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[ open rp post // nsfw ]

[ leave prompts or starters, get rp. or a drabble if you want. nsfw or general. ]

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[ i want stuff but I'm at work so I'll either come back and edit this to be a starter or you can prompt me. ✌️ ]

[ Say goodbye to the spaceship. It's time for the next Matrix, Bucky Barnes.

If you want to distinguish reality from a computer program, Elliot is not the person to go to. But here they are anyway, Elliot tapping away quietly as he tries to figure out if this is true or even possible. In a world without The Matrix as a film, it seems more plausible than it probably should.

Bucky isn't the first or only person: Elliot collects reports as a hobby, of glitches in the way the world works, bugs in the universal code. Bucky is just the first one he's found in New York. And now, like Flipper the dog and Qwerty the fish, he gets to live in Elliot's shitty, rundown apartment and watch him do what he does. Which is change the world. ]

Edited (icon, typo) 2015-11-16 06:05 (UTC)

[ Bucky still keeps watch in the Not Real. Digital boots tread eerily silent across digital floor boards, settle near digital windows overlooking digital streets, through raindrops he knows to be no more than streaking lines of code — or at least that's what he tells himself, in between moments of chasmic certainty that every one of his experiences before this moment is a delusion. (That this moment, too, is a delusion.)

Thinking like that doesn't serve a purpose. He has a purpose. He just needs resources. Expertise. Elliot.

Elliot, who sits and taps on his quiet keys, who Bucky watches when the perimeter is secured, affect flat and eyes matte, another idling machine on a shelf. Even the low whisper of his prosthesis at rest is subsumed in the hum of computer fans and keystrokes.

Flipper huff-huffs at his shoes. Flipper is just code, too, but his eyes drop to her, blinking. (Does it matter if she's just code?) ]

I'm not crazy, [ he says, to Flipper or to Elliot, because the whole red pill/blue pill conversation has never been his area of expertise even when he had a red pill to offer, and because that feels– important somehow, in its own way, that anyone believe. He's not crazy. Or he is. ]

[ Elliot laughs to himself at that. Elliot doesn't really think Bucky is crazy, with his metal arm and the blankness in his icy gaze, both of those things intriguing and unaffected. Story too wild and pointless to be a plant. He swings around in his chair. ]

Yeah, you, you... I'm solid on.

[ Behind him, code creeps across the screen, a bruteforce keygen at work, running endless repetitive strings of code with only minor changes to try and find the one that sticks. ]

Doesn't mean this is real.

[ Because Elliot is crazy, has good reason to doubt his own perception of the world. Flipper whines and scoots her butt like she does five minutes before she shits in his bed, and Elliot sighs. ]

I need to walk my dog.

[ Just his eyes shift, from Flipper to Elliot to Flipper again, and the corner of his mouth turns as he reaches beneath the back of his jacket to shift what is probably a gun, metal clicking against metal. There might be agents out there. There might be agents anywhere, though, and he doesn't doubt the dog will eventually shit on the floor, so he nods, burying the hand in his pocket again.

Alright. You need to walk your dog. He needs to bring his Glock. ]

Quickly. [ he agrees, then adds as he moves toward the door, ] How do you know anything is real?

[ It's not rhetorical. He isn't really a rhetorical kind of guy. ]

[ Fucking guns. Elliot watches the movement unwaveringly, like he's considering his options, but then doesn't say anything. If he was going to get shot it would have happened by now. Instead he just gets to his feet, joints popping quietly, and finds Flippers leash. Her claws click as she races over excitedly to let him hook it to her collar. He scrunches her ears a moment, warm and soft, and she tries to stand on her hindpaws to lick his chin.

Is Flipper real? ]

I don't.

[ He straightens again, doesn't look at Bucky as they leave, checking his door is locked before he closes it behind him. ]

I don't even know if you're real. Maybe you're just malware in my own head. Making me paranoid. Take my meds, you'd be gone. Dunno.

[ A shrug, like this possibility bothers him about as much as the world actually being a 'Matrix'. They both seem equally likely at this point. ]

[ He doesn't remember the day they met. Details don't stand out so clearly in his mind. There are missions, and there are teams, and there are recruits, and there is training, and he is pulled along the ebbs and flows of those tides so many times it ceases to matter when or where or who. He remembers the day he noticed her, though, when she put all 250lbs of him to the mat so hard the air knocked clean out of his lungs and it felt like waking up.

(He'd buried it, to keep them from noticing, but he'd remembered.)

He doesn't know how long it is after that, that he's pulled out for a mission with her — her, specifically, because the Winter Soldier isn't the only one she's impressed, although perhaps the only one with whom she's shared small, lingering touches between sweeps of her handler's gaze, who's stood close enough to share air for a few stolen seconds in an empty hall. Their work does not disappoint.

(It's a husband and wife, potential defectors, problems to be eliminated before they begin, victims of a murder-suicide and a tragic house fire or just their own misplaced optimism, and he doesn't hesitate, he barely remembers how to hesitate, but he watches the fire after and he— feels. Wants. Nothing he can name, but something other than this.)

Their extraction team is less reliable. In this part of the world, weather is as much their enemy as the powers they're fighting, and the swift arrival of a blizzard leaves them fending for themselves one night longer, on concrete floors arced around a trash barrel fire. It isn't pretty, but neither is anything else.

Sometime in the night he'd curled around her with practical ease, for warmth, for survival — and when that changes, it's only in his breathing, a slowing and a warming and a long, complicated sort of look that lands on her and doesn't stray. ]

We shouldn't, [ as if he's not sure whether that's a reason to stop or continue — or even what it is he wants so desperately to continue. Not doing what he's told, maybe. ]

[ She remember it like it was yesterday. A ghost story, passed down from student to student, whispered in the halls and threatened by teachers: 'If you don't behave, Winter will come for you'. She was five, and he was terrifyingly large, but so was everyone else in the Red Room. Ivan told her not to be afraid, and so she wasn't. She remembers watching him with a child's curiosity, the way he moved, the sound of his arm as he used it, training the older students, over and over. Only four of the girls on this day would make it to his level. Natasha wanted to be one of them.

She was seventeen when they met again and it was time for her to begin her training with him. Yelena, Ekatarina, and Svetlana were all with her, sisters in training, if not in blood. He was brutal and didn't hold back, and she admired his strength and form, watched how he threw the other girls to the mat again and again, memorized his movements, and when it was her turn, used them against him. She'd twisted her body up, got her legs around his neck, and threw him to the ground, standing over his body. She'd watched him, then, his face, something stirring inside of her.

They told her she was the only one worthy of the name Black Widow a fact her now rivals detested. She was selected for the best missions, given the highest marks in training, and when the time came, became his partner on an important mission. She managed to keep her pleased response off her face when they announced it; lingering touches had been something she'd started and he hadn't been remiss to, a glance here and there, one moment where she had almost raised up onto her toes to kiss him. He is something bright in the darkness that is the Red Room. He is the only thing she's chosen for herself.

Their safe house isn't even a house, just four walls, a floor and a roof. The barrel had been pure luck and the fire hadn't been easy to start, but once it had gotten going, she'd gotten tired, leaning against him to rest. It was comfortable. It was safe. She wakes up when his breathing changes, eyes fluttering open, looking up at him from where she's curled against his chest. His statement confuses her, because... well because. They'd been playing house, something Natasha had fallen into almost too easily, being able to be near him in public, hands at his waist or shoulder, leaning in a little too close, even one of those forbidden kisses she'd been longing for until that moment. ] Why?

[ She reaches down, threads her fingers with his and brings his metal knuckles up to her mouth to kiss them. ] They don't have to know.

[ It's a year before he comes back, his eyes sharp and his head clearer than it's been in decades — just clear enough to start thinking too much. But he does come back, where back is the hotel room Natasha's latest cover had moved into between missions instead of anywhere he's ever been before, where back is to her, not to Steve, although there have been conversations, low and heavy with guilt on both sides, and maybe they both just need a little time, as if ninety-five years just wasn't quite enough to get their shit together. But things are different with Steve — they're both different. The pieces are harder to fit together again.

And easier somehow, with Natasha, not because they haven't changed too, but because change was already a constant. Having to figure each other out again is nothing new.

It is a process, though. His gaze fits easily now at the small of her back, an elbow propped on the mattress and his hair, the damn hair he still won't cut, half splayed on the sheets while she dresses. For work, he assumes, another Avengers side-project, and he hasn't forgotten the offer he's had from Fury since reappearing on the man's radar. He hasn't come to a decision, either. ]

You don't talk much about it, [ he says instead, barely a question because she doesn't owe him an answer. ] Joining SHIELD.

[ Change and choice: strange things to have when you don't know who you are. He isn't the man he was before, not even when he was in the Red Room. She understands that; she's not that person either, the girl with hope in her eyes for serving Mother Russia, the girl with fear in her eyes as she realized what was going to be done to her. The broken assassin that came out of it. It's an unspoken understanding between them; it isn't as though they don't acknowledge that past, but she had told him, once he'd come back, that she remembered everything, and she didn't regret a minute of it. After that, it was up to him. She doesn't try to push him to be someone he isn't, and maybe that's why it's easier. Natasha doesn't blame Steve, though. It's difficult for people to come back from the dead.

She glances at him over her shoulder from her position next to the window, tugging on the heel of her shoe before sliding a small knife into a hidden pocket just above it. She lowers her foot, still watching him, contemplating her answer. It's not that she doesn't want to, rather would prefer to tell him more than anyone else everything that happened. But it's a difficult period in her life, and it wasn't easy. But then again, she thinks, maybe that's why he's asking. He deserves the truth. ]

It wasn't easy, [ she finally answers, reaching for the garter belt slash knife holster on the side table. She straps it around her thigh, moves to stand at the edge of the bed where he's laying. ] At the time, I wondered if Barton made the right call. Why do you ask?

[ It's curious, not accusatory; she can't tell him what he wants to know if he doesn't tell her what he wants to know. Natasha sits, reaching down to brush her fingers through his hair, giving him a small smile. ] Are you thinking of taking Fury up on his offer?

Edited (words) 2015-11-24 08:44 (UTC)

[ It's time for a fun game: Who sent the assassin, and can they be paid off?

Bruce is no stranger (not by a million miles) to being shadowed by people who want him dead in and out of the cowl. Whether they're angling to eliminate Bruce Wayne as his own entity, or using the perceived more vulnerable state of his civilian identity to get at Batman, it's a road he's been on before. If it's the latter, the number of people who could have sent someone are few. Doesn't feel like al Ghul. Doesn't feel like Shiva. But then, they're creative people. Can't judge too quickly.

He's excused himself from the party, retiring with unsteady steps to the penthouse suite he keeps in this particular hotel. He misses the counter with his champagne glass and lets out a little laugh as it hits the floor, and shatters.

How much patience does his quiet observer have? ]

[ Maybe it's the taste of victory that brings his blood up. It doesn't matter if the mission went smoothly, if the whole team escaped unscathed or he took a crossbow bolt in the flank from a hunter-turned-agent and woke with blood spattering his lips — sometimes the blood helps. (Usually, the blood helps.) What matters is that they reached out and took something back from the machines who have taken so much from them.

It matters, too, that this time it was a matrix like Deucalion's. An unusual destination, one he'd known only by proxy before, from rare glimpses of the other man in full shift years ago, but this time he'd felt it himself — strength, speed, power coursing hot through his veins, not on simple reflex the way his anomaly usually manifests but overwhelming every one of his senses. Intoxicating. It's rare that he trusts himself to hold power over anything, but over the machines it feels good – right.

After, he finds Deuc before he finds the showers. A hand comes to rest warm on the other man's shoulder, a greeting, an anchor, the pads of his fingers pressed firmly into fabric. For a moment he just hovers there, breathing, a warm, silent presence at the other man's back, as if teetering on a cliff's edge.

Then he drags fingers around the ball of the joint, back across shoulder blades, raking a path in his wake. Or directions.

They aren't far from the showers, after all. ]

( i just want some bucky sam teamup and or h/c shit is that fair???? ? )

tbh

Edited (am a problem... ) 2015-12-30 07:31 (UTC)

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