[Between growing up in the Depression and spending a good deal of the war eating C-Rations or whatever other crap was readily available, Bucky's used to being hungry more often than he's not.

That means the dining hall has pretty quickly become his favorite place on board, only partially because you can apparently talk people into making you pancakes for breakfast basically every morning, and that's where he is and what he's doing now.

(This might actually be plate number two.)

He's wearing his combat fatigues, and there's still a sort of hollowness in his expression, like the amused smirk doesn't quite meet his eyes, but maybe he's just tired.]

So, potential end of the world aside, you guys realize this is basically a cruise ship, right? [There's a spa. A friggin' spa, and here he is coming from a place where a goddamn bathtub was a ridiculous luxury you were pretty much never going to see.] I've been in a lot of crummy places where things're about to totally fall apart, but I've never been around this many pancakes in my life, even when I was back home.

[It is and isn't a joke. Whatever's coming deserves some amount of respect and preparation, but seriously. This is nothing compared to holding up in a flooded, muddy fox hole waiting for a grenade to fall in and blow you to hell.]

There's still a lot I'm missing out on about the future, but if this's anything to go off of? The food's definitely a lot better. I mean, maybe I'm not the best guy to judge, but we used to boil everything, [He sounds somewhere between disgusted and fond in saying that.] And if anyone ever tries to trade you a can of ham and lima beans, you're better off socking them in the jaw, I don't care how hungry you are.

[Private to Ben]

Alex told me I was your warden. [And with that admission, there's a sort of awkward, half apologetic twist of his mouth that's not really a smile.] I'm having a hard time remembering everything, but I think I'm starting to get bits and pieces of it.

[It's like some nightmare he only has pieces of, and most of them don't make a lot of sense. Talking to him in some cell in the middle of God knows where, a weird hotel, were they animals at some point? It's a lot to figure out how to respond to.

And then there's the fact that he'd left. Or vanished, or who knows what, and he might not totally remember Ben, but he knows he feels like a complete jackass for walking out on him, intentionally or not.]

Sorry.

[Open Spam]

[Routine is - Bucky figures - the best way to keep himself from going completely nuts as long as he's just... here. Without an assignment and without some crisis to get in the middle of (for the time being, anyway), being at loose ends means he has time to sit and think about what happened, and what the future's potentially going to hold for him, and that's absolutely not how he wants to be spending his time.

So besides the dining hall - which again, you can find him in at least three times a day eating and finishing pretty sizable portions of whatever's available today - he also spends a decent amount of time in the gym. A lot of the more modern exercise equipment gets ignored - not because he doesn't know how to use it, but because beating the hell out of a punching bag is something he hasn't actually had a lot of time to indulge in over the last couple months

He also keeps finding himself wandering back to the library, which would probably surprise some of his grade school teachers if they were around to see it. Bucky's not an idiot, and he was no slouch when it came to academics or anything, but he'd definitely rather be out playing baseball or bailing Steve out of whatever shit he'd gotten himself into than sit around reading a book. And yet here he is, frequenting the same section of the library every time he comes in and selecting books all with more or less the same theme - The Day of Battle, The Longest Day, Band of Brothers, Eagle Against the Sun, Pacific Crucible. Sometimes he just flips through them, scowling like there's either something just factually wrong here or morally offended him, or maybe both. More often than not, they get returned to the shelves without being finished, and he goes back to looking for books that talk about what he's actually interested in.

Maybe someday, he'll come back to all of this and try to understand the bigger picture, but right now, he's got a different focus.

And then there's the firing range, which he is, frankly, unimpressed by. It's boring, not a challenge at all for someone who's used to taking impossible shots, sometimes while under heavy fire. Even the moving targets aren't especially difficult, and this leaves him feeling weirdly caged in and bored more than anything else.

There's a part of him that feels like this is a waste of ammo (and there's another, much quieter part of him that wonders if not just being able to say fuck it and never pick up a gun again is a bad thing or not), but with the way people are talking, it doesn't sound like he can really afford to get rusty, or pack it in and say someone else can deal with it.

Not that that's ever been his style.

And honestly? Part of him almost misses it. Not the killing, not the constantly being in danger of getting killed or watching a friend bite it, but the familiarity of it, the strange consistency of the life he'd adapted to over the last couple years. Getting suddenly jolted out of it is taking more effort than he'd sort of realized it would.]

[Bucky sounds a little more level than he did in his last post, back to his normal, not oh god I suddenly have superpowers self, and he sounds more vaguely amused/annoyed by the flood than anything else.]

I guess as far as first floods go, that coulda been a lot worse. [And that's all he really wants to say on the subject for right now, if that's cool with the rest of you.]

[Private to Ben]

Hey, kid. I've got your file. [And he's thumbed through it a little and holy shit, your life :|] You got anywhere you wanna meet up and talk? [He figures you're likely to agree to whatever he asks you to do, right off the bat, but he wants to give him the option to pick where he'd like to sit down and talk about stuff.]

[Private to Steve]

I think your friend Nicole has a crush on me.