Prompt Post 1

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At least one of the characters in your prompt must have been in Captain America: The First Avenger or Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

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Update, April 22, 2014:
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Fill: And I Am Always with You, Part 44

[lauralot]

There is, the Soldier quickly learns, more than one type of pizza in the world, and the variety they select appears to be a serious matter. Stark, Barton, and Romanoff debate "toppings" with all the furor and stubbornness the Soldier associates with combat strategizing. He watches, silent, assessing how best to disarm them with minimal damage should fighting break out, as they argue things like anchovy and pepperoni and Hawaiian.

To the Soldier's right, Sam is trying to explain these words. His efforts are inadequate, though not unappreciated. Anchovy is a sort of fish, but the Soldier cannot recall ever tasting any sort of aquatic life. His mind supplies no definition for the word "salami." Ham is a familiar food; pineapple is not. It is possible that he has seen the things they are discussing, but most of the images that come to mind when he thinks of food are either MREs from the strike team members or half-digested remains spilling out of cut stomachs. Neither recollection is applicable now.

"Are we sure," Steve asks over the dispute, brow slightly furrowed, "that Bucky can even digest those things?"

"No, we aren't. That settles it." Relief, possibly, flashes over Sam's face. The Soldier concludes that the potential relief is more likely due to the matter being settled than to the possibility of pizza-borne sickness. There may be some circumstance in which the Soldier's vomit is beneficial, but he cannot envision it. HYDRA had never utilized it for any medical or combative purpose that he recalls. "We're getting cheese."

There are murmurs—not dissent, but resignation—from the others. Steve assures him that this is melodrama on their parts and that no one actually dislikes cheese pizza.

Melodrama. The Soldier adds that to his list of words in need of definition.

A little over three quarters of an hour pass before the pizza is delivered. It still looks like melting flesh, albeit with a thin layer of oil over it. The scent is different, though. He thinks burning bodies smelled more like…barbeque? Is that a word?

He stares at the slice on his plate. It seems to glisten under the lights. He would calculate the odds of his ability to successfully digest this, but considering the only times he can remember vomiting were when he was starving and undergoing amputation, there would be little point to the exercise. Also, pizza appears to consist of cheese and bread, both of which he has kept down in the past without struggle.

"How do you eat it?" he asks. None of the foods he was introduced to previously were ever so...triangular.

"Not with a fork," Stark says, and to the Soldier's left, Steve sighs.

"That was one time. Are you ever going to let that go?"

"You ate pizza with a fork, Spangles. That's not the kind of thing one lets go."

"I was in uniform and I didn't want to get tomato sauce on everything."

"So what, super soldiers are shockingly uncoordinated?" Stark picks up his own slice. "Now listen, Stepford. There are two ways to eat pizza: the right way, and every other method."

"That is more than two ways," the Soldier says so quietly he can barely hear himself.

"The right way," Stark continues, "is that you start with the crust first."

"Maybe that's the right way for crazy rich people." Barton has already bitten into a slice, at the end opposite the crust, and speaks around it. "You eat the crust last. You hold onto it until then."

"False, Big Bird. That's saving the most boring and least flavorful part 'til the end."

"That's why there are dipping sauces," Romanoff says. The Soldier notices for the first time that there is a thin chain around her neck with some kind of small charm hanging from it. She is at the opposite end of the table and he is not sure what the thing on the necklace is meant to be.

Barton swallows. "You don't need the sauces. You just leave, like, an inch of the actual pizza and eat that along with the crust."

"There's not a right or a wrong way to eat pizza, Bucky," Sam says. "But there is a best way, and that's folding it in half." He proceeds to do so with his own slice over the protests of Romanoff, Stark, and Barton.

For a food consisting of bread, cheese, and possibly tomato sauce, there are entirely too many options for its consumption. The Soldier looks to Steve, who smiles and shrugs.

"Just eat it however you want," he says, and the Soldier does not want to eat it any particular way, so he picks up the slice and bites into the end opposite the crust. Stark mutters something about kids today, a statement the Soldier thinks would make no sense upon further examination, but he doesn't examine it because he manages to identify the thing on Romanoff's necklace.

An arrow.

Romanoff and Barton sit beside each other. When their eyes do not meet, their elbows and probably their knees brush together. But their eyes often meet. They can talk without speaking. The concept is not alien to the Soldier; it was necessary on some missions to communicate with the body. But those were simple messages such as "fall back" or "path is clear." These two—Mercenaries? Ninja?—have a nuance in their movements that those communications never reached. Any method of interaction in which the Soldier had been expected to respond was inherently limited, but he thinks this difference goes beyond the human weapon dichotomy.

This is, possibly, friendship.

The hallucination of Steve was always making contact: holding the Soldier's hand, worrying at injuries. James Buchanan Barnes, if the flashes of memories are correct, used to put his arm around Steve's shoulders. In the tower, Steve has held his hand and rubbed his back, guided his fingers around knitting needles. They are not starved for touch, but there is trepidation when contact occurs. The Soldier's movements are hesitant for fear of breaking the man, and perhaps Steve falters to keep from spooking the former weapon.

Barton and Romanoff are effortless. They are not concealing their caution for one another; there is no caution to conceal.

The archer said he had been made to oppose those he cared for. Said that he could remember who he was the entire time. The Soldier had been falling apart with nothing but little fragments of memory when he was sent to eliminate Steve. To be made to fight a friend so close, a friend fully remembered, must have been immeasurably worse.

At the thought of it, the Soldier goes rigid. He feels something else as well, a sinking weight not unlike when his metal arm ran the risk of drowning him in the Potomac. Three days, Barton had said, and the Soldier had felt badly for himself because his time span was so vastly different. And now they sit at a table together, like comrades, because Barton has not realized the terrible cold the Soldier is capable of. None of them have.

It feels like a lie, sitting here. Lies should be confessed and punished, but his throat is paralyzed and his mind races, casting about for anything other than the heartless, lying now.

The woman in the red dress, standing in the doorway. He had stood up when she entered because it was respectful. Should he be standing now for Romanoff?

Steve had been there. The woman in red spoke to him. She'd had an accent. She'd had dark brown eyes that never left Steve's face, even when Barnes had spoken to her. "I might even," she'd said, "when this is all over, go dancing."

But Steve wasn't the one who danced, so why had the woman in red said that to him?

There is something inside him when he remembers the way she looked at Steve, an emotion he can't categorize.

"Like it, Buck?" Steve asks, and the Soldier is pulled halfway back to the present.

"We met a dame," he says. He means we met a woman, but it comes out funny. "She had a…she had…her voice wasn't American. She had a red dress."

Right as the words leave his lips, he tenses. Steve doesn't see colors the way everyone else does. He remembers crayons in their youth, how Steve used to act like the reds and yellows and greens were interchangeable before he started drawing with just pencils and charcoal. He remembers the words color blind and his stomach twists to have brought colors up at all.

The Soldier hadn't realized what cruelty he was capable of before today. He was never cruel as a weapon. Cold, calculating, but not cruel.

But Steve says, "Peggy" and the Soldier realizes firstly that the serum must have changed Steve's vision and secondly that the name Agent Peggy Carter is not entirely unfamiliar. "Peggy Carter. That would have been the first time you met her."

Steve's eyes are distant and they look almost sad, but the Soldier must be reading them wrong because then Steve smiles. "That was a beautiful dress. You remember it?"

"We were in the army?" he asks. They must have been if Steve had already taken the serum.

"Yeah, we were. That was the day we put the Commandos together, remember?"

When James Buchanan Barnes and Steve served side by side, it was after Barnes had been rescued from the POW camp in Austria. He'd read about it at the Smithsonian. The POW camp was run by HYDRA. Before, amidst questions such as "Am I human?" and "Am I Barnes?" that information had been little more than a footnote.

But now that he thinks on it, it is all encompassing. Barnes had been HYDRA's once before. Then he came back. He served with Steve and earned the title of a war hero. It may be the most crucial time in Barnes's life, if only insofar as a learning experience for the Soldier to emulate. "Tell me everything."

Re: Fill: And I Am Always with You, Part 44

[(Anonymous)]

Can't help but notice that Bucky chose Clint's way to eat pizza, instead of the other's. He's gonna be like Hawkeye's little duckling from hell, and Clint's gonna love every minute of it, and Steve's gonna be jealous as hell.

Re: Fill: And I Am Always with You, Part 44

[lauralot]

I was wondering if anyone would notice he was copying Hawkeye. He really is like a duckling.

Re: Fill: And I Am Always with You, Part 44

[(Anonymous)]

Not with a fork. Good Lord! Tony and Steve pizza banter, glorious.

Re: Fill: And I Am Always with You, Part 44

[lauralot]

My mother used to eat pizza with a fork when she had her braces on. Of course, that was in the 1970s, when braces were a giant metal bracket around each tooth. That's the only acceptable circumstances for pizza forks, possibly.