#ooc: i just hope it's okay u don't have to match length

[ghostsandmirrors]

( continued from here with @holygroundscafe )

Truthfully, he barely remembered getting through the door. After a certain point, everything became a haze of pain and dissociation, only broken up by the occasional detail.

The footsteps that he'd heard behind him, the whirring of his metal hand in his pocket as it balled tightly into a fist. The cold laugh from a face dappled with freckles, and the very satisfying feeling of his right hand connecting with that freckle-dappled face, giving surprise to those conflictingly deep green eyes. His own stumbled footsteps and the pain coming from his side, quietened only by the bell above the door and a nest of voices he didn't know or couldn't pick apart with a single voice he'd instantly recognised as Milo's.

The blank spot in the middle didn't bother him as much as it probably should have; half of his life was a blank spot, an empty hole where memories used to be with nothing to replace them. He was used to this, and that was likely another thing that should've bothered him more than it did.

The irony of him being friends with a witch who could interact with memories as someone with severe memory loss was not lost on Bucky.

"Thanks," he said, fighting back a wince; Milo had managed to put his hand directly over a sore spot, "for all of this." It hadn't been his intention to cause any problems, to almost fall through the door of the café, to probably scare the customers, but he hadn't been told that trouble had followed him so he was at least glad that the punch to the face had probably made them rethink the decision to follow him. At least the decision to follow him into a back alley, where none of them had been able to get distance.

There was a sigh with the statement that they should get him inside and do things to help him. Usually, if he was at home where he knew every hidden knife and thus knew he was safe, he would have argued. He would have insisted that he didn't need to move and he could just clean himself up later, once the surface injuries had healed. As it was, he just nodded. This wasn't his home, so he didn't get to insist on not moving. Instead, he braced himself for having to stand; there was an ache through his ribs that could have been a break or a bruise and the effort required to stand would only make that ache sharper. The focus on that disappeared with the appearance of the question, though, and Bucky shot him a look.

"You ain't gotta worry about me fallin' over and dyin' or anythin'; survived worse than this." He paused before taking a deep breath and instantly regretting it, fighting back any wincing from that ache. "I can stand. This is nothin'." Despite how certain he was that this didn't look like nothing--because those aches and pains weren't going anywhere--and despite how much he wasn't about to list his top 10 beatings, this didn't make that list.