Bᴜᴄᴋʏ Bᴀʀɴᴇs ★ Wɪɴᴛᴇʀ Sᴏʟᴅɪᴇʀ (serzhant) wrote in themandalay, |
He didn't have an answer for Steve's sudden change in age. No one did. It was just another complication of this prison that all of them had been brought to, a situation that he hated for a lot of reasons. He hadn't voiced them, not even to Steve, but he knew Steve understood some of it. "Strange shit happens here with no warning. Some people are affected, others aren't," he replied. "There isn't more information available than that." In the past, he might have smiled when a woman had said she wanted to see him. He'd been known as a ladies man, even though a pretty face didn't mean women exclusively to him. But there was no reaction now. He studied her for a moment, as if weighing up his response. "Well, you can see me. Is it what you expected?" Bucky asked, his face almost eerily neutral from an outsider's perspective - but things had changed since his presumed death. He'd changed. Yet her question, paired with a smile, caused a quiet and brief chuckle to slip out. "Do you know how to not be?" he asked, though it was more a joke and rhetorical remark than anything else. He hadn't known her too long during the war, but he had always considered her bold and confident. She knew what she wanted and went for it, and he respected her for that - and many other things. He wasn't surprised by her curiosity, either. It was a wonder that those he had talked to before, who knew of him, hadn't asked how he'd survived. Even as she moved forward, he let his back rest against the booth, keeping the small distance between them. Those words - cheat death - implied that he'd escaped a terrible fate, but the fact that he'd survived meant that he had just traded one terrible fate for another - one even worse than death. And it wasn't as simple as the question she had posed to him made out, but he had to respond somehow. "You almost make it sound heroic, and it wasn't," he replied, the unforgivable actions of the Soldier clear in his mind. "But I did survive the fall from the train." |