thecapitol | But all folks are damaged goods

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But all folks are damaged goods

Who| Bruce Banner and Bucky Barnes (MCU)
What| After checking to see everyone is alive, Bruce is going to stress cook. Bucky is invited.
Where| District 3's kitchen
When| After Bruce's death in Week 6
Warnings/Notes| Talk of their terrible pasts, which involve psychological torture, physical abuse, possibly a mention of a past suicide attempt.

Bruce has invited Bucky to join him in cooking. He isn't sure what he's cooking. A little bit of everything, he supposes.

He starts making dough. The kind he can work with his hands. His tribble purrs like a chainsaw on his shoulder. It helps to be have something to knead. Maybe he'll make bread as well as dinner. Something to calm him down.

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With so much time on his hands Bucky is welcome for any offered distraction. Cooking with Bruce has become an easy and familiar activity, a vastly different one than abusing the punching bags and training dummies but perhaps even more effective. It was good to have a growing hobby that didn't involve violence.

He let's himself into District 3, walking straight over to the kitchen where Bruce is already working. Bucky glances down at the countertop, "Hey. You're making bread?"

There's a flicker of a smile on his face as he looks (and hears) Bruce's happy tribble from where it's perched on the man's shoulder.

Bruce is of the opinion that cooking is one of the better hobbies to have. It's constructive. People always have need for good food. Less good comes out of destroying oneself in a gym.

"I suppose I am." Bruce jerks his head towards the sink. He doesn't miss the brief, tiny smile in Bucky's eyes. Bruce doesn't smile himself, but it softens him to see. "Wash your hands and join me. I'll show you how this is done."

The tribble, if possible, just purrs louder at Bucky's presence. Bruce begins to wonder if the tribble is trying to deafen him.

Tribbles are a guaranteed calming influence on Bucky these days, he's become quite acclimatised to having his own around. He's left Toro down in District 1 today, contentedly curled up on his pillow so doesn't miss the opportunity to give Bruce's a single pat, while being careful not to touch Bruce himself.

"Okay." he turns and goes to the sink, carefully following the instruction. Bucky is extra careful with his metal fingers after Bruce explained the importance of hygiene when cooking to him. It doesn't take long for him to rinse and dry off his hands before returning to the other man's side, waiting expectantly for further instruction.

Bruce obligingly moves his head so Bucky has an easier time to touch the tribble without touching him. Bucky is becoming one of those people who Bruce probably wouldn't mind touching him, but he still instinctively avoids any close contact with people.

He pulls a big ball of dough that he isn't working on from his bowl, offering it for Bucky to take. "Roll this into something resembling what my dough looks like. I'll show you how."

Inside Bucky feels the same way. He thinks if Bruce wanted to touch him (asked for and telegraphed) then he wouldn't mind but as a matter of course he avoids it now, out of preference an respect for personal space.

His right hand neatly pulls the dough towards him, then he puts his left hand onto it to help with the rolling process. The metal seams of his fingers leave imprints in the dough and he frowns, wary of getting it stuck inside. It's a pain to try and get that sort of muck out. Worst come to worst he would have to ask Tony for help with it. "Do you have a glove I could use?"

Bruce glances at the dough, noticing the strange pattern Bucky's hand leaves behind. "Right. Metal arm." Is it weird that he's so used to it he just sort of forgets about it?

He dusts some flour off his hands before pulling open the drawers and taking out a single glove, offering it to Bucky. "I don't suppose you've ever made bread before?" Or at least don't remember it.

"It's hard to clean substances out of the grooves." he explains, wiping the palm of his hand with a tea towel before turning to accept the glove with a grateful nod. It slips onto his hand easily and he flexes the fingers to be sure before continuing on with the dough.

Having to take care of his own maintenance has given him a whole new appreciation for what a complicated piece of technology the arm is. Luckily it's robust and largely self-sustaining, running off some internal power source that seems made to go long-term without needing to be recharged, meaning that so long as he keeps it clean and oiled as well as undamaged he's fine between arena's. Whatever damage it has sustained before seems to always be put right after he dies.

"I don't think so. I'm not sure."

"I imagine. Has the Capitol given you any tools that might help when you need to clean it off?"

It's really a fascinating piece of technology. Had it not been connected to someone, Bruce would have taken apart in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, it is attached to a person, and Bruce has always valued bodily autonomy over scientific curiosity. He waits for Bucky to watch again before once again demonstrating how to properly fold over the dough before putting it into a bread tin.

"It's easier than people think. You just need to get a little experience before it's intuitive." And who knows? Maybe Bucky's mother had made bread fresh and it would remind him of something. There's no real way of knowing unless they asked Steve.

"No. Tony gave me some advice about it." About the right type of cloth and cleaning solutions and the best way to get between the grooves without damaging them. Ever since he'd let Tony take a look at it after it was damaged in the Mall arena there's been more trust about letting him get his hands on it. If they had access to the right tools Bucky might have even been persuaded to let him take a look inside.

Bucky copies Bruce's example to the letter, mimicking more than anything. He moves his dough over to be put inside the tin as well, then shifts back from the counter. "I can practice it."

He does that anyway with the recipe's Bruce teaches him, back in the D1's kitchen, or sometimes D9's. Cooking is soothing and useful.

"If worse comes to worse, pipecleaners could probably work if they don't let you get your hands on anything more useful."

He pushes the filled tins away and offers Bucky another chunk of dough to roll out. Bruce made far too much dough, but he needs something to do with his hands, and unfortunately bread usually takes a while to rise. "It's probably one of the most useful things you can know in cooking. Bread is a staple for most diets." He stares down at the dough as he begins to agitate it gently before rolling it again. The tribble is purring too loudly, as usual. He hesitates, but eventually says, "how are you holding up?"

Sometimes, it can be hard to read Bucky, and he needs the most support out of any of them. Bruce hadn't been happy when he realized he and Steve had been murdered.

There's no hesitation in Bucky taking the dough, he's largely always happy to be given a task to concentrate on. He has too much free time to fill in the Capitol.

Occasionally he wonders if his desire to please runs deeper than the behaviour protocols that HYDRA instilled in him.

His hands still at the question and for a moment Bucky can only stare at the dough, feeling the weight of what happened weighing down on him again. Thor, the hands that held him down, the ice water in his lungs... "I'm..." he means to say fine, to push off Bruce's concerns but what actually comes out of his mouth is a fair distance from that, "pissed off."

Edited 2015-04-25 14:06 (UTC)

"Good. I'd be worried if you weren't." Frankly, Bruce is pissed off too. It's not pleasant to be murdered by one's friend, knowing that he was scared and angry and completely out of his mind because of what a bunch of sadists did to him. It's good that powers are suppressed, or Bruce might have to be worried about how much anger boiled in his gut at the thought. Anger and guilt.

"They took our friend and brainwashed him to punish us all. I don't think there's any other response to have."

Bucky's hands were tightly fisted, the knuckles on his right turned white from the strength of his grip. "They didn't take his memory, they... they just made him hate us. They made him afraid of us so he felt like he had no choice."

He feels sick just thinking about it. The memory of Thor hurling his reasoning at him while Bucky's own attempts to get through to him fell on death ears. Then the ice.

"I wanted to stop him from..." killing his friends. Bucky had almost killed his friend and the guilt of just coming close to it sat with him every day, but to actually go through with it and remember that would have had such horrible repercussions on Thor if he'd come back.

"I understand."

He understands more than anyone. He understands How Thor would probably feel knowing that he'd killed his friends. He understands how much Bucky wanted to stop him from needing to feel that way.

Maybe it'd be best if Thor isn't saved by District 13. It's a possibility that they stepped in, but Bruce doesn't know if they did or didn't, and he doesn't know if they should have.

"If Thor was in his right mind..." Bruce shakes his head. "He would appreciate the sentiment." He can't say that Thor would have wanted Bucky to try. Bruce wouldn't have wanted Bucky to try, wouldn't want anyone to try, because he knows that nothing gets through to the Hulk. They didn't know if Thor could have been gotten through to or not.

But Bruce knows that it means something that a friend feels that there's something worth saving, even if they try to save it and put themselves in harm's way.

"It wasn't the same. I thought it could be the way--" he falters for a moment, "the way Steve got through to me." though it took Bucky almost killing him to happen.

That moment is burned into his mind forever. Steve, bruised, beaten, bleeding from knife and gun wounds underneath him. Bucky's own fist poised to deliver another blow until those words fell from his lips and something clicked into place in Bucky's head, breaking through the programming. The horror he felt then of almost killing Steve, the war in his mind between saving him or letting him die as the mission decreed... it had been terrible enough without actually getting the job done.

If he had... if he had... could he have lived with himself afterwards? If he'd recalled who Steve was to him a second too late...

Now Thor was dead, or somewhere else. "It's good they didn't bring him back." he murmurs.

He hasn't heard about this before. Steve getting through to him? "How did he do that?" It's a gentle question. Bucky can refuse to answer if he wants.

Bruce pushes the bowl of dough towards Bucky. He can take another piece and start folding it if doing something with his hands helps.

It should be hard to hear Bucky say something like that. It should. But it's not. "It might just be." Bruce is feeling himself become more and more sure that they aren't going to be getting out of this world. If that's the case, it might just be better for Thor to die rather than live with what happened and never seeing Asgard again.

"He stopped fighting me. Threw away his shield." Bucky said staring down as he takes the dough without question. His hands work, folding it over and over, kneading with mechanical motion. "He told me I was his friend. Said he was..." he falters. "Said he was with me to the end of the line. I almost killed him before he said that."

Two bullet wounds and one knife to the torso. All the blunt force blows he inflicted on Steve, last of all to his face with his metal hand. Any normal human would have been dead.

Bucky licks his lips. "I knew that phrase." he stops what he's doing. "I almost killed him. If I had..." he shakes his head. "Thor killed many of us."

"The difference is that for Thor, we came back. That makes a difference."

Steve wouldn't have come back if Bucky had killed him back home. He would be dead in the ground, and Bucky would be wandering the world with his last hope of recovering his past destroyed. What was Steve thinking, giving in like that?

Steve was thinking that he didn't want to hurt his best friend, of course. He was thinking that he believed in Bucky. "Steve sees the best in people, even if they can't see it themselves. He gambled because he believed in you, just like how you gambled because you believed in Thor. For Thor... things were different." Thor was driven by fear, not purpose. He and Bucky didn't have the same history as Bucky and Steve did. The situation was different. Bucky's gamble didn't play out.

But he had to wonder... "I take it HYDRA sent you after Steve?"

"Maybe." Bucky says, unsure. He thinks coming back is like almost in a way, almost but for circumstances beyond their control that operate under the whims of the very people who made Thor that way in the first place. It's not clean cut, never is.

Bucky hadn't believed in Thor enough not to fight, but he had liked him enough to try and get through to him first. When it didn't work he'd been ready to kill, he'd tried to but the odds, as the popular phrase went, weren't in his favour that day. Thor was too strong to take down directly, even for him.

A slow nod, "Level 6 target, no... two level 6 targets." he mouths the words in silence again after vocalising them, "Steve and the Widow."

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But all folks are damaged goods

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