frostythehitman | HUA CHENG

[ He approaches Hua Cheng at the graveyard. ]

Why do I keep finding people coming out here when no one we know is even buried here?

[ He looks at him, immediately and obviously amused. ]

I'm a ghost, Chad. I gravitate where is most thematically appropriate. [ a wiggle of his fingers at him, sarcastically oooo spooky ] The others, I don't know what their excuse is, but I understand death very well. Why're you here?

I'm just here because I wanna know why the hell anybody bothers coming here in the first place.

...a ghost, huh? You don't seem like one to me.

It's not that exciting, to be honest. I've looked with Sora and Ochako at the collapsed floor, but that didn't give us much besides popping a bunch of these bubbles. [ And we are avoiding those! (No we are not, kids.) ]

I'm strong enough that I have a solid body that passes for human, even outside of the Realm. Most ghosts can disguise themselves as humans, but they can't get all the details right - palm lines, fingerprints, individual strands of hair. The skin doesn't fit quite right. Things like that.

Huh. So...does that mean you can't die? Because that's--

[ hey, remember that thing about avoiding bubbles? yeah, that's gonna fail right here! Because a bubble pops and engulfs the both of them in a strange, surreal fog. It's not so much a memory as it is an amalgam of memories, moments pulled from across decades and brought forth in a haze.

It's not entirely clear at first, the memory almost tunnel-visioned as it is, but it begins with being pulled from a long, cold sleep by the harsh arms of scientists. He is strapped into machines and helmets, and from there all he knows is pain and sensory overload. He doesn't think to ask why he's there, what these machines are, why he hurts--this is just how things are. Guns and knives are placed in his hands and he trains for hours and days and weeks. One of his arms is metal and it doesn't even occur to him to think that maybe it wasn't always like that. All he knows is that he serves the Soviet Union and he's the best agent they have.

Then the fog is overwhelmed by mission after mission. The details vary and they come so fast they almost overlay on top of one another; sometimes he snipes a target from a mile away. Sometimes he personally kills them with his own two hands. Sometimes he sabotages cars or sets fires. The only thing in common is that they are always important players on the world stage, and someone else is always implicated, more chaos and bloodshed left in his wake. He himself (the Winter Soldier, they call him, and it's the only name he has) might as well not exist--he is more force of nature than man.

Sometimes, he even works domestically--training other agents through the mental and physical hoops of this hellish program. Or killing parents so the Soviet Union could scoop up the children for their own ends. Or hunting down other agents of the state who think of escaping. Or killing a scientist who specifically tries to help him escape. Like a crab in a bucket too unaware to know he's just hurting himself in the end.

He speaks his mind, of course, if he finds something abhorrent. He's even tried to escape before. But all it does in the end is send him back into the machines, back into the canister, back into the long cold sleep until he's awake again and god knows how many years have passed, his head too battered to even entertain whatever blasphemous ideas he might have considered before.

And on and on it goes, until eventually--eventually, all the events are overlaid one on top of the other in such a frenetic frenzy that trying to absorb all of it feels like being stuck in one of those damn machines themselves. ]

[ Hua Cheng was going to answer. It's on the tip of his tongue, before the bubble pops and the fog tilts everything, skews it into a different world that honestly makes him a little dizzy with the sheer level of overlap that happens.

Bucky has lived an eventful life. He clearly hasn't needed hundreds of years, to experience the sprawling memories that go and go and go.

He blinks a few times after the scenes stop playing out, and things snap back into place in the graveyard. And then blinks again, like he's been squinting into light. ]

... what the fuck, Vezda. [ laughingly, but like, also ] How much of that did you even remember?

[ well, Hua Cheng might be laughing a little, but Vezda isn't, not in the least. He looks dazed and...helpless, almost. He can feel his legs about to give out too, so he lets himself drop, landing harshly on his behind in the graveyard dirt. Sorry to whoever's buried under his ass. ]

N...none of it. I don't remember any of that.

[ He runs a hand through his hair--the hair that is inexplicably longer than he ever remembers it being. By now, he's staring at the ground in front of him and isn't even really talking to Hua Cheng at all. ]

Is that what happened after I died? Is that how I got the arm?

[ It's more out of - sheer disbelief, that he laughs, as he tries to process everything he just saw. Even reading in the book store hasn't prepared him for the sheer otherness of seeing a world like this, and other memories haven't gone to such... lengths, is maybe the best way to describe it.

Hua Cheng moves, avoiding bubbles, to drop into an easy crouch next to him when his legs go out and he has an existential crisis. Two, three, four weeks ago, he'd just leave him to it. There's a little more empathy in him these days.

He claps him between the shoulders. ]

I think that's how you got the arm.

Somebody fished me out of the ocean, gave me a metal arm, and then made me--

[ He swallows thickly. He wants to say that there's no way this is real, that this is just some cruel hallucination, but. He's older than he has any business being. He has an arm he doesn't remember getting. And plenty of these bubbles have, in fact, shown things he distinctly remembers happening.

How long did this go on for? How much of his life has he forgotten without even realizing it? Is he even the same person he came in here as?

Now it's Vezda's turn to laugh--sharp, pained, wet. ]

Shit. No wonder I was such an asshole the past few weeks. I would be too, if that happened to me.

...except it did. No 'if's about it.

[ A quiet falls over him as he considers that, filing away the memories and dissecting them, one by one, snorting humorlessly. It does explain Bucky in all that he is, all the reasons why he is the way he is - and he can't say he blames him for his behavior, necessarily, because suffering shapes every inch of you, for better or worse.

Another pat between his shoulders. ]

Go figure you've already got years missing to you. It does explain a lot about you as a person, learning that. [ Hua Cheng won't sit with him, but he'll stay there, hand to his back. ] But take it from another asshole, Vezda - pretty sure most people wouldn't hold this against you.

That's not the point!

It's...fuck, 'Vezda' may as well be a stranger.

[ He does finger quotes around his name.

For all that he can understand now what he was thinking just last week, for all that he knows of himself anymore--stranger feels like an apt term. ]

Don't even know why I picked Vezda of all things. Shit.

[ He wasn't actively searching for Hua Cheng--at least, not that minute--but well, running into him in the kitchen is convenient enough. He glances him over, and-- ]

So, you didn't figure out the arm, huh?

[ Hua Cheng has actually been looking for Bucky, by the time they cross paths. Because he has the spare arm in his possession, just casually holding it propped against his shoulder like one would a large bouquet of flowers. Or a baseball bat. Things like that. ]

I don't have the piece that can connect it like you do, but I do appreciate the thought of sending it. I was actually ready to bludgeon a monster with it.

[ oh my god dude. ]

Yeah, it wouldn't have worked. It only attaches to the specific port I've got surgically attached. Not that I remembered that when I sent it over to you.

...Bludgeoning a monster with it's not a half bad idea, though.

[ look sometimes you don't know if a metal man has been running around without his fucking arm, okay ]

There's something - well, there? It's difficult to describe without seeing it, but there's white crystal there, basically, so I doubt a port would be achievable even if we had an extra.

[ jostles arm so that the hand flops ] Which, you apparently had an extra of the arm. We were wondering if you were running around without an arm.

Crystal, huh? Well, if someone could've drilled the port on over your shoulder, it wouldn't have mattered what's underneath. But that's not really doable. Or pleasant, probably.

...yeah, I got a spare arm weeks ago. I've had dozens of these things, they get damaged a lot in my line of work.

HUA CHENG

w4, tuesday

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week 7, friday

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