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[It's been over a week since Bucky was almost beaten to death maybe a couple yards from the infirmary, and he feels... fine.

Fine. Sore, tired, still healing, but fine, and that's so deeply unsettling that he really doesn't know what to do with it at all. At all, because he's gone this long without having to talk about what happened to him in any detail at all, and he definitely doesn't want to start now. It's just a lot harder to dismiss little differences like increased appetite and tolerance to alcohol and apparently painkillers now, too, as not a big deal when the deep black and blue bruises on his ribs have already faded to almost nothing, when it should take a friggin' month for broken ribs to actually start feeling better, not days.

He's scared. He's been scared of what this is going to mean for a long time, and two days ago, after he'd shooed Steve away, locked the bathroom door behind him and turned on the shower, he'd spent a distressingly long time staring at his own reflection in the mirror, wondering if now's the time his face is going to start peeling off to reveal some monster right out of a pulp underneath.

So he stays quiet about it, tries to pretend like he still feels like shit and doesn't want to do much - which isn't a difficult thing to pull off, because all of this means he is pretty fucking miserable - and if he's a little more sullen and cranky than usual, Steve seems to be chalking it up to the fact that he's got three busted ribs and a bad concussion, and leaves it at that. It works out for the most part.

But eventually, boredom does get the better of him. Sitting around in bed while you're recovering - unless you're really out of your mind with fever or whatever drugs were trying to help nudge you back along to health - is fucking terrible, no matter who you're with or where you are, and obviously it's not like he expects Steve to be keeping him company the whole time he convalesces. They can't both be sitting around in Steve's room feeling penned in and bored.

Bucky slips out of Steve's room sometime after his friend heads out to go for a jog, and as much as he wants to go for a run or punch the hell of something in the gym, he heads for the dining hall and helps himself to a giant stack of pancakes instead. Now that he's not as achey or metabolizing painkillers out of his system too quickly, he's even more ravenously hungry than usual, and winds up settling at a table near a corner, facing the door to get to work on finishing breakfast. The bruises around his eyes are gone, and there's still a bandage wrapped around his left hand - even though the cut's healed, he'd changed the wrappings himself so no one would get suspicious - and as much as he looks burned out and tired, he's in a lot better shape than he has any right to be, and kind of looks it.]

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[Funny you should mention all that Allison, because you know who's in a really good spot to completely get where you're coming from, and how hard it is to cope with not just because you're upset, but because you hurt your friends?

Bucky freaking Barnes.

Just because you knew it was probably going to happen, just because you'd do it again in a heartbeat if you knew it'd mean your friends got out okay, or if an innocent person didn't have to go in your place doesn't make it easier to cope with. Especially not when the people (or person) you'd left behind is often face to face with you here, looking at you like you're some kind of ghost.

So he smiles, and while it's not really a happy one, it's still genuine. Sympathetic. Empathetic, more like, because yeah. He's been there.

(And Stiles did tell him the rest of it, even if he doesn't know she knows, and he's promised not to say anything.)]

Welcome to the club. I'd say there're benefits or whatever, but I think you'd know I was full of crap.

There should at least be jackets or secret decoder rings, right?

[It's easier if she can make light of it, now knowing that what's happened here has happened before...will happen for her, and soon. She wonders if terminal patients feel this way, their lives ticking down by the second...trying to do and say and feel enough that, when it happens, they will know a minimum of regret.

Because she doesn't think there's any real way to die with none. To live is to regret, to love is to know pain...they're lessons she knows she's learned too early, lessons she's learned the hardest way possible.

She has to force her attention away from her own thoughts, refocusing on Bucky instead as she cuts another bite from her stack of pancakes.]

How are you holding up? You look rough. [And he does, just not in ways anyone else could see...as much as Bucky understands about knowing you'll one day die, Allison understands just as much about soldiers.

She understands the toll of war. She understands how you never really stop being a soldier, even when you're not on the battlefield.

She also understands a lot about strange things happening to you...thinks you can't explain, things you can't share...things that change the world you know into an alien, even hostile place.

When it happened to her, she had Scott...and in less comforting ways, she had her family. Maybe she doesn't recognize that look right away, but she sees the rest: the weariness in his eyes that never really goes away, the furrow in his brow...

Right now, she sees the soldier, the war...and maybe a little something else that creases her own features with a frown of concern.]

Maybe talk to someone about making some. People're always looking for projects around here, right? [He's kidding, but now that it's out there, he wouldn't exactly be shocked if it happened. People are weird around here, go figure.

Her question's a little bit harder to answer honestly, or kid around about, because he knows people can probably tell something's off, or up, or just a little different about him. It's not like he's been quiet about who he is, or what he'd been doing before the Admiral had grabbed him, and he knows there's a certain kind of deadness in the expression that comes along after months and years of exposure to combat. He does a pretty good job of hiding it, but when he's sore and tired and coming off of a couple days of feeling like complete and utter shit? Yeah, it probably shows.

So, he just shrugs. Maybe later, she'll be able to weasel something more out of him.]

I'm fine. This isn't the worst thing that's ever happened to me.

[He says it like he's kidding, but boy, he so is not. Yeah, it sucks to have to recover from about a hundred different bruises and aches and pains, and actual broken ribs and what probably should have been a skull fracture, but this isn't the worst.

He's a soldier. He's been tortured, he's watched friends die, he's died himself. And as scared as he is about what this all means, because he hates thinking about what HYDRA did to him, what they tried to turn him into, at least he's in one piece, and he's got Steve around and plenty of other good people watching his back.

He's been worse.]

[It's morbid...but her best friend is both a banshee and an amateur party planner, so she actually considers mentioning it to Lydia. The idea makes her smile as she rolls her eyes and shrugs a little, as if to say sure, why not?

When he answers her question, though, she can feel the dodge. Hell, it's obvious to someone that knows, someone that's worn those shadows. Maybe she's not as entitled to complain, being seventeen and having only seen what's in Beacon Hills. It's horrible, but the world's a lot bigger and a whole lot darker than her own backyard.

She may be only seventeen, but she understands that much perfectly.

So she doesn't push...not hard, anyway. Her expression is soft, curious as she keeps working on her breakfast.]

What is the worst thing that's ever happened to you? I'll show you mine if you show me yours...

[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.]

They talk about it. War's not something you learn in school, it's a private club with too many members that don't want to be there.

[It comes almost automatically, something her father's said to her more than once when she asks about why certain things are a certain way, when she wants to know about his past hunts or find out if there's a legitimate threat they might need to pursue between incidents in Beacon Hills.

"Don't be too eager, Allison. War's a private club with too many members that don't want to be there...you'll have time to join."

There are days when she understands the sadness that always lingered in his eyes every time he said it...and looking at Bucky, today is one of those days.]

[That gets a laugh out of him that's somewhere between a little surprised and slightly appreciative. It's all true enough, even if it doesn't quite answer his half serious question - he doesn't have much of a benchmark to know what kind of stuff she'd know and what she wouldn't.

Although really, he can guess most of what he'd be talking about gets glossed over, and he can't fully bring himself to be pissed about that. There's some stuff no one should ever have to know about, and he both does and doesn't want people to understand what it had really been like.

Bucky chases a couple bites of pancake around on his plate with his fork for a second, buying himself a little time.]

I fell off a moving train going about a hundred miles an hour and bounced down a mountain. Woke up here. [Again, it's not the worst thing that's ever happened, but it's close enough.]

Steve tried to grab me. [He glances over at the entrance to the dining hall, either avoiding looking at her when he explains or just checking to see if anyone else is wandering in. And then he just shrugs.] Nothing he could've done.

[...okay, that is pretty bad.

Allison feels suddenly guilty, because despite the fact that she knows, that she's going to die...it's still her future. It's nothing she's endured, nothing she's been through, and so it's hard to relate. She hasn't been killed, like he would have been were he not brought here...she's a terminal patient, and the clock has been paused.

With a sigh, she takes another bite of her food, chewing thoughtfully as she watches Bucky not watch her...or watch the door, whichever it actually is, toying with her fork as she carefully chews and swallows.]

Was it a troop transport? Or were you...I don't know. Trying to kill Hitler or something?

[Because she doesn't know them well, not at all...but that's the impression she gets of Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers.

They could totally have killed Hitler. Like something right out of a movie.]

[Oh, Bucky is a hundred and twenty percent certain he died when he hit the water. Later on, maybe he'll realize that dead people don't show up on board still injured, and he definitely had been - as Stiles and Morgana can attest to - when he got here.

But for now, he's dead. Steve had pretty much confirmed that anyway - he would have mentioned if Bucky was around and alive in the future, or had died at the end of the war, or survived the fall at all. There's just no real reason to doubt it.

Anyway, no use brooding about it (right now), right? So he looks back at Allison and gives her a slightly chagrined smirk.]

It's classified.

[And it's probably been declassified and talked about in textbooks, and museums, and movies. It's been a long, long time since he fell off that cliff, and the world's moved on and changed and stayed the same.

So the smirk gets a little wider, because you're definitely on the right track there, Allison.]

But yeah, it was on a mission kind of like that.

[Allison tracks that growing smirk, more like a full-blown smile now, and she's glad to see it. Of course, it makes her wildly curious to know more about what happened, but there's a time and a place for war stories, and this doesn't feel like either. At least not yet.

Still, she's officially convinced that what she learned in history class is now bullshit: Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes totally helped kill Hitler.

A deal is a deal, however, so she just smiles back as she tries to think of the worst thing that's ever happened to her, the worst thing she's ever done...and then she realizes that maybe she doesn't have it quite as bad as she thought.]

You know, I actually did die once before. I was a human sacrifice...well, a surrogate human sacrifice.

[He actually knows about that. Not the dirty details, really, but the important parts. The aftermath. Stiles told him a lot after Allison showed up, and Bucky had promised he wouldn't tell anyone how much he knew. Just because the secret's out about what happened to her doesn't mean he's going to go back on that.

It's hard not to see himself in Stiles, just like how it's hard to see Scott being a selfless idiot and not think of Steve. Even without kind of experiencing their lives thanks to that flood, that would absolutely be the case, and thus it's hard to even think about going back on that.

So he just gives her an interested, maybe slightly skeptical look while he works on demolishing another pancake.]

Oh yeah?

[Good thing he's had a lot of practice pretending like he doesn't know what people are talking about.]

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