[It's not that he doesn't know these kids lives have been shitty. He does, and he knows it's been especially hard on Stiles. Bucky has no idea how he'd be able to live with himself if he could remember stabbing Steve, even if he hadn't been fully in control of himself.
But it's not the same. He could sit here and talk for hours about what it feels like to be shelled, how you just hug whatever cover you can find and hope it ends soon, one way or another. How it had been so cold and wet in Anzio that guys in his unit had been sent home because the skin on their feet was literally rotting off, what it was like getting so used to seeing carnage that it was easy not to feel anything when you saw horribly mangled enemy dead. To watch other guys pick on replacements because they hadn't been there when they'd first put their boots down on Italian soil, and then see those same kids get blown to hell because they had no idea what they were getting into.
And then there's everything with HYDRA, what it had been like to be a prisoner of war, what it's like to watch a guy's head explode through a scope and feel nothing but a vague sort of happiness that you'd gotten the hit.
Still, there's one obvious answer: I got singled out by a bunch of HYDRA scientists after sticking up for one of the guys in my unit and was tortured and experimented on for I don't know how long, and I spent most of it wishing I would just hurry up and die already.
And then there's the fall, and that's safer to talk about, somehow. Maybe he'll offer that up.]
What, they don't teach about the war in schools anymore? [There's a sort of wry upturn to his mouth as he says it, because he'd like to hope they did, and that hopefully sort of covers what his worst actually is.]
no subject
But it's not the same. He could sit here and talk for hours about what it feels like to be shelled, how you just hug whatever cover you can find and hope it ends soon, one way or another. How it had been so cold and wet in Anzio that guys in his unit had been sent home because the skin on their feet was literally rotting off, what it was like getting so used to seeing carnage that it was easy not to feel anything when you saw horribly mangled enemy dead. To watch other guys pick on replacements because they hadn't been there when they'd first put their boots down on Italian soil, and then see those same kids get blown to hell because they had no idea what they were getting into.
And then there's everything with HYDRA, what it had been like to be a prisoner of war, what it's like to watch a guy's head explode through a scope and feel nothing but a vague sort of happiness that you'd gotten the hit.
Still, there's one obvious answer: I got singled out by a bunch of HYDRA scientists after sticking up for one of the guys in my unit and was tortured and experimented on for I don't know how long, and I spent most of it wishing I would just hurry up and die already.
And then there's the fall, and that's safer to talk about, somehow. Maybe he'll offer that up.]
What, they don't teach about the war in schools anymore? [There's a sort of wry upturn to his mouth as he says it, because he'd like to hope they did, and that hopefully sort of covers what his worst actually is.]