frostythehitman | HUA CHENG

[ 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.

HUA CHENG

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