’t fast enough or smart enough, when someone died because of something I did or didn’t do. And the missions and planetary visits that didn’t go well…”
He sighed. “The destiny thing.. Recently, there was a war with a species that was ruthlessly brutal. My ship wasn’t nearby, we were on a deep space mission. We couldn’t have gotten there in time anyway, but we were told to stay away. I… don’t do well with being told to sit on the sidelines. Apparently I was the Fleet’s insurance policy. If they lost.. well, the plan was that at least my crew and I would survive, to help the Fleet and the Federation regroup or start from scratch.”
Chris ran a hand through his hair, disheveling the pomade slick pompadour. “Eventually we regrouped. Long story short, we had to send one of our ships into the future to save the universe. But it needed a power source. The only way to get one strong enough was to get what’s called a time crystal from this monastery. Of course, there was a price to pay.”
If the future Chris spoke of was true - and Bucky desperately wished it was - then he could see exactly why Pike would be kept out of a war. And exactly how much he would resent it. He’d seen the same with Steve.
Time crystal. The pieces fell into place. “You paid it. You saw your future.” Bucky winced. “Jesus.” And if that was the price to save the universe... “What did you see, Chris?”
Blue eyes locked on blue. This wasn’t going to be pretty. Bucky held on to the captain’s hand.
“The monk gave me a choice. I could say no…” Chris’ voice was quieter, but didn’t shake. He’d revisited this scene enough in his waking and his sleeping hours.
“About ten years in the future… there’s an accident… a radiation leak. There were cadets… they were just kids. I… I do what I can to save them, to get them out in time. But the radiation…” Chris’ eyes met Bucky’s. “I didn’t just see it. I felt it. Felt it burn me…”
“Somehow, I survive… but afterwards, I’m basically locked in a wheelchair of sorts. Unable to communicate except through beeps.” Chris drained what was left in his glass. “I never really expected to retire to a quiet life. I guess I hoped I’d go out in a blaze of glory at least. To have my consciousness trapped in a body trapped in a machine… it was… unexpected.”
He shook his head. “Even if it didn’t save the universe, I would still do it again. Anything to give those cadets a chance at the future.”
Chris shrugged. “So I said yes, accepted my fate. And now… it haunts me.. I keep reliving it… seeing that version of myself…”
Bucky grimaced, shaking his head. “I… I’m sorry. That’s… I’ve been locked in my own mind like that. But I was watching myself move, and unable to do anything about it. Being locked in a body that can’t…” He shook his head. “I don’t know that I could take that. Probably go off the deep end. But I don’t think you’re the type to make any other choice. Not when there’s lives on the line.”
Just like Steve, Bucky thought to himself, then chuckled inwardly. “I seem to have a habit of picking up Captains with more heart than self-preservation. Even Sam’s got the damn promotion, now.”
Chris chuckled and raised an eyebrow. “Well, clearly you just attract them? Or you hang around military men too much,” he teased, refilling both their glasses and turning back to his meals. “Says something good about you, I think. Speaking as captain with no self-preservation instinct - much to my Number One’s dismay - you’ve got a lot of heart too, Bucky.”