freightcars

GOOD MORNING, STARSHINE

[At first, his eyes only open half way and the world around him sways, lazy and still like a womb. Like the bottom of a still lake, deep blue water, lines of seaweed reaching in tendrils up toward the surface looking for light. He watches them oscillate back and forth for minutes, calm and dreamy, and his eyes want to fall shut again so he can enjoy the momentary serene, sweetly empty bliss of a blank mind and no gravity.

A little awareness trickles in before he can drift off, though, and his eyes focus on a tendril of that weed properly, taking in the rigidness, the straight lines found only in the artificial. The inorganic. It's not a weed, it's a cable. He tracks it with his eyes first, until it dips below his range of vision and ducking his head a little doesn't reveal it. He tracks it with his fingers next, reaching out slowly, curling them around the thing, chasing it up inch by inch until he reaches his face.

There's a mask on it. There's a mask covering his mouth, and he can feel suddenly the tube going down his throat. The swaying of the cables becomes inadvertently menacing as he begins to writhe, tugging at it in disbelief and the first trappings of fear.

This is hardly the first time he's woken up bound in cables with a mask strapped across his mouth, trapped and confined to clear glass, a tube in his throat, limbs heavy, lethargic. Soon someone will come release him, he knows, and he'll collapse under the weight of gravity. He knows two handlers will wedge themselves beneath his arms and drag him toward a chair, where he will drip as they strap him in. They'll lower the halo down upon his head and shoot a thousand volts straight into his brain, and they'll take everything.

Everything. Again.

His panic becomes a proper sensation, a real and physical dread. The floundering becomes chaotic and wild, ripping at the cords around him, digging his fingernails into the glass above his face, flailing even as they retract. In his haste and his panic, he rips the tube from his throat and holds his breath at the sudden onslaught of fluid. He doesn't catch the whispered words in his mind, they're lost on him.

Before the fluid is even drained, before the lid is even completely off, Barnes is dragging himself out of the thing limb over limb like some kind of sopping wet naked spider, gasping hoarsely, nearly hyperventilating. His legs don't work quite right but that doesn't seem to stop him, it just means that rather than standing or slowly lowering he rolls out of the pod and gravity drops him heavily onto the ground flat on his back. He's a damn mess in the process, dragging nutrient fluid with him, hair matted, skin slick and shiny, hand groping for the lid of the pod above him to try and drag himself to his feet.

There are no coherent thoughts in his head, only a sentiment: run, run, run-

Fight or flight begins with the latter, but have you ever been half-tackled by a naked bambi-legged two hundred pound man? The first person that tries to approach him will earn that experience first hand.]

MAINTENANCE

[Day two, and Barnes sort of has his shit together. Don't get him wrong, it took hours for the panic to fade and for his mind to wrap around the whole I'm in goddamn space thing. He's still working on that part, but at least he's dressed and sort of walking (ish. mostly. for a few minutes at a time). It's on the path down an unfamiliar hallway that the first droid catches him, dropping a big square block of something into his arms. He freezes beneath it, wide-eyed, watching it zip off. He doesn't get the chance to react before a second droid shows up, depositing another rounder bundle of something on top of the first that he's got to dip to stabilize, muttering an incredulous: ]

What the hell?

[ Evidently he has been elected the Supreme Stuff Holder by a half dozen droids, because a small army of them comes one after the other, beeping and depositing their load into his overburdened arms. When they're full, drops start dropping something on his shoulders, the top of his head, hanging things out of his pockets and off his belt loops.

Within minutes he's decked out like some kind of space themed Christmas tree, afraid to move, stone faced. ]

AIRLOCK

[ It took him a week to find it, and two more days to get the balls to figure it out. It took a little trial and error, but Bucky Barnes has officially figured out how to work the airlock. Anyone wandering by may catch him in the act, and his process is as follows:

Ensure the outer door is closed.
Ask Rip if the room is pressurized.
Ask her again to make sure she's sure.
Disengage the safety lock to the inner door.
Open the inner door.
Stick a piece of garbage, scrap metal, or junk in the middle of the room.
Leave the room.
Shut the door
Engage the safety lock.
Ask Rip if the safety lock is engaged.
Ask if she's sure.
Smack the red button.

Process complete, a little red light switches on, a warning tone sounds, and then the outer door opens up sucking whatever he placed in the room out into space. Judging by the junk floating just outside the door visible through the glass, he's been doing this for a while. If you shoot him a judgmental look he'll just shrug and flatly say: ]

Never gets old.

[ Space. ]

TDM;