2614/Real or Imagined

Real or Imagined
Date of Scene:	27 September 2017
Location:	Unknown
Synopsis:	Summary needed
Cast of Characters:	Captain America, Peggy Carter, Winter Soldier

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Captain America has posed:
Some weeks ago, Steve had asked Bucky to join him in his efforts to finish what they started so long ago to defeat HYDRA. Today, the culmination of that work comes to full fruition. Steve Rogers dressed in a white t-shirt, light khakis, and a bomber-style jacket, treads through the front doors of SHIELD. He'd brought Bucky on as a consultant, and was anxious to get rolling on planning to take down HYDRA bases.

He's somehow deluded himself into believing this will look like it did when they were in Europe so long ago, a delusion that's already becoming apparent as such when they get to SHIELD and go through multiple layers of security.

Such is the nature of the organization.

"We just need to make a solid plan as to who can be involved--" Steve looks over his shoulder at Barnes as the two move through the foyer.

Peggy Carter has posed:
In that very same foyer is one Peggy Carter. It's hard to miss Captain America striding his way through.

Holding a tablet that she has been taking notes on and crossing to a different part of the building, she periodically glances up to ensure she is not about to run into a person or a pillar. Both would be embarrassing and not proper of her station. As she does so, though, she notices Steve as well as Barnes. The last time she saw and spoke to Steve he called her a delusion, a figment of his imagination. The last time she saw Barnes, hew as trying to kill her. Her eyes narrow and her footsteps stop.

While she certainly does not approach them, she cannot help but allow her eyes to follow them. What are they both doing here? What does this mean?

Winter Soldier has posed:
It both feels and doesn't feel like a similar resolution they made, eighty-two years ago.

It does because it's the same kind of promise -- to destroy Hydra wherever they might put down their coils -- and it doesn't because the last time they swore to it, they were two exhausted and bloody soldiers, sweat-streaked and dirty, vowing it after Bucky's extraction from a hellish POW experience. This time he doesn't look half as bad in body -- he's dressed as casually as Steve, to the point where he doesn't look like anything special -- but in spirit... well, his spiritual condition is plain in the haggard, twitchy way his blue eyes try to track defensively in every direction as they walk into the too-open foyer of the Triskelion.

He is a known quantity by now: the reports about him have been lodged, the statements made and recorded. He is still treated with extreme caution, even if it is not overt. He's hidden his arm, and it doesn't set off the metal detectors (for arcane reasons best known to Hydra engineers), but nonetheless Peggy Carter isn't the only one following Steve and his odd companion with her eyes.

Bucky looks transparently uncomfortable about that.

"We need to make a plan that I'm not going to go off again, Steve," he says, muted, trailing after his friend with head down and hands shoved in his pockets. "Though I guess I gotta say, if so, no place better equipped to take me out again than here."

Captain America has posed:
It's in Steve's nature to try to make things okay. His eyebrows draw together and he manages a crooked, very boyish smile towards his friend. Even though Bucky says nothing about the eyes, Steve tucks his chin and bashfully asserts, "Sorry. I garner some attention around here." Because clearly everyone is looking at him rather than Bucky. Even if Barnes doesn't buy the lie (that Steve tries so desperately to sell but can't quite land), it's a solid effort regardless. "Even without the suit," his eyebrows lift at that.

"You're not going to go off again," Steve reasserts when he's focused on the task at hand. "I'm here. SHIELD has scientists who can help work on that. We can get you oriented and working alongside the best in the country." He reaches out to squeeze Bucky's shoulder reassuringly. And there should be little doubt if will alone can keep Bucky from losing himself, Steve has it in spades. It's not likely to be enough.

"I'm hoping if we can get into one of the HYDRA facilities we can get some information," this is spy talk and so outside of Steve's wheelhouse, "about what they did so we can find a way to permanently remove it." He issues his friend a one-shouldered shrug. And as he does so, blue eyes cut across the room to catch Peggy Carter. Again.

Steve's skin pales and his shoes suddenly become the most interesting thing in the room. He stares at his feet while his eyebrows knit together tightly.

Peggy Carter has posed:
From her observational position, Peggy starts to move slightly in order to ensure she can either intercept or follow the pair of Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers. She knows from Steve that Bucky was under Hydra brainwashing, but has somehow broken free of it. She also knows that Steve - for some reason - believes her to be a delusion of his own making. That does not exactly make for small talk.

However, she notices that Steve has seen that she is here. Barnes? Well, that's another matter entirely. Simply following them silently does little to help the matter and she is a woman born of curiosity and grit, so therefore she will not simple wait there while things unfold in front of her. Instead, she grabs the bull by the horns.

Striding forward with her tablet, she nods at first Steve and then Bucky. "Captain, Barnes." To Bucky, she adds, "I must say, I did have it on my to-do list to find you as last we spoke you were rather unlike yourself as I remembered you. Captain Rogers has said, though, that you are on the road to recovery, for which I am glad."

Winter Soldier has posed:
"You're as bad at lying as you were when you were fourteen," Bucky says, his gaze tracking upwards to where a gaggle of workers are staring at him from a landing several stories up. They notice him noticing them, and vanish. "Though I guess I gotta allow that you're /kind/ of interesting. Sometimes."

The levity is brief. Steve might be trying to stay optimistic, but Bucky isn't about to let the fact he's a potential ticking time bomb drop, not until he has some kind of assurance that he's not going to black out one day and wake up with his metal arm impaled through Steve's chest, or something equally horrifying. And though he knows it's probably his best shot at being deprogrammed, he tenses visibly when Steve mentions scientists.

"Yeah," he says, though in that one syllable is couched an overwhelming instinct to run for it that Bucky is obviously trying to keep at bay. He still doesn't know how the hell Steve can even look at him, or touch him, but at the same time he can't very well hurt or let down his friend either, and he has a sneaking awareness if he ran he'd just be twisting the knife in his friend's chest more.

He only relaxes at Steve's hand on his shoulder, though marginally. "The means that got used on me varied," he says. "Soviets liked hypnosis, suggestion, mind-bending shit. Kept it running while I was in cryo, even. Hydra liked drugs and electricity." He grimaces. "Needles. We find any information on one way, that ought to be enough of a start -- "

He stops abruptly as he notices what has got Steve looking like a ghost. He starts looking like a ghost himself, if an extremely guilt-ridden one. He, too, suddenly starts finding the floor interesting. "Carter," he starts, unable to look anywhere even remotely near her. "That's a hell of an understatement. I owe you..." He looks embarrassed. "Apology doesn't cover it."

Captain America has posed:
When Peggy greets them, Steve doesn't look up from his feet. His dockers, much like the ones he's always worn (and was pleased to know they are still made), are the epitome of interest. No reason to talk to illusions. They will only cause pain and trouble and suck life from anyone that dares remain in them for extended periods of time.

Bucky's change of tracks in his sentence, however, causes Steve to tense further. Steve's head snaps upwards when Barnes greets Agent Carter, and he glances between them as he can feel his own heartbeat begin to race. Fight or flight mechanism says something is wrong. But in the moment, all Steve can do is try to build some sense of what reality is. And what it isn't.

His breath comes out in an urgent puff of air when he looks at Barnes. His hands shove into his pockets and the shadow of confusion further darkens Steve's features. He swallows hard around the growing lump in his throat. "Buck..." he forces his gaze upwards and blue eyes flit between the pair "...you see her?"

Peggy Carter has posed:
Peggy Carter is a woman that deals in multiple grey areas. One of those is time and the other is moral quandaries. She has no idea why Steve seems to be so reluctant to believe that she is not real, but she is also not about to bring that up in the middle of a foyer. In fact, as this starts to unfold, she looks about her and then sighs.

"Perhaps this is all better discussed in another room?" she asks, lifting an eyebrow to both Barnes and Rogers.

Without much of a confirmation, she turns and then leads them down a hallway and into a room she is all but sure is empty. It's small, but functional, a sort of low level conference room made for people without proper clearance. There's a long conference table in the center and scattered chairs pushed against it.

Once the door is properly shut, she takes a deep breath and looks between the men she once fought a war with. First, to Barnes, she asks point blank: "From what I have been told and read through briefings, you were brainwashed. Is that true?" Then, she looks at Steve long after his question whether Barnes can see Peggy. They are now in a not secure, but private location. She gives a soft sigh. "Also, could you please assure Captain Rogers I am not a hallucination?"

Winter Soldier has posed:
Buck... you see her?

Bucky slowly looks right at Steve (he is keeping his left side away from other humans). He sort of puts his head on one side, looks at Peggy, then looks back at Steve.

"...Yeah?" he asks, like he isn't quite sure it's the right answer. "I mean... I know it's fucked up... but /we're/ both here."

He doesn't object when Peggy draws them into another room, though he tenses a little (again) when the door is shut. His back turns to a wall and he immediately checks all exits, though his eyes turn to Peggy when she confronts him. "...Yeah," he says, at her demand to know whether he was brainwashed. His stance is outwardly casual, but his hands in his pockets are curled into fists. "About the size of it."

Could you please assure Captain Rogers I am not a hallucination?

"We... met before," he says, and the grimace that accompanies the words says clearly enough under what circumstances. "She was solid as you or me." When I was trying to kill her.

Captain America has posed:
Steve is easily drawn into the conference room. He assumes his silence and can't decide if he's dreaming, still haunted by Hydra, or something else altogether. And there's little doubt that he's struggling with both the circumstance as well as the moment itself. He blinks owlishly when Peggy asks Bucky to concur that he's real, yet there's something in that which earns a faint tick of Steve's eyebrows.

It's then that Bucky explains the solidity that is Peggy Carter, and Steve sits in his chair and cinches his eyes closed, willing himself to wake up all over again. Bucky had been in the fiction too, and finding the separation between real, desire, and some fictional nightmare doesn't help him.

He mutters softly, "Right." He doesn't trust it though. And the wariness becomes demonstrable in the skepticism of his tone. "The timing it..." his head shakes as his eyes turn back to Peggy. "You should be really old," or dead. But he leaves that one unspoken.

Steve and Bucky should also be dead, but he doesn't draw attention to that either.

Peggy Carter has posed:
It doesn't seem as if Peggy is here to close the door on Steve and Bucky and then attempt to kill them both. The instinct, though? She gets it. "I see." It does seem to be something she understands. "I've..." she frowns. "I encountered similar," she tells Barnes in a way to show that she believes him.

Then, she looks to Steve. There is a bit of pain there to know that he continually thinks her to be figment of his imagination. However, she knows how to work through pain. At his skepticism, she tells him just a dryly, "You should be dead." Her own skepticism, practical British viewpoints steadies on Steve. "Why should I believe you to be alive? I know why I am here, why should I believe you?" It's a counterpoint to his own fears and she feels validated in her own counterpoint.

Even if Steve doesn't bring attention to he hypocrisy, she does. "I told you why I was here. It is the truth and it is up to you to believe it or not."

Winter Soldier has posed:
It's maybe not necessarily a wariness of Peggy herself so much as just ingrained habit, by now, in a man who has traded in death and deception for nearly ninety years now. It is death to enter any enclosed area without scoping it out fully. This much is written in Bucky Barnes down to the bones.

He looks at Steve, a little worried, slowly understanding why the other man would be questioning his own reality. He questions his own mind often enough, himself, and he has -- a vague recollection of what happened, when they used the Mind Stone on him and restored his memories to himself. He saw glimpses of what they all saw.

It's his turn to put his right hand on Steve's shoulder, as the other man sits. Bucky himself doesn't, not yet.

You should be old, Steve virtually accuses, and Bucky's eyes turn to Peggy as if wondering the same. Her admission she's encountered other cases of brainwashing... he understands it for what it is, and though his expression goes a little taut, the slight nod he gives her is silently appreciative.

He has no contribution to the point and counterpoint that Steve and Peggy make, but he does look askance at Carter at that last. "I missed that briefing," he says, a hint of the old wryness he had when he was young shining through.

Captain America has posed:
Why should Peggy believe him? Because Hydra didn't mess with her mind. Because she didn't see the reality that wasn't. Because she doesn't know what-would-have-been if they'd lost the war. All of these thoughts swirl across Steve's mind, culminating in a chaotic storm behind serene blue eyes. The battle in his mind proves particularly troublesome.

Including the sound of Susie's voice. Which still cuts into the silence in his dreams.

But all of that is left unsaid, and the storm only clears with that brief contact with his best friend. The touch works magic and Steve's brain finds the reboot button, charging back up deftly.

"Look Peggy, I was frozen in the ice for decades. I'm still making sense of all of this. Time travel seems impossible. And if someone could do that, we both know it'd have terrible implications for past, present, and future. There will always be someone who would try to hold the timeline hostage. If we'd never encountered time travel in the twenties, especially when we both know Hydra would use it to their advantage, then..." his cheeks puff out irritably.

"So while you may think I'm hyppocritcal, I'm doing exactly what you and others wanted of me. To be skeptical. To be..." his eyebrows draw together "...less trusting. To be what this place wants from its agents. I'm no spy, ma'am. Never will be. But this place needs its agents to be cautious."