milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

james 'bucky' barnes

(no subject)

[OOM: SOLDIER ID: 24]

Gabriel comes in this evening barefoot and wearing grey sweatpants and an army green T-shirt, slightly damp from a shower. He glances up at the sounds of the bar from his tablet, frowns slightly, then shrugs. He can do his evening reading here just fine.

He pads over to Bar. "Hey, can you do a hot chocolate with the diet thing?" It's starting to get cold back home and he smiles when a steaming mug appears. "Awesome, thanks."

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His own choice of beverage for the evening is black coffee. It's the warmth he's after rather than the caffeine.

Light glints silver from his wrist as he raises his mug for another swallow. Bucky gives the other man an absent once-over, taking note of his bearing and manner.

Gabriel is a man used to standing at attention but he's a little old for the trace of gangly awkwardness to his movements. He grew three inches recently and is still getting used to that.

It's the flash that catches his eye and he glances over, not sure what made it. Watch, maybe?

"Evening," he says, giving the man a nod. He looks really, really familiar. Huh.

Bucky nods back.

"Evening," he returns.

A beat.

"Cold out there."

Outside at Milliways, that is; no telling what it's like where this guy's from.

He nods, raising his mug slightly. "Getting a bit nippy, yeah."

"Something about this part of the bar that gets a decent amount of warmth," he observes.

Bucky nods to the fireplace not far away, and then nods at the chair across from him.

(Steve would be glad to see him talking with people, he thinks, not without wry amusement.)

Gabriel smiles a little.

"Thanks." He settles into the chair. "I'm Gabriel."

"Nice to meet you. I'm Bucky."

That's...also really familiar. Gabriel glances at the man's wrists, checking to see if he's actually wearing a watch. As old as those movies are they're pretty popular on base considering what they're going through. And Gabriel watched them a fair amount when he was younger.

"You, too, man. Earth?"

Edited 2018-02-25 05:46 (UTC)

There's no sign of a watch, but close observation will reveal a gleam of silver metal at his left wrist, where the light hoodie he's wearing doesn't quite reach all the way to the black leather glove on his left hand.

"Yeah, Earth. You?"

Well, that's just cool.

His smile broadens a bit and he nods with a slight laugh, eyes on his cup of cocoa. "Same. Always such a weird question to ask."

"No kidding. Then again, it kind of goes with everything else around here, you know?"

He takes another swallow of coffee and signals for a waitrat to bring a refill.

"Want anything to go with yours?"

"Nah, I'm good. Had dinner before I came in."

He takes a sip, appreciating the kick of cayenne Bar added.

"Just chilling a bit before I turn in for the night," he taps the tablet, "but conversation works just as well." Patrons from other worlds can tell good stories, too, but this also gives Bucky an out if he wants to stop talking. Gabriel doesn't remember him being a great people person in the movies though he realizes the movies may not actually be accurate.

"Mm-hm. Don't let me interrupt your reading if you'd rather," he returns.

Once upon a time, Sergeant James 'Bucky' Barnes had been a much more personable man. The Winter Soldier is anything but.

But.

But Steve worries; Joe worries; Ysalwen had given sound advice. Step by step, one slow bit at a time, Bucky is trying to reclaim something of what he was, as part of who he now is.

It's a damn grueling process, unfortunately.

"Your call."

Edited 2018-02-26 00:26 (UTC)

"Happy to talk. Pretty sure anything you say is way more interesting than omnic schematics." He holds the tablet up, showing off a theropod type robot line drawing with various notes over it.

"What kind of schematics?"

His eyes narrow a little as he studies the image.

"Omnic," he repeats, holding the tablet out far enough Bucky can take it if he wants. "Robot workforce made in omnium factories. Supposed to revolutionize manufacturing but the company got charged with fraud a few years ago and was shut down."

He scowls.

"Then the omniums woke themselves back up earlier this year and decided to kill all humans."

"The hell you say."

He takes the tablet, and scrutinizes the image on the screen before glancing up and handing it back.

"How bad is it?"

There's a date on the image somewhere that says it's 2041.

He grimaces.

"Pretty bad. Had no idea it was coming and the omniums are pretty near population centers. Detroit's basically been wiped out and the rest of the world isn't doing any better."

"Fuck."

He wonders if these omniums were activated by something like that Ultron being that Steve and the team had run up against in Sokovia. Either way, it sounds like things in Gabriel's world have gone straight to hell.

"Sorry, man."

"Thanks." He glares at the tablet for a moment, then shuts it off.

"There's one that comes here, from my future, that says we survive. So that's something at least. Different model." He's still not sure how much he should trust the thing but it seemed to have been honest with him.

"One of the weirdest things about this place, how people can be from all these different times."

He shakes his head and accepts the new cup of coffee from the waitrat, then takes a sip.

"You a soldier?"

He nods.

"A captain. Not in the field at the moment, going through a program to try and get an advantage over fighting machines." He may as well mention since it'll be pretty obvious the next time they talk that he's had some sort of tampering done with him.

"What about you?" He moves to take a sip of his own cocoa.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that catches his attention.

"A program, huh? What kind of program?"

"I was a sergeant. Never made it to captain, though."

Yeah, he was kinda expecting that. He's proud of being selected for the SEP but he understands the leeriness some people may have about it.

"Voluntary," he assures the other man. He's not even the first to worry about it. "Faster, stronger, hardier, that kind of thing. Two weeks ago I was three inches shorter." He shrugs. The rest of the work has been on internal body systems.

"Retired?"

"Voluntary matters," he agrees.

There's something extremely dry about his tone.

He takes a moment to size the other man up. "So, a super-soldier program. I ... know someone who went through something like that."

(Not counting what Zola did to him. That's being a lab rat, not a volunteer.)

"Unofficially retired, I guess. I ... switched branches, you could say."