thecapitol | They don't understand how

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They don't understand how

Who| Aang and Bucky (MCU), Aang and Korra
What| Aang doesn't respond well to to dying and being revived. It's just an unpleasant process.
When| Almost immediately after the Mini-Arena, after Loki killed him.
Warnings/Notes| Violence against children and Aang getting sick.

When Aang first wakes up, he goes to the bathroom and throws up. Except there's not much in his stomach, so he mostly dry heaves. Sweat on his skin, muscles shaking, chest shuddering like the Avatar Spirit is still trying to beat its way out of a dying body--he's a mess.

Then he brushes his teeth, goes back into his room, and huddles under the covers like a shaking baby rabbaroo. He feels feverish. It's silly because his body is supposed to be reset, supposed to be just as healthy as before, but this is the second time the Avatar cycle has been unnaturally stalled and his spirit is trying to find its way out.

He's going to be out of commission for the day, he thinks.

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Bucky enters District 4 without difficulty. Once inside he inquires with a cleaning Avox as to which room belongs to Aang rather than speak to one of the other residents before making his way to the door.

He hadn't come immediately after he'd learned those killed in the children's arena had been brought back, instead he'd waited an hour before a surprising amount of impatience goaded him into action, leaving his previous location and heading into the lift. This is not the first time Aang has suffered death but he remembered seeing how it had shaken him before and he knew he had to at least check on the boy. He had to see for himself that he was in one piece and coping with a second violent death.

After a moment of considering the closed door before him Bucky reaches up and raps on it with metal knuckles, certain the distinctive sound would be enough to announce his identity should Aang still be within and receptive to visitors.

Aang recognizes the sound of metal on the door. He only knows of one person with a metal arm who would visit him.

He is wrapped up in his blanket like a sad burrito and still feels sick to his stomach, but he doesn't even consider pretending to be asleep. He wants to make sure his friends are okay just as much as they do.

So he wiggles and sits up, looking very small and pale and clammy in his blanket burrito, and says, "Door's unlocked."

He opens the door at once, slipping inside and then shutting it again behind him.

Bucky finds Aang pale and apparently in the middle of being swallowed whole by blankets. It looks like this resurrection has been worse on the boy than the first. He crossed the floor to the bed silently, gazed around and after a moment sat down on the corner of the mattress. "You're not okay."

"That obvious?" Aang manages a smile. Yeah, he knows he looks horrible. "No, I'm not. But I will be." And that's the important part. Aang feels sick and awful right now, but the spirit will settle again and he'll be fine. Right now, he's thinking of it as existential flu, and he can deal with the flu. Even if its a flu that makes everything feel detached and unreal and like he really should have died a while ago.

(What's more shaking is that he had liked Loki. He didn't expect someone he thought was a new friend to kill him like that. Luckily, he gave the other boy some broken ribs to remember him by, but Aang isn't one to dwell on retribution.)

What is more important is that Bucky is here and real and hasn't disappeared. "Are you okay?"

"You look ill." he assesses with an incline of his head to the positive. "Are you cold?"

He could bring more blankets or see to the heating in the room being turned up. Bucky doesn't like how pale Aang is. "I'm fine."

Fine, as in almost started a fight with Peacekeepers over Aang and others in his age group being singled out for an arena with the only thing stopping him being bad jokes about pigeons, courtesy of one Sam Wilson. Bucky still doesn't get what happened there.

"Probably just a fever."

Hey, if it worked, Aang isn't going to question it. He'd prefer an alive Bucky over a dead and/or arrested Bucky.

He wiggles in his blankets, sticking his arm out and touching his forehead with the back of his hand without bothering to pull his arm out of the blankets. "Yep, probably a fever." Not that he can actually tell with his own hand, let alone when there's a layer of bedding between the hand and the forehead, but details. "I'll be okay. The Avatar Spirit just needs to settle back in." If that makes any sense.

Bucky frowns and shakes his head. "You need rest."

He reaches and tugs the blankets Aang has wrapped round themselves, adjusting them in the minutest way which is apparently more to the former assassin's liking. His hand seems to know what it's doing, even if Bucky's not quite sure himself.

"What are you talking about?"

Aang can't help but smile a little when Bucky fusses over him. He's an independent boy who has been mostly taking care of himself for nearly a year, but that said... it's nice to have an adult fuss over him again. Just a little.

"The Avatar Spirit. It's what makes me a person instead of just... I don't know, a body." His soul, in other words, but he doesn't know that word. "After I die, it's supposed to leave my body and go to a newborn Water Tribesman. And after the Water Tribesman dies, it's supposed to go to a citizen of the Earth Kingdom. That's how the Avatar cycle works." Death, rebirth, reincarnation, all that fun stuff. "But it wasn't able to leave my body in the arena. Now I just feel sick while it... gets comfortable again, I guess?" He doesn't know how this is working. He's never heard of the Avatar cycle being stalled like this. All he knows is that he feels sick and it always feel like his spirit is struggling to leave his chest when he's dying in the arena. For all he knows, it's all in his head, but he's the Avatar and the things that are just in his head usually aren't.

...He's remarkably calm while discussing the fact that his own soul thinks he should be dead.

Aang doesn't know the word, Bucky does.

"Your soul."

He can't imagine the Winter Soldier ever had much use for the term, maybe Bucky Barnes had. He connects it to the idea of the Avatar Spirit as the only thing that makes any plausible sense -- if any of this is plausible. They didn't make him to question, they made him to accept what he was told and the important thing Bucky gets confirmation of in this conversation is that Aang is sick.

"Do you need anything?"

"Is that what you call it where you come from?"

The word just doesn't really exist in Aang's world, at least not in the places he's visited. It would be synonymous with 'spirit', although their ideas of spirits probably differ from the ideas in Bucky's world.

When asked if he needs something, Aang bites the inside of his cheek, debating whether to ask for what he wants or not.

"Is it okay if... can I touch your hand? I can make it really quick, it's just..." He rocks a little in place and averts his eyes, a little embarrassed to be asking in the first place. To verbalize it sounds... childish. Which normally doesn't bother him, since he's a child, but here, he feels like he has to prove that he can be grown-up enough for the adults to trust him. The fact is that there's a persistent feeling of unreality, and he just wants a living anchor for a second.

"Yes. The concept that humans are possessed of a spiritual entity separate from the physical body."

A very cut and dry explanation it is but one nonetheless. Bucky himself holds no belief in such things and if ever he once did he holds no memory of it. HYDRA had no use of religion beyond their own idealised zealous belief in themselves and belief in the soul opened a world of rules and moral commandments that could compromise the efficiency of their weapon. If Bucky Barnes had believed in God and the soul it had been burned from him since the birth of the Winter Soldier.

Now he looks at Aang, small and frail looking in his nest of blankets and considers the request. To hold his hand was a simple thing, a gesture he surmised was for reassurance. In recent times Bucky has come to understand the potential for physical touch to do just that with such few as he trusted to allow to touch him and Aang... Aang was no threat.

Bucky shifts slowly, reaching with his right hand, guessing it would be preferable over the left, and without words offers it to Aang to take.

Well... yeah, that sounds like the definition of a spirit.

Aang waits anxiously, knowing that he hasn't offended Bucky by asking but still a little nervous just in case he did. So when Bucky offers his hand, Aang lets out a little breath of relief before snaking two arms out of the blanket and clasping it between his own hands.

The hand is warm. Aang can feel the man's heartbeat. Alive. Breathing. Thump thump thump. Blood through veins, burning heart, solid bones, rushing air, life. Aang closes his eyes and breathes. Two people. Both alive, both real. Both in the real world, both breathing, both with beating hearts.

He was real. He was alive and he was real.

It's meditative, feeling Bucky's heartbeat and his own. He feels somewhat more at ease in his pile of blankets.

"Thanks."

He holds on for maybe a little longer than 'really quick', but he lets go, folding himself up in his blanket cocoon again feeling better.

When those small hands grasp his Bucky has a moment, just a moment, where he waits for the discomfort to kick in. When it doesn't come he relaxes and let's his fingers curl backwards loosely around Aang's, a light grip that is in no way confining and is in a way cautious of wrongdoing himself.

They sit and for those moments breath and exist together, Bucky staying alert and on-guard for Aang while he takes what he needs from the touch. He thinks he understands why he needs this, the way Bucky also needs to be grounded sometimes and feel something that is real when his mind tries to take him down pathways he doesn't want. He let's in happen and nods when the kid withdraws his hand.

He thinks he wouldn't have minded if he had held on a little longer.

"Is that better?"

"Much."

Aang tightens all his blankets around him, peering out at Bucky from his pile, giving a smile that is a little more solid than the ones previous.

"Thanks, Bucky."

"Good." he nods and comes to a decision, "Stay there, I'll get you food. Food helps."

Old instinct maybe, but in this case Bucky has learned enough about Aang to know better than to make the chicken soup he had favoured when Steve was ill. Tomato soup is what he'll bring back to Aang after a foray in the kitchen, prepared to sit and stay with the boy until he's finished it at least.

Korra had needed a few minutes to herself after waking up, similarly to how Aang is reacting. The private, silent comfort she could give herself didn't feel real. None of it felt like something she could deal with alone and she later finds herself walking briskly to Aang's district.

He's experienced this. No, maybe he did again, and if so Korra just can't imagine what to feel. She doesn't know what this will do but she knows she needs to see him.

After being directed to his room, Korra knocks on the door once, softly, after gaining the courage.

"Aang?" Her voice is hesitant.

Aang is sick and thoroughly wrapped up in a blanket burrito. He would be okay with just sitting there for the rest of the day.

And then he hears Korra's voice. Wait, Korra! Of course she would be feeling the same thing. Aang is embarrassed for not even thinking about that--great Avatar past life he is. He sits up with a soft unhappy noise as his stomach makes its displeasure known. "Door's unlocked."

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They don't understand how

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Ready to wrap up?

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