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May. 7th, 2014 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missioned→ IC
□ Name: James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes / the Winter Soldier
□ Journal: missioned
□ Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe
□ Canon point: End of Captain America: The Winter Soldier
□ History: wikia link: http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Winter_Soldier
□ Personality:
There are a few distinct parts of Bucky's personality -- who he used to be, who he was turned into and who he is becoming. He's really none of these things fully at this point in canon, but he is a great deal of each one. It's impossible to talk about him as he is now without talking about the man he used to be.
Bucky's childhood is mostly alluded to in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What is known for certain is that he and Steve Rogers have been close friends since they were both quite young. The way the two men talk and interact, they very clearly have a history. When Bucky first appears, he is stepping in to save the diminutive Steve's ass from being beaten any further than it has. He throws a punch, literally kicks the assailant in the butt, and helps pick his friend up off the ground. His friendship with Steve is a defining connection in his life and will prove to be even more so as his life goes on.
As a young man, Bucky is casual and brash, downright cocky at times. He walks with something that's very near a swagger, done up in his military finest, hat cocked to the side. He's interested in having fun and flirting -- though in fairness, he is shipping out to war the next day. He's a charmer (something that works out well for him usually) and quick with a grin or a joke. At this point in time, he's young and he has his entire life ahead of him, despite heading off to fight in World War II.
It has to be said, that he did willingly enlist and obtain the rank of Sergeant even before shipping out, so he has a serious and dedicated side, a side that is very fixed on doing the right thing. It's visible in his friendship with Steve too. He doesn't hesitate before stepping in to defend his then-smaller friend. The fact that Steve is a scrawny asthmatic pipsqueak (sorry, Steve) doesn't stop Bucky from trying to set him up with a girl. He also does his best to try to talk Steve into stopping his obsessive quest to get himself enlisted in the army, out of concern for the other man. He says quite adamantly that it's not some back alley fight and that Steve is likely to get himself arrested or worse: actually enlisted. Of course, he also adds the bright side that Steve will be the only eligible man left in New York. Bucky can be serious, but it doesn't tend to last that way. Even when Steve's mother has died, Bucky tries to cajole him into coming to spend the night at his place, like when they were kids. He's clearly worried about his friend, and promises that Steve doesn't have to be alone, that they'll be together to the end of the line. Of course, this seriousness is followed up by more playfulness, telling Steve that he'll only have to take out the trash and shine his shoes if he does want to stay. He cares, but he tends to wrap that caring up in a rather impressive coat of bravado.
Even once he arrives in Europe and enters combat, this doesn't seem to change. He's a precise marksman and a competent soldier, but that never seems to stop him from making the most of lighter moments. He seems to understand people fairly well too, quite convinced that the men who become the Howling Commandos will say yes even before they're asked. He joins the Howling Commandos as well, but makes it clear that he's not doing it because of any desire to follow Captain America, but because he'll follow the skinny kid from Brooklyn. His friendship with Steve is still important to him; he even refuses to leave in the middle of an impressive inferno without Steve coming with him when the other man is seemingly trapped. Somehow they manage anyway, so he's placed his faith in the right person. He seems genuinely happy for Steve having accomplished what he has, being the one to start the cheer for Captain America's bravery upon the return of the rescued POWs. Again, this doesn't stop him from later bemoaning how he's becoming invisible and slipping into Steve's former role when Agent Carter seems entirely oblivious to his very obvious attempts at flirting.
To the moment that he dies, Bucky is a confident and charismatic young man, capable of being serious and brave and downright deadly, but there is always the casual and easy bravado that underlines everything he does. Maybe he's thinks of himself as immortal in a way, like a lot of young men and women tend to. The thing is, for Bucky, this turns out to be almost true in a really horrific way. He falls, presumably to his death.
And things change.
The next time Bucky pops up, it's a seven decades later, and everything about him has changed. His posture is rigid and deliberate, none of the casual ease that colored every movement he used to make. Now he is honed for battle and acts that way. No more jokes, no more playful quips. Instead he is efficiency embodied. It's not just his body that has been altered. His mind has literally been erased -- painfully -- by HYDRA over and over again. He has been trained to be the perfect assassin, so much so that his ruthlessness and skill (and the fact that he's put in the freezer in between missions and so has been an active asset for longer than anyone normally ought to be) have turned him into a ghost story: the Winter Soldier. Where Bucky was defined by his relationship to his friends and his own bravery and bravado, the Soldier is defined by his orders. He seems to make no decisions based on his own desires, instead his only freewill seems to be in tactical choices.
His skill isn't in question. Natasha talks about him having shot a man in her protection by shooting straight through her. Nothing and no one stands in the Soldier's way. He is a blank slate except for the lethal training that he has been programmed with. Even when he's confronting Natasha and Steve, and Steve recognizes and calls him by name, there is no recognition in the Soldier, who just responds with a question of who the hell is Bucky. But notably, this does stop his attack at least momentarily.
At this moment in time, he's not Bucky Barnes, he's HYDRA's fist and nothing else. But bit by bit, something in him surfaces. Flashes of the fall from the train, of being found and the beginning of the experiments and reconditioning that he goes through come to mind. And one thing else surfaces, with a sadness and a certainty, that he knows the man who called him by name.
Despite being methodical and obedient to a fault, as any good tool ought to be, the Soldier can be erratic and unpredictable at times, as shown notably when he lashes out at his handlers when he's assaulted by these memories that he doesn't understand. But even then, he obeys and settles himself back into the machine that will strip those memories from him, forcibly and painfully.
Brainwashed, reprogrammed and frozen only to be thawed out, set out to hunt down and kill one target or another and then set back into the same cycle over and over has clearly left its scars on Bucky. He's a shell of who he used to be. And as the Winter Soldier, he's more a weapon than a person. He's not one for jokes or talking casually, reminiscing. He speaks to communicate necessary information more than indulge in casual conversation; he's disturbingly good at silence.
But this is no longer who he is either. Bit by bit he's changing, and again is has a great deal to do with his friendship with Steve Rogers. From the moment that Steve calls him by name, things slowly begin to fall apart for him. The memories try to surface, even if they're soon erased the first time. He's almost violent in insisting that he doesn't know Steve, that Steve is his mission and he will complete it, even once Steve stops fighting him. But some of the things that his old friend say strike a chord in him, and that change that has begun in him continues. Instead of killing Steve, he actively saves him. It's not even just a matter of not actively delivering the blow and just letting him die, he proactively pulls him from the water -- a choice that the Soldier would not have made, not when it was his target, his mission. Later, the questions rising in him drive him to look into who he was and he's seen at the Smithsonian at the exhibit that is about his own past, staring at the memorial about the man he once was.
Basically, the man who used to be Bucky Barnes and then the Winter Soldier is really neither and both at the same time right now. He's changing, in a state of flux and transition. He's shown that his memories are not irrecoverable, just repressed, but regaining them is likely to be a long and arduous process. He may never be the man he used to be, but he also isn't simply HYDRA's tool anymore. He's shown an ability for autonomy and making his own decisions, which is definite growth and progress after seven years being an obedient and effective asset. He's still dangerous, still unstable -- lethal and sharp-edged, but breakable somehow -- and even more unpredictable than he once was. But like most anyone, he's a work in progress trying to reconcile his life with what he's discovering about who he used to be.
□ Age: Somewhere between 26 and 94ish. Give or take.
Chronologically, he was born over ninety years ago, but he's spent the majority of this time in a cryogenic freeze, only woken up to complete missions or training before being wiped and refrozen again once more. So physically, he's in his mid-twenties.
□ Gender: Male physically, male mentally
□ Appearance: Bucky is not the man he used to be, even if his face hasn't changed. He's still strong-jawed and blue-eyed, pale skinned and dark-haired. But similarities end there. Where he used to be clean cut and clean-shaven, possessed of an easy, casual posture and downright cocky manner at times, bright-eyed and quick to smile or quip, these days he is exactly the opposite. His every movement is precise and methodical and powerful, an often unstoppable force. He's also a great deal scruffier. His dark hair is kept long and bordering on unkempt, and he cultivates an impressive growth of stubble more often than not.
While he was always fit, he now is very muscular, clear evidence of the training that he has been put through to shape him into what he is. He seems mostly to exist between two extreme states -- eerily still and in full-on-full-out-murder mode, though this is changing too since at the very end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he's shown blending in among a crowd of tourists at the Smithsonian.
One notable physical feature is his left arm. It's a machine, metallic and decorated with a single red star at his artificial bicep. These days he tends to favor clothes that help him blend in and go unnoticed -- long sleeves, hooded sweatshirts, worn out jeans. I'm not saying he looks like a hobo, but he sort of looks a little like a hobo.
□ Abilities/Powers:
Though the canon explanation for it is brief at best, Steve Rogers mentions that Bucky was able to survive the fall from the train because of the experimentation that HYDRA did on him when he was held captive by Doctor Zola, probably related to the super soldier serum that changed both Steve and HYDRA's leader, Schmidt. There isn't a thorough rundown of what it has done, but between those experiments and the training that he's been through, Buck as the Winter Soldier has an impressive skill-set.
He's very strong. Especially with his cybernetic arm, he does things that no one ought to be able to -- yanking a steering wheel straight off a car's dashboard, throwing someone across several lanes of traffic, stopping Captain America's shield when it was thrown at him, leaping on and off moving cars.
He's highly trained in combat -- before being taken by HYDRA and turned into the Winter Solider, Bucky is a very capable soldier. He joined the ranks of the Howling Commandos and fought with Steve, always holding his own. He's also shown to be an impressively talented marksman. This apparently stays with him since later when he has been brainwashed and sent out on missions, he manages to shoot and kill his target straight through Natasha. He's a strong and capable fighter hand-to-hand as well as proficient with numerous firearms. He's also skilled fighting with a knife or even the odd weapon stolen from his targets.
His endurance seems more than a match for Steve's, and his ability to fight on despite being seriously injured suggests that the effect of the experiments and his training has pushed him beyond the limit of what is normally considered human capability.
□ First Person Sample:
What did they put in my head. [The voice that speaks is quiet, hesitant to be even resorting to speaking out, but more than a little demanding, so the question comes like an issuance of a challenge rather than a query.]
Not the answer I was fed. What is it really? What does it do? Can it be disabled?
[Because he is in no way just believing the flimsy answers about financial tracking and communication are the only functions. He's swallowed HYDRA's lies too long for believing so easily. He's quiet a long moment, and it might seem like he's finished speaking, but then, abruptly, like he's been weighing the risk and finally decides to take the plunge.]
One other question. HYDRA. SHIELD. Do those names mean anything to anyone?
[So maybe there's just a little paranoia that they somehow (god only knows how) have a hand in this, and he knows he's opening himself up to scrutiny with all of these questions. But he'll take the risk. Now the broadcast does end. Radio silence.]
□ Third Person Sample:
Some things never changed. The man who once was Bucky Barnes, who was no longer quite the Winter Soldier, wondered if he ought to be comforted by that fact. He wasn't. Not in this instance, not when the familiar themes that were reappearing were ones of control and brainwashing, where it felt like that small pieces of freewill and autonomy that he'd managed to finally wrap his hand around were in jeopardy of falling through his fingers like so much dry sand.
He sat, still and silent, in the room that had been provided for him. That generosity made him skeptical somehow; the furnishings were comfortable, far more than the downright clinical surroundings he was used to, but that didn't make it feel any better. Night fell, and he watched the hours tick by, sleepless and on edge. He'd slept too long, too many years lost while his eyes were closed involuntarily, and the last thing he wanted to do was slip away again.
Strange place, strange faces and stranger things that he was simply supposed to believe when told had brought his guard up, and it showed through every tense line of his body, all sharp and hard angles, a wild creature cornered and ready to spring at the slightest provocation. It wouldn't help anything, though. He knew that much. There was no target here, no clear direction to aim his frustration. The place was foreign, alien somehow even if so little seemed superficially out of place. Nothing here was familiar, and away from that sliver of familiarity, he could feel the beginnings of memory that had begun to creep up in his thoughts retreat, as though taking cover from this new round of uncertainty.
He's so still that he might as well be a statue, barely moving enough for his chest to rise and fall with each regular breath. Alone in these four walls, he didn't know what to do, what direction to take. For just a moment he could feel the longing for orders, for someone to just tell him what the mission was, a goal, a target. But then, wasn't that what had been given here, in this strange place? Assimilate. Go. Fit in. Mold himself into the twisted shape that this city wanted its residents in. And oh it would be so easy to simply fall. in. line. Stillness broke all at once, hands lifting to fist in hair, head falling forward, breathing quickening as his heartbeat stumbled over itself. The apartment, the night, was still entirely silent, broken only by each breathless gasp as he tried to put it all back together, find some order that the world made sense in.
□ Name: James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes / the Winter Soldier
□ Journal: missioned
□ Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe
□ Canon point: End of Captain America: The Winter Soldier
□ History: wikia link: http://marvelcinematicuniverse.wikia.com/wiki/Winter_Soldier
□ Personality:
There are a few distinct parts of Bucky's personality -- who he used to be, who he was turned into and who he is becoming. He's really none of these things fully at this point in canon, but he is a great deal of each one. It's impossible to talk about him as he is now without talking about the man he used to be.
Bucky's childhood is mostly alluded to in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What is known for certain is that he and Steve Rogers have been close friends since they were both quite young. The way the two men talk and interact, they very clearly have a history. When Bucky first appears, he is stepping in to save the diminutive Steve's ass from being beaten any further than it has. He throws a punch, literally kicks the assailant in the butt, and helps pick his friend up off the ground. His friendship with Steve is a defining connection in his life and will prove to be even more so as his life goes on.
As a young man, Bucky is casual and brash, downright cocky at times. He walks with something that's very near a swagger, done up in his military finest, hat cocked to the side. He's interested in having fun and flirting -- though in fairness, he is shipping out to war the next day. He's a charmer (something that works out well for him usually) and quick with a grin or a joke. At this point in time, he's young and he has his entire life ahead of him, despite heading off to fight in World War II.
It has to be said, that he did willingly enlist and obtain the rank of Sergeant even before shipping out, so he has a serious and dedicated side, a side that is very fixed on doing the right thing. It's visible in his friendship with Steve too. He doesn't hesitate before stepping in to defend his then-smaller friend. The fact that Steve is a scrawny asthmatic pipsqueak (sorry, Steve) doesn't stop Bucky from trying to set him up with a girl. He also does his best to try to talk Steve into stopping his obsessive quest to get himself enlisted in the army, out of concern for the other man. He says quite adamantly that it's not some back alley fight and that Steve is likely to get himself arrested or worse: actually enlisted. Of course, he also adds the bright side that Steve will be the only eligible man left in New York. Bucky can be serious, but it doesn't tend to last that way. Even when Steve's mother has died, Bucky tries to cajole him into coming to spend the night at his place, like when they were kids. He's clearly worried about his friend, and promises that Steve doesn't have to be alone, that they'll be together to the end of the line. Of course, this seriousness is followed up by more playfulness, telling Steve that he'll only have to take out the trash and shine his shoes if he does want to stay. He cares, but he tends to wrap that caring up in a rather impressive coat of bravado.
Even once he arrives in Europe and enters combat, this doesn't seem to change. He's a precise marksman and a competent soldier, but that never seems to stop him from making the most of lighter moments. He seems to understand people fairly well too, quite convinced that the men who become the Howling Commandos will say yes even before they're asked. He joins the Howling Commandos as well, but makes it clear that he's not doing it because of any desire to follow Captain America, but because he'll follow the skinny kid from Brooklyn. His friendship with Steve is still important to him; he even refuses to leave in the middle of an impressive inferno without Steve coming with him when the other man is seemingly trapped. Somehow they manage anyway, so he's placed his faith in the right person. He seems genuinely happy for Steve having accomplished what he has, being the one to start the cheer for Captain America's bravery upon the return of the rescued POWs. Again, this doesn't stop him from later bemoaning how he's becoming invisible and slipping into Steve's former role when Agent Carter seems entirely oblivious to his very obvious attempts at flirting.
To the moment that he dies, Bucky is a confident and charismatic young man, capable of being serious and brave and downright deadly, but there is always the casual and easy bravado that underlines everything he does. Maybe he's thinks of himself as immortal in a way, like a lot of young men and women tend to. The thing is, for Bucky, this turns out to be almost true in a really horrific way. He falls, presumably to his death.
And things change.
The next time Bucky pops up, it's a seven decades later, and everything about him has changed. His posture is rigid and deliberate, none of the casual ease that colored every movement he used to make. Now he is honed for battle and acts that way. No more jokes, no more playful quips. Instead he is efficiency embodied. It's not just his body that has been altered. His mind has literally been erased -- painfully -- by HYDRA over and over again. He has been trained to be the perfect assassin, so much so that his ruthlessness and skill (and the fact that he's put in the freezer in between missions and so has been an active asset for longer than anyone normally ought to be) have turned him into a ghost story: the Winter Soldier. Where Bucky was defined by his relationship to his friends and his own bravery and bravado, the Soldier is defined by his orders. He seems to make no decisions based on his own desires, instead his only freewill seems to be in tactical choices.
His skill isn't in question. Natasha talks about him having shot a man in her protection by shooting straight through her. Nothing and no one stands in the Soldier's way. He is a blank slate except for the lethal training that he has been programmed with. Even when he's confronting Natasha and Steve, and Steve recognizes and calls him by name, there is no recognition in the Soldier, who just responds with a question of who the hell is Bucky. But notably, this does stop his attack at least momentarily.
At this moment in time, he's not Bucky Barnes, he's HYDRA's fist and nothing else. But bit by bit, something in him surfaces. Flashes of the fall from the train, of being found and the beginning of the experiments and reconditioning that he goes through come to mind. And one thing else surfaces, with a sadness and a certainty, that he knows the man who called him by name.
Despite being methodical and obedient to a fault, as any good tool ought to be, the Soldier can be erratic and unpredictable at times, as shown notably when he lashes out at his handlers when he's assaulted by these memories that he doesn't understand. But even then, he obeys and settles himself back into the machine that will strip those memories from him, forcibly and painfully.
Brainwashed, reprogrammed and frozen only to be thawed out, set out to hunt down and kill one target or another and then set back into the same cycle over and over has clearly left its scars on Bucky. He's a shell of who he used to be. And as the Winter Soldier, he's more a weapon than a person. He's not one for jokes or talking casually, reminiscing. He speaks to communicate necessary information more than indulge in casual conversation; he's disturbingly good at silence.
But this is no longer who he is either. Bit by bit he's changing, and again is has a great deal to do with his friendship with Steve Rogers. From the moment that Steve calls him by name, things slowly begin to fall apart for him. The memories try to surface, even if they're soon erased the first time. He's almost violent in insisting that he doesn't know Steve, that Steve is his mission and he will complete it, even once Steve stops fighting him. But some of the things that his old friend say strike a chord in him, and that change that has begun in him continues. Instead of killing Steve, he actively saves him. It's not even just a matter of not actively delivering the blow and just letting him die, he proactively pulls him from the water -- a choice that the Soldier would not have made, not when it was his target, his mission. Later, the questions rising in him drive him to look into who he was and he's seen at the Smithsonian at the exhibit that is about his own past, staring at the memorial about the man he once was.
Basically, the man who used to be Bucky Barnes and then the Winter Soldier is really neither and both at the same time right now. He's changing, in a state of flux and transition. He's shown that his memories are not irrecoverable, just repressed, but regaining them is likely to be a long and arduous process. He may never be the man he used to be, but he also isn't simply HYDRA's tool anymore. He's shown an ability for autonomy and making his own decisions, which is definite growth and progress after seven years being an obedient and effective asset. He's still dangerous, still unstable -- lethal and sharp-edged, but breakable somehow -- and even more unpredictable than he once was. But like most anyone, he's a work in progress trying to reconcile his life with what he's discovering about who he used to be.
□ Age: Somewhere between 26 and 94ish. Give or take.
Chronologically, he was born over ninety years ago, but he's spent the majority of this time in a cryogenic freeze, only woken up to complete missions or training before being wiped and refrozen again once more. So physically, he's in his mid-twenties.
□ Gender: Male physically, male mentally
□ Appearance: Bucky is not the man he used to be, even if his face hasn't changed. He's still strong-jawed and blue-eyed, pale skinned and dark-haired. But similarities end there. Where he used to be clean cut and clean-shaven, possessed of an easy, casual posture and downright cocky manner at times, bright-eyed and quick to smile or quip, these days he is exactly the opposite. His every movement is precise and methodical and powerful, an often unstoppable force. He's also a great deal scruffier. His dark hair is kept long and bordering on unkempt, and he cultivates an impressive growth of stubble more often than not.
While he was always fit, he now is very muscular, clear evidence of the training that he has been put through to shape him into what he is. He seems mostly to exist between two extreme states -- eerily still and in full-on-full-out-murder mode, though this is changing too since at the very end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he's shown blending in among a crowd of tourists at the Smithsonian.
One notable physical feature is his left arm. It's a machine, metallic and decorated with a single red star at his artificial bicep. These days he tends to favor clothes that help him blend in and go unnoticed -- long sleeves, hooded sweatshirts, worn out jeans. I'm not saying he looks like a hobo, but he sort of looks a little like a hobo.
□ Abilities/Powers:
Though the canon explanation for it is brief at best, Steve Rogers mentions that Bucky was able to survive the fall from the train because of the experimentation that HYDRA did on him when he was held captive by Doctor Zola, probably related to the super soldier serum that changed both Steve and HYDRA's leader, Schmidt. There isn't a thorough rundown of what it has done, but between those experiments and the training that he's been through, Buck as the Winter Soldier has an impressive skill-set.
He's very strong. Especially with his cybernetic arm, he does things that no one ought to be able to -- yanking a steering wheel straight off a car's dashboard, throwing someone across several lanes of traffic, stopping Captain America's shield when it was thrown at him, leaping on and off moving cars.
He's highly trained in combat -- before being taken by HYDRA and turned into the Winter Solider, Bucky is a very capable soldier. He joined the ranks of the Howling Commandos and fought with Steve, always holding his own. He's also shown to be an impressively talented marksman. This apparently stays with him since later when he has been brainwashed and sent out on missions, he manages to shoot and kill his target straight through Natasha. He's a strong and capable fighter hand-to-hand as well as proficient with numerous firearms. He's also skilled fighting with a knife or even the odd weapon stolen from his targets.
His endurance seems more than a match for Steve's, and his ability to fight on despite being seriously injured suggests that the effect of the experiments and his training has pushed him beyond the limit of what is normally considered human capability.
□ First Person Sample:
What did they put in my head. [The voice that speaks is quiet, hesitant to be even resorting to speaking out, but more than a little demanding, so the question comes like an issuance of a challenge rather than a query.]
Not the answer I was fed. What is it really? What does it do? Can it be disabled?
[Because he is in no way just believing the flimsy answers about financial tracking and communication are the only functions. He's swallowed HYDRA's lies too long for believing so easily. He's quiet a long moment, and it might seem like he's finished speaking, but then, abruptly, like he's been weighing the risk and finally decides to take the plunge.]
One other question. HYDRA. SHIELD. Do those names mean anything to anyone?
[So maybe there's just a little paranoia that they somehow (god only knows how) have a hand in this, and he knows he's opening himself up to scrutiny with all of these questions. But he'll take the risk. Now the broadcast does end. Radio silence.]
□ Third Person Sample:
Some things never changed. The man who once was Bucky Barnes, who was no longer quite the Winter Soldier, wondered if he ought to be comforted by that fact. He wasn't. Not in this instance, not when the familiar themes that were reappearing were ones of control and brainwashing, where it felt like that small pieces of freewill and autonomy that he'd managed to finally wrap his hand around were in jeopardy of falling through his fingers like so much dry sand.
He sat, still and silent, in the room that had been provided for him. That generosity made him skeptical somehow; the furnishings were comfortable, far more than the downright clinical surroundings he was used to, but that didn't make it feel any better. Night fell, and he watched the hours tick by, sleepless and on edge. He'd slept too long, too many years lost while his eyes were closed involuntarily, and the last thing he wanted to do was slip away again.
Strange place, strange faces and stranger things that he was simply supposed to believe when told had brought his guard up, and it showed through every tense line of his body, all sharp and hard angles, a wild creature cornered and ready to spring at the slightest provocation. It wouldn't help anything, though. He knew that much. There was no target here, no clear direction to aim his frustration. The place was foreign, alien somehow even if so little seemed superficially out of place. Nothing here was familiar, and away from that sliver of familiarity, he could feel the beginnings of memory that had begun to creep up in his thoughts retreat, as though taking cover from this new round of uncertainty.
He's so still that he might as well be a statue, barely moving enough for his chest to rise and fall with each regular breath. Alone in these four walls, he didn't know what to do, what direction to take. For just a moment he could feel the longing for orders, for someone to just tell him what the mission was, a goal, a target. But then, wasn't that what had been given here, in this strange place? Assimilate. Go. Fit in. Mold himself into the twisted shape that this city wanted its residents in. And oh it would be so easy to simply fall. in. line. Stillness broke all at once, hands lifting to fist in hair, head falling forward, breathing quickening as his heartbeat stumbled over itself. The apartment, the night, was still entirely silent, broken only by each breathless gasp as he tried to put it all back together, find some order that the world made sense in.
