these are the times that try

[deadthenred]

WHO: Bucky Barnes + various
WHERE: Red Wings, the safehouse, ???
WHEN: Late March.
WHAT: Catch-all log for March, with some open prompts.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: N/A, will update if it changes.

[ Prompts are in the comments below. PM or message me at lightfellows if you'd like a closed starter. ]

Comments

[deadthenred]

Armor?

[ Like Iron Man? Probably not like Iron Man, right? ]

I think doin' this professionally would earn me some weird looks. [ Because there's no way he could keep gloves on the whole time.
He doesn't mind people asking about his arm in the Safehouse, but outside it's a whole other ballgame.

Still. There's some dignity in being a professional dishwasher. He wouldn't look down on it. ]

I was thinking maybe construction.

[championofsnark]

Yeah, armor. Cheastplates, boots, gloves, helmets. Irons and metals mixed with cloth and leather.

[So not like Iron Man, medieval style. Hawke's armor is not top of the line either, especially not recently. It's well used and it fits and suits her, so she doesn't care that much, but there are shinier sets out there worth more. She's always preferred quality of movement and speed than brute strength. She misses walking around with it; it's difficult not to feel exposed everywhere she walks.

She also doesn't look down on dishwashing. In Kirkwall that'd be considered a good career, one less likely to lead to being stabbed in the street. ]

Well you do look very strong, which I assume would help in construction. [He has excellent tone, she admires that in anyone.] Is the arm helpful then? If I didn't see you using it now I might think it just something visual, not useful.

[Hawke's terribly curious and she's never seen anything quite like it. It moves as well as a normal arm.]

Do you have normal feeling in it? [After a beat.] Sorry about all the questions, I can be a pest. Feel free to tell me to fuck off at any time.

[deadthenred]

[ He actually thinks that's pretty neat. He liked Prince Valiant when he was a kid. But Bucky gets the sense that he'll be answering the questions, for now. And he probably couldn't match Hawke's nosiness if she tried.

He doesn't tell her to fuck off. ]

I— [ But he isn't sure where to start, or how much to say. It's also not something he really thinks about. ] It isn't like a real arm. I can feel some things— [ Pressure, mostly— he knows when someone's touching it, or when he's holding something. ] But not the same way.

[ Warmth. It was hard to feel warmth. ]

It's a lot stronger than my other arm, though.

[ And he kind of grins when he says that. Bucky does like punching stuff. ]

[championofsnark]

Ooh, an upgrade of sorts in that way then.

[Hawke is somewhat able to control herself in the way that she doesn't ask him to touch the arm or poke at it; she has some boundaries. Barely. Although just thinking about doing that makes her curious yet again.]

Does the empathy bond happen with it? I suppose it wouldn't necessarily need to be skin to skin with us, yeah?

[There's a reason Hawke keeps gloves. She's already incapable of stopping herself from wandering through people's dreams, so it seems only fair to respect physical distances too. She can't help her curiosity; she's a little bored, for one, and also fucking lonely despite having been on her own for months before this. Being around her best friend again, before coming here, made that gaps more noticeable. She hungers for conversation, like most extroverts.]

I came very close to getting my leg torn off by a dragon once.

[deadthenred]

No, it—

[ Bucky had to wear gloves, anyway, before coming here, to give him the illusion of normalcy. He is not a very touchy person. The arm, though, isn't his skin, and he can't feel things the same through it, anyway. ]

A dragon?

[ That's a lot, even for him. He wants to hear about the dragon. ]

[championofsnark]

[That's interesting. And probably a relief. It would mean he could at least use one hand to deal with people without worrying about transferring anything. Hawke's fine with gloves, she wore them plenty in her day-to-day life since she carries weapons and doesn't wear down her hands. She's still adjusting though.

Hawke grins, her eyes lighting up. She always likes talking about dragons.]

Yeah! She was a high dragon, red, beautiful, ferocious. It's a good thing we got her to land because I wasn't great at fighting anything that high above me.

[They had long range weapons but nothing that could really attract a dragon. She came down to deal with those pesky mortals and ended up paying for it. But Hawke loves dragons.]

There's a variety of dragons that prey on certain territories, and people always end up irritating them and need saving.

[deadthenred]

How big are we talkin'? [ Fin Fang Foom size? Sue him, he still likes a good adventure story, and that's clear from how his demeanor changes. Not that he shows much emotion, either way, but his interest in this dragon is more than politeness. ]

And why do people build where the dragons are?

[ Probably because they haven't got much choice. That's usually how it works. ]

[championofsnark]

[Her eyebrows furrow as she thinks through the best way to represent its size. Hmm. She moves her hands small and wide, but it's not as if she can express the size of a dragon with her arm length.]

I'd say the size of a fancy Imperium ship? The biggest kind. Vaguely. Possibly bigger.

[Of course her only frames of reference are things that fit within her world. But she thinks about it and nods. Isabela's ship would have been too small, but she could see Tevinter coming along with something giant enough to suit a dragon. Nothing like it has come into Kirkwall though, otherwise she'd be able to point to it. She doesn't know if that's helpful to someone not from the area.]

It hasn't exactly been a choice. Sometimes they leave them alone, but then trade routes are the only way to keep your family alive, so. [She shrugs. They take the chance. Or beg the Champion to handle it for them.] That beauty had cut off an entire trade route to my city from the north, eating or burning everyone coming by. So they made sad starving villager eyes at me until I went.

[deadthenred]

Yeah. I guess you don't always get to pick the easy paths.

[ He immediately thinks of an aircraft carrier, but no. That's probably not right. The scale is completely beyond him. ]

I killed a frost giant once, when I was a kid. [ Back when he had two regular arms. Is he bragging? He might be bragging. ] I'm gonna pretend it was that size.

[championofsnark]

Well if it isn't dragons on the path it's some other kind of beast. As someone who once lived in the middle of fucking nowhere, there's always something trying to eat you.

[It's said very matter-of-factly because it is a matter of fact. Hawke and her family came to Kirkwall to try and outrun the Darkspawn and all that came with it. She's not a city girl by birth, otherwise she wouldn't know how to live off the land. Not that it matters in this place in the least; no land to find life out of.

Her eyes brighten at that story; she is duly impressed! Bragging approved!]

Oh that's brilliant, you mean frost as in has ice powers too? [She grins at him.] And as a child too? How did you manage that?

[deadthenred]

I was a kid, not a child. [ He was what, eighteen? ] Anyway, I just threw a grenade at it.

[ He's not so great at this storytelling. His training is all in leaving out the details, not filling them in all pretty. But he realizes Hawke might not know what a grenade is, so he's quick to add— ]

That's… like a bomb, I guess, small enough to throw. There's supposed to be a bunch of different kinds of giants. The frost giants live in the cold. They don't like being blown up.

sorry for the wait *waves at life*

[championofsnark]

What is a kid compared to a child for you? Eight? Twelve?

[She is about to ask what a grenade is, so good call on that, when he explains instead. Hawke listens, very enraptured by it.]

A bomb you can throw easily with your hand? [That's very interesting! Hawke is not terribly fond of bombs herself, having a terrorist ex, but this is more of a fantastical story than that.] Well no one really does like being blown up. It's terribly inconvenient.

[Hawke's curiosity is ever burning.] Why were you fighting frost giants?

no kidding

[deadthenred]

Seventeen? Eighteen? [ He'd have to think about the timeline. ] I hated when people called me a kid.

[ He's older now, old enough to recognize how young he really was. How young so many of them were, really, in that war. Still hasn't unpacked that, really. ]

Heard rumors of some kinda magic Nazi superweapon. Went to do recon. Then the frost giant decided to fight us.

[championofsnark]

Oh, people are married with kids by that point in some of our villages. That's definitely not a kid.

[Thus why she was aiming so low in the age department. A child felt like ten, and a kid more like twelve to fourteen. Hawke was young when she basically took over the family with her father's death. But that's the time period she's from. She started fighting and hunting as a child.]

The giant itself wasn't a superweapon? It sounds a bit like one.

[Although only one being and not a bomb which can do far more danger.]

Did it have ice magic? My sister used to freeze my bed as a prank when we were younger. My least favorite element.