Poker
Day 6 at the Retreat
"You're keeping busy, right, Buck? I know how you get when you're bored."
The snippet of Steve's concern played over again in his head as he stared down at the cards in his hand. Busy wasn't quite the word that Bucky wanted to use for the path of his days at the Retreat. If he squinted real hard, maybe he could consider himself busy. It wasn't like his time in Wakanda, where he could lose himself in heavy labor and mindless drudgery. There was a lot of thinking going on here.
"I see your fact, and I raise you a question." Taylar slid a red poker chip into the meager pot between them. It was only the first hand, and bets stayed small. Especially after Taylar had gotten him to agree on non-monetary betting. Five-card draw wasn't his favorite, or his forte, but it was a quick and simple way to play poker.
After a long consideration, Bucky carefully chose two cards to exchange. Taylar only drew a single. She watched him intently over the fan of her own cards, a glint of mischief in her gaze. They'd limited the chips to only three colors: white were for voluntary facts shared, red denoted a question that the winner asks that must be answered, and blue were for a secret confession. Bucky was dreading the moment that a blue chip came into play.
He watched as Taylar calmly laid a single card down, and drew a replacement from the deck. Looking back down at his own cards, he considered his own actions. Drawing too many could make her think his hand was weak, and she could just bet the farm. The pair of queens staring back at him were his only hope. He settled on two cards,and the choice paid off. His two Queens were joined by a third.
Poker was all about nuance and expression. Bucky had long mastered masking his thoughts and emotions, shuttering himself as some had put it. But she had the advantage in this game. She could read what he was feeling, whether or not he wanted her to. His right hand idly played with the small stack of chips, shuffling the red, white and blue stack repeatedly until a red chip ended up on top.
Tossing the chip into the pile served as a call, but also piqued his amusement. The irony of the colored chips didn't escape him, nor did the frisbee-like action of the spinning chip. With a small sigh, Tay laid her cards out. For a split second, Bucky thought he was looking at a straight, but realized she was one card short. A pair of sixes ruined it for her. Smirking slowly, Bucky countered with his three Queens, and reached forward to pick up the three chips in the center.
"So, two facts, and I get to ask you a question, right?" He clarified as he added the chips to his pile.
Laughing, she pushed the deck towards him for his shuffle and deal. "Right. Facts of my choosing. So, fact number one: I have two elder brothers. Fact number two: I grew up in Iowa City."
She gestured for him to take the floor, and Bucky scratched the two-day old scruff on his cheek while he considered his options. There were a dozen innocent things he could ask, but greater number of harder topics in the same breath. He began shuffling the deck. With his attention firmly on what his hands were doing, he started framing the question.
"It's only fair... you know what I'm afraid of, so, what are you most afraid of?"
Taylar winced, but laughed softly at the same time. "Oof, going right for the jugular. You know this is gonna change the nature of future bets, right?"
Smirking, Bucky cut the deck into thirds before restacking the cards a different way. "I'm counting on it."
Studying him for a long moment, Taylar realized that he was pleased with the development. Upping the stakes as it were, made the game more competitive for him. It was also going to make the nature of their bets weigh more.
"Well, okay then. When I was five, my middle brother, Charlie, shut me in an abandoned fridge we found dumped in the woods behind our house. My eldest brother noticed I was missing, and eventually found me. No one's really sure how long I wasn't breathing, but tight spaces... yeah, hard pass there." Taylar shrugged. "Calling it claustrophobia is putting it nicely."
Bucky's hands had stopped moving when she blithely confessed to having suffocated as a child. He watched her carefully, looking for any sign that she was fabricating the tale. Her expression was steady, somber and thoughtful. He couldn't find any traditional tells that could hint at a lie. After another minute trying to figure out what to say, Bucky simply began to deal out the next hand.
Seven or eight hands went by relatively quickly. Neither had any hands that warranted any kind of excessive betting. Besides, Bucky found the facts portion of the bets far safer, and more comfortable to share. For Bucky, it was mostly tidbits about growing up in Brooklyn, watching out for three little sisters, and Steve. Aside from telling him the origin of her biggest fear, Taylar noticeably avoided talking about her childhood. All her facts were recent, and just as seemingly trivial as his: favorite foods, favorite music, and the fact that she achieved a black belt in some martial art right before she signed up to join SHIELD.
She caught him with a pair of questions in the pot at one point. He thought he'd caught onto how she bluffed, tapping her fingers against the table when she was working out her bet. He thought that his Tens would be good enough to carry him. He jumped the gun far enough on the matter that he'd even come up with the questions he was going to ask, as he laid down his cards to show her. She rapped the back of his hand when he reached for the chips.
"Slow down there, soldier boy," she laughed, fanning her cards out. "Full house, Jacks and Twos."
Bucky swore under his breath, before forcing himself to sit back in his chair. He'd avoided being the target of questions up to this point. Maybe she sensed his dread, because Taylar didn't jump right into collecting the bet. Instead, she watched him as she gathered up the displayed cards, setting them on top of the rest of the deck. She didn't pick it up to shuffle; she didn't even move to gather the chips in the pot.
"Why are you doing this?" She finally asked. "Your trial wasn't public knowledge. You've been pardoned. With the exception of select institutions, the world at large believes that Bucky Barnes died back in World War Two. You could live a quiet life in suburban America and no one would the wiser. So why join the Avengers? Why agree to basically babysit me?"
"That's three questions," Bucky pointed out, unhelpfully.
"I'll write you an IOU," she retorted. "One less question you have to answer later."
Since she wasn't going to shuffle, Bucky snagged the deck and worked on keeping his hands busy. Even just a tiny split in his focus like that made thinking and talking easier. "Same reason I enlisted, I guess. To stop the bad guys." He scowled at himself, pausing when he caught a momentary gleam from his left hand. "Except, I was one of those bad guys."
"Was, being the operative word there," Taylar reminded before surge of his despair got the better of him. "I've got pretty good instincts when it comes to bad people. Comes hand in hand with knowing what other people feel. You definitely don't strike me as a bad person. Conflicted, a lot. Ashamed, sometimes, but not... malicious."
"Sam doesn't trust me."
Taylar stood from the table, circling around close enough so she could take the deck of cards out of Bucky's hands. "You don't trust yourself. But honestly, I can't blame you for that. I don't much trust myself either right now." Bucky heard the apology in her tone, a familiar path where she apologized yet again for twisting his mind around. "Truth is, I know I'm not here because of what happened to Chestefield. That's just.. a convenient excuse. I'm here because no one knows what to do with me. I'm not supposed to have powers, after all. I didn't get hit with some super-soldier serum; I don't have a fancy suit of armor, or anything. I'm just some spoiled kid from a podunk town."
She was putting the cards and the poker chips away, but Bucky didn't feel like she was shutting down the opportunity to talk as well. Heading for the fridge, Bucky retrieved the last bottles of beer, one for him, and the other he offered to Taylar.
"How long have you had them?" He tested the waters with the question, unsure if she'd indulge him with an answer.
"Uh, which part? The weird hand/fear thing is... I've never done that before, so yeah, pretty new." She twisted the cap off the beer, but didn't take a pull for a long moment. She was looking at the bottle critically, as if she were trying to figure out if it was a good idea. "But I've been able to tell what other people are feeling for as long as I can remember. I used it to navigate my parents divorce. To survive high school. It was going to be an advantage when I became a social worker." She shrugged a little, setting down the untouched beer. "I don't remember a time when I couldn't look at someone and tell if they were having a bad day, or if they were happy."
She continued sorting out and stowing the chips in the little case she'd found them in. There was something unsaid on the end of her thought, though. Something that Bucky didn't think she'd spill without a little encouragement. He thought back on what Sam told him right before he'd been called back to the complex in New York.
"You told Sam you used to be able to shut it off. You can't anymore? What happened?"
The question actually caused her hands to tremble for a moment. Taylar shoved the last few chips into the box, and grabbed the beer bottle by the neck again. Instead of answering right away, she stalked over to the couch and sat down, hard. By the time Bucky followed, she'd drained half the beer in one long desperate pull.
"In one brief instant, half the people in the world died. In the hours that followed, planes fell from the sky; cars crashed, trains derailed, and boats ran aground. Billions of people. Gone." Taylar stared out the window, unfocused, not really seeing the lush forest beyond. "All that fear, all that pain, got driven right through my skull like an ice pick. I was in the middle of taking my psychology final. People were so busy panicking about the ones that disappeared, that no one noticed I was seizing on the floor until it was almost too late."
"Christ," Bucky breathed, as he sank down on the other end of the couch.
She made a sound that was almost a laugh, but fell short of holding actual amusement. "I mean, I recovered, obviously. But, those five years, it was like the world was put on hold. School just didn't seem important anymore. It wasn't bad at first. Half the people in the world, and I guess I got used to a background level of anxiety. But when everyone came back..." Whistling, she tipped her head back against the couch and blinked up at the ceiling. With her free hand, she made a fist, before exploding her fingers outward. "Since then, it's getting progressively harder to ignore. Not to mention.. whatever it was I did to you... which is a whole new wrinkle."
Bucky was quiet as he played over the events of that night all over again. He had the steps all memorized: how she was angry recounting the harassment she'd been subjected to, and how that turned to terror inside a heartbeat. "I can't believe I'm about to say this, but.. we should experiment more with your powers. There's cameras to record it all."
Turning her head to him, she blinked owlishly at the proposition.
Spreading his hands, Bucky flashed her a winning smile. "I'm tough. I can take it."
"That's not what I'm worried about," Taylar countered softly. She sat upright again, tipping the beer back for another pull. "I kinda like you. The last thing I want to do is hurt you."
"Only kinda? I'm hurt."
Her eye roll was exquisite. "Absolutely not. I will figure this out myself. There's no way in hell I'm putting you through that again."
Bucky shrugged, sipping his beer. It was certainly more of a flavor thing than anything else that led to his continued drinking. He still hadn't figured out how to drink fast enough to actually feel buzzed. "The offer stands."
She didn't answer, or comment, instead, draining the last of her own beer before getting up from the couch again. Dropping the empty bottle in the recycling container, Taylar opened the fridge and peered in for a refresh, only to sigh in disappointment.
"When's Sam's next supply run?"
"Another five days or so. You want me to text him for more hooch?" Bucky supplied helpfully.
"No, no, God, no. Text him and tell him not to bring any. I need to find a better way to occupy my time." She glanced up at the digital clock embedded high in the wall. "Tomorrow. I will be more constructive tomorrow. G'night, Bucky."
