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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1O4SEra:
I was wrong, I can’t update Full of Grace right now. Here’s a bit I was going to use, but I had forgotten where exactly I left off.
This is not where I left off. So here it is, instead, for now; its eventual destination is probably in FoG’s sequel.
Not Civil War-compliant, precisely.
The Soldier’s face filled the screen, a little blurry. He had sunglasses on, even though it looked dark in the room. “I don’t got anywhere safe to sleep,” he said, hoarse. “Not for a few days now. I got a public service announcement about that: if you don’t sleep for a couple days you start gettin’ delusions. So I got delusions at the moment, somethin’ fierce.”
He sat back a little, and the camera focused a little better. He was wearing about eight layers of clothes, collars all mismatched and protruding, and he hadn’t shaved in like a week, and his hair was loose and stringy and his sunglasses were visibly badly scratched. “So I’m gonna start off by sayin’– like, I don’t sleep at homeless shelters because that would be really dangerous for the other people at the homeless shelters, but sometimes I wind up hanging out with homeless people so I know what’s up, right, and I got a point here. Like, this is a platform a lot of people watch. And I know you’re all in it for the train wreck. I know I’m being hunted. I know somebody’s gonna catch up to me one of these days, and whether it’s Tony Stark or not doesn’t really matter. Whatever.” He waved his hand across the screen, and it glinted metallic.
“My point is. I got this real public platform, and some insider knowledge, so I’m gonna start off by sayin’ like, I keep seein’ people sayin’ we shouldn’t help refugees if we can’t even house our own homeless veterans, and here’s the thing– so fuckin’ do it, okay? Like, I meet a lotta guys out here and fuck if they don’t need help. If you’re gonna toss that shit rhetoric around like, fuckin, do something. Otherwise fuck you, we’re people, not a punchline. We certainly could help homeless veterans a lot more than we do, and we don’t, so that’s not a good excuse to just not help anyone. Unless that was your whole point?”
He sat back a little further, put his hand to his chest, and made as if declaiming to an audience. “America! We’re pieces of shit, why would you expect better from us? Fuck you!”
He sat forward again. “Fuck you, pal. I fuckin’ died for this country and I’m telling you. Fuckin’ do better than that.” He pointed with one finger toward the lens, jabbing viciously. “Do better.” It was the metal hand. He had no gloves no it, just the visible cuffs of three or four shirts coming down over the heel of it.
He pushed the sunglasses back up on his nose and hunched his shoulders in. “So that was my, like, ad. All y’all vultures watching this for the inevitable meltdown, that was the price of admission. So here comes the meltdown: I told you, right, I ain’t slept more than a couple minutes in four, five days, maybe more now. I actually don’t know.” He pushed his hair back with the skin-covered hand, looking down and away a little.
“So I got these delusions now and it’s making me wonder like, maybe.” He broke off and looked at nothing, folding his arms across his chest. “Maybe I’m– not really the Winter Soldier. Maybe those were delusions.”
He glanced over camera-ward, and laughed bitterly. “Could be I dreamed up the whole thing and I’m really just some guy. I mean, sure, I was probably in a war or something. I mean, that’s the thing, I’m not sure what’s real or not, so there’s any amount of things that might not be true about me after all. I met a guy the other day who was dead-set convinced he was Bucky Barnes, and it really got me thinkin’. He protested that he had never been no Winter Soldier nothin’, he’d just, he went away and when he came back nobody believed who he was.”
He glanced over at the camera again. “He was about forty, and black, and I couldn’t tell you where he was from, but it didn’t sound like New York. Maybe Philly. Anyway. Who’s to say he wasn’t, though? He was really convinced, he really believed. He knew weird trivia stuff about Bucky that nobody else would know. Like, really…” he made a face, “sort of weird stuff… that doesn’t totally match up with the historical record. But he knew it, and I’m not makin’ fun of the guy. It was true, was my point. It was totally true to him, and he wasn’t playin’.”
He breathed in very deliberately, and out again, blowing it through his moustache stubble, and then grimaced. “So I don’t– I mean, I been trained in how to kinda power through sleep dep, so I know there’s an element of– well, I sort of know how to blink around the hallucinations, among other things. But this is really pretty deep in my head, here. And on the one hand, it makes me feel pretty sick to think like, I don’t know who I actually am, then. And all these things I got– some of the memories I got are good, and if those aren’t real, well, I mean. That sucks. The Soldier doesn’t have a ton of good memories but he has some pretty crazy-weird ones, and it’s the kind of stuff that like– nobody else has ever seen that, so I guess on the one hand it’d be sad if it wasn’t real, but on the other hand, well, if nobody else has ever seen this, then it’s not real surprising that it’s not real.” He had his eyebrows raised, even if his eyes weren’t really visible behind the scratched lenses, and seemed to be more talking to himself than anything else.
He gestured reasonably with the metal hand. “But then on the other hand I have, like, just this huge sense of relief. Thank fucking God. Because if none of it was real then I didn’t kill those people, I didn’t cause all that trouble, those really awful things didn’t happen to me. None of it was real. I don’t know who I actually am or anything about my past life, I can’t trust anything I think I know– but on the other hand, so much of what I know is so fucking awful that I’m just– glad.”
He uncrossed his arms and rubbed his face, one metal hand and one flesh hand, under the sunglasses. “Thank fucking God,” he said, muffled, “it never really happened. Things like that shouldn’t happen in the world. The shit I seen– it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real.”
He sat with his hands over his face for a moment, then pulled them down and let the sunglasses settle back onto his nose. He looked over at the camera. “Wouldn’t that be better? I know they can’t totally fix schizophrenia, which is what I think causes delusions like that. But there’s shit they can do for it, I wouldn’t be like this forever. And maybe my real life was kinda bad and that’s why I forgot it– but odds are real good that my whole family isn’t dead of old age like the real Bucky’s, so that’d be– something. Maybe they’re awful, maybe they disowned me. Maybe I got kids. I don’t know. It all seems sort of sickening and awful to contemplate, that I got a whole life I don’t know about, but you weigh that next to getting to not be the Winter fucking Soldier, and it kind of makes it all okay. Wouldn’t it be great?”
He was smiling, but sadly. “Of course, though, I’m pretty deep in the grips of delusions, so– and I’m pretty sure it’s not a delusion that I don’t got health insurance, so it ain’t like it changes anything. I’m still on the street and I still don’t got nowhere I can sleep and I’m still real damn convinced they’re after me, literally everyone is after me. But maybe I don’t deserve it, and it’s real nice to think about that for a little while.”
He crossed his arms across his midsection, looking down at the floor so his face was almost totally covered by his hair. “If I was just some guy with problems in his brain,” he said softly. “And I didn’t deserve any of this because I never did anything that terrible. So like. I could get help.” He shook his head a little. “It’s kind of nice to think about. Humor me.”
He looked up to the camera. “So here’s the trippy part,” he said, and held up the metal hand. “I cannot, cannot make myself think this is a normal hand.” He flexed the fingers. “It looks metal to me. It looks all crazy and shiny and like, articulated plates and shit, it looks like a crazy killing machine arm. Even when I’m not thinkin’ about it. I got a camoflage thing I can put on it, make it look normal sometimes, but even then, I like– I know. I can always feel it. No matter what, I can’t forget about it. All the other stuff, it comes and it goes. But I mean– it seems sometimes like other people see it too. It’s so real.”
He flexed the fingers again and laughed. “What does it look like to you? Am I this crazy guy holding up a totally normal-looking hand and like, making you look at it, and I’m crazy so you’re humoring me?” He rubbed the fingers together. They made a clicking noise. “It’s just, it’s so real to me. I know I keep using that phrase. I don’t know what else to call it. I can feel it all the way up. I can feel where it’s hooked into my spine. I swear I can feel it where the metal goes under my skin and my skin is all fucked-up and keloided to shit. It hurts all the time, the skin and the spinal attachments, and the whole thing just– when it’s covered up it feels like static in my teeth, it’s like the whole thing is scar tissue, but I can’t keep it uncovered because it’s too fuckin’ cold.”
He leaned in. “Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe it’s really an old injury and it’s all fucked-up and scarred and whatever, and– my brain just seized onto the delusion that it’s metal instead of dealing with how fucked-up it is.” He made a fist, staring at it. “But it works pretty good and I feel like if it was all that injured it wouldn’t?”
He made a face. “So that’s, I don’t really know what to do with that one. I feel like it’s proof that the delusions are real and I’m really the Winter Soldier.” He lowered the metal fist, and brought his right arm across his body to hold the left elbow from above, tucking it into his garment-bulked body.
“So that’s disappointing,” he said. “Because here’s the thing about the Winter Soldier, he has a healing factor. He has all kinds of shit that means he’s functionally immortal. He’s kind of self-repairing. If I don’t have that stuff, I should really be a lot more careful about stuff like frostbite and gettin’ hit by cars and gettin’ mugged and stuff. Guy pulls a knife on me I really shouldn’t laugh and tell him to just do it if all these memories I got of coughin’ out lung tissue and keepin’ on going are delusions.”
He paused and made a face. “They’re really vivid memories,” he added. “Like, if these are delusions, I have a seriously good imagination, and also a real fucked-up one. Like, fuckin’ really.”
He pondered that a moment, then looked over at the camera again. “But on the other hand,” he said, “I mean, I know I talked about like, wantin’ to off myself, and the reason I don’t is that I got shit to do, but that’s just a real transparent self-serving lie. Because the real reason I don’t is I know it won’t work, I can’t just– die, like that, I’m self-repairing, so there’s just no point. And I also know it’s not worth it yadda yadda but Jesus Christ. Jesus fuckin’ Christ, if I could do it and it would fuckin’ take– “
He stopped, and he was breathing kind of hard and not looking at the camera. “Sorry,” he said after a moment, eyebrows pulling together. “Sorry. Sorry!” He looked over at the camera, and behind the obstruction of the glasses, he looked almost pleading. “I know some of you been thinkin’ about it too and I was tryin’ to be good with solidarity and stuff and so don’t do it. Don’t. Don’t. I mean that. I just– I don’t mean to set you off to thinkin’ about it again. Don’t do that.”
He breathed, for a moment. “I just, fuck.” He rubbed his face again, this time pulling up one of his several shirts to do it. “I won’t test it,” he said finally. “I won’t test the hypothesis. Because if I am the Winter Soldier, it won’t fuckin’ work anyway.” He pulled the shirt back down. “And if I’m not, then I’m just some poor asshole who doesn’t deserve to die without getting some fuckin’ help and remembering who he actually is.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, then leaned forward, reaching out for the camera with the left hand. “The real Bucky Barnes is a homeless veteran who served in– he’s not clear on it, but I think it was Iraq. He’s black and about five-ten, and he sits down by the Union Square subway station and has a navy blue nylon coat and a red hat. He probably has schizophrenia, and he certainly has PTSD, and he doesn’t have anywhere safe to sleep. And he thinks we should help refugees. He’s a real gentle kinda guy, a little sullen because people laugh at him, but if you don’t laugh at him he’s real sweet. He’s probably a better person than you are. So think about that, Tony Stark, and if you got six million dollars to put on a bounty for me you could probably buy Bucky a cup of fuckin’ coffee.”
The screen went black, and a list of veterans’ charities scrolled by.
q: why are you homeless? have you been homeless this whole time?
a: no, I had a few places I was staying, but as the bounty on me keeps going up, I have to keep moving. There was one person I felt safe with but she left, sort of suddenly, and I’m scared to death something bad happened to her, maybe because of me. I have friends who’ve offered me places to say but I mean, either I’m a delusional paranoid schizophrenic which means I don’t even know if I’m violent or dangerous or whatever, or I really am the Winter fucking Soldier and I shouldn’t really be near places where people are.
so it’s not that I have nowhere to stay, but I don’t have anywhere safe. And the heat means I can’t really get gigs anymore, so I can’t work, so I don’t have money, so I can’t stay in motels anymore, so it’s just gotten real complicated lately and I’m over-sharing because I’m real tired. It’s been this bad for a while, I just was better at not talking about it.
and I’m really, really, really scared something happened to my friend. I really cared about her a lot. I got other people I care about and just thinking of something happening to them too is enough to keep me up at night. So even if I had somewhere safe enough I don’t know that I’d sleep.
q: did you know that the Stark Foundation already endows a number of veterans’ charities in the New York metro area?
a: i don’t give a fuck how much guilt money he’s poured into this shit, there’s still an awful lot of guys with no place to go, and you know, it makes it a lot easier for a bum like me to move around unseen when I got so much company. Maybe devote that bounty money to getting those guys somewhere warm to sleep, you’d be able to find me and not have to pay anybody. Spitballing here, but it’s a thought.
And sorry I know it’s not really Tony Stark asking this question but I just got, like an image of him hunched over like all mad at me writing me shit on the Internet. I know you’re a PR lackey, I’m sorry, I just, like I said, I’m a crazy paranoid guy and it gave me a really good laugh break to think that, like, I pissed Stark off calling him out like that.
I don’t think Stark gives a fuck or is in a position to care about what I say but if I’m gonna be delusional anyway, I’m just gonna cherish the delusion that he personally wrote that post, like, all prissy and mad. Because I noticed he upped the bounty again, and i know he does it in response to other people upping their bounties, but I’m just imagining him like “fuck you! SEVEN million for your head in a plastic lunchbox! you’re such a dick! you could never understand how hard it is to be so stinking rich!”
You’re damn right I can’t, I spent the night under a fucking Dumpster lid and I smell so bad right now it makes my eyes water. I know you’ll get me eventually and I hope I smell real bad when you do so you gotta deal with this too, even if just for a minute.
Seven million dollars. Fuck you, pal.
I was wrong, I can’t update Full of Grace right now. Here’s a bit I was going to use, but I had forgotten where exactly I left off.
This is not where I left off. So here it is, instead, for now; its eventual destination is probably in FoG’s sequel.
Not Civil War-compliant, precisely.
The Soldier’s face filled the screen, a little blurry. He had sunglasses on, even though it looked dark in the room. “I don’t got anywhere safe to sleep,” he said, hoarse. “Not for a few days now. I got a public service announcement about that: if you don’t sleep for a couple days you start gettin’ delusions. So I got delusions at the moment, somethin’ fierce.”
He sat back a little, and the camera focused a little better. He was wearing about eight layers of clothes, collars all mismatched and protruding, and he hadn’t shaved in like a week, and his hair was loose and stringy and his sunglasses were visibly badly scratched. “So I’m gonna start off by sayin’– like, I don’t sleep at homeless shelters because that would be really dangerous for the other people at the homeless shelters, but sometimes I wind up hanging out with homeless people so I know what’s up, right, and I got a point here. Like, this is a platform a lot of people watch. And I know you’re all in it for the train wreck. I know I’m being hunted. I know somebody’s gonna catch up to me one of these days, and whether it’s Tony Stark or not doesn’t really matter. Whatever.” He waved his hand across the screen, and it glinted metallic.
“My point is. I got this real public platform, and some insider knowledge, so I’m gonna start off by sayin’ like, I keep seein’ people sayin’ we shouldn’t help refugees if we can’t even house our own homeless veterans, and here’s the thing– so fuckin’ do it, okay? Like, I meet a lotta guys out here and fuck if they don’t need help. If you’re gonna toss that shit rhetoric around like, fuckin, do something. Otherwise fuck you, we’re people, not a punchline. We certainly could help homeless veterans a lot more than we do, and we don’t, so that’s not a good excuse to just not help anyone. Unless that was your whole point?”
He sat back a little further, put his hand to his chest, and made as if declaiming to an audience. “America! We’re pieces of shit, why would you expect better from us? Fuck you!”
He sat forward again. “Fuck you, pal. I fuckin’ died for this country and I’m telling you. Fuckin’ do better than that.” He pointed with one finger toward the lens, jabbing viciously. “Do better.” It was the metal hand. He had no gloves no it, just the visible cuffs of three or four shirts coming down over the heel of it.
He pushed the sunglasses back up on his nose and hunched his shoulders in. “So that was my, like, ad. All y’all vultures watching this for the inevitable meltdown, that was the price of admission. So here comes the meltdown: I told you, right, I ain’t slept more than a couple minutes in four, five days, maybe more now. I actually don’t know.” He pushed his hair back with the skin-covered hand, looking down and away a little.
“So I got these delusions now and it’s making me wonder like, maybe.” He broke off and looked at nothing, folding his arms across his chest. “Maybe I’m– not really the Winter Soldier. Maybe those were delusions.”
He glanced over camera-ward, and laughed bitterly. “Could be I dreamed up the whole thing and I’m really just some guy. I mean, sure, I was probably in a war or something. I mean, that’s the thing, I’m not sure what’s real or not, so there’s any amount of things that might not be true about me after all. I met a guy the other day who was dead-set convinced he was Bucky Barnes, and it really got me thinkin’. He protested that he had never been no Winter Soldier nothin’, he’d just, he went away and when he came back nobody believed who he was.”
He glanced over at the camera again. “He was about forty, and black, and I couldn’t tell you where he was from, but it didn’t sound like New York. Maybe Philly. Anyway. Who’s to say he wasn’t, though? He was really convinced, he really believed. He knew weird trivia stuff about Bucky that nobody else would know. Like, really…” he made a face, “sort of weird stuff… that doesn’t totally match up with the historical record. But he knew it, and I’m not makin’ fun of the guy. It was true, was my point. It was totally true to him, and he wasn’t playin’.”
He breathed in very deliberately, and out again, blowing it through his moustache stubble, and then grimaced. “So I don’t– I mean, I been trained in how to kinda power through sleep dep, so I know there’s an element of– well, I sort of know how to blink around the hallucinations, among other things. But this is really pretty deep in my head, here. And on the one hand, it makes me feel pretty sick to think like, I don’t know who I actually am, then. And all these things I got– some of the memories I got are good, and if those aren’t real, well, I mean. That sucks. The Soldier doesn’t have a ton of good memories but he has some pretty crazy-weird ones, and it’s the kind of stuff that like– nobody else has ever seen that, so I guess on the one hand it’d be sad if it wasn’t real, but on the other hand, well, if nobody else has ever seen this, then it’s not real surprising that it’s not real.” He had his eyebrows raised, even if his eyes weren’t really visible behind the scratched lenses, and seemed to be more talking to himself than anything else.
He gestured reasonably with the metal hand. “But then on the other hand I have, like, just this huge sense of relief. Thank fucking God. Because if none of it was real then I didn’t kill those people, I didn’t cause all that trouble, those really awful things didn’t happen to me. None of it was real. I don’t know who I actually am or anything about my past life, I can’t trust anything I think I know– but on the other hand, so much of what I know is so fucking awful that I’m just– glad.”
He uncrossed his arms and rubbed his face, one metal hand and one flesh hand, under the sunglasses. “Thank fucking God,” he said, muffled, “it never really happened. Things like that shouldn’t happen in the world. The shit I seen– it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real.”
He sat with his hands over his face for a moment, then pulled them down and let the sunglasses settle back onto his nose. He looked over at the camera. “Wouldn’t that be better? I know they can’t totally fix schizophrenia, which is what I think causes delusions like that. But there’s shit they can do for it, I wouldn’t be like this forever. And maybe my real life was kinda bad and that’s why I forgot it– but odds are real good that my whole family isn’t dead of old age like the real Bucky’s, so that’d be– something. Maybe they’re awful, maybe they disowned me. Maybe I got kids. I don’t know. It all seems sort of sickening and awful to contemplate, that I got a whole life I don’t know about, but you weigh that next to getting to not be the Winter fucking Soldier, and it kind of makes it all okay. Wouldn’t it be great?”
He was smiling, but sadly. “Of course, though, I’m pretty deep in the grips of delusions, so– and I’m pretty sure it’s not a delusion that I don’t got health insurance, so it ain’t like it changes anything. I’m still on the street and I still don’t got nowhere I can sleep and I’m still real damn convinced they’re after me, literally everyone is after me. But maybe I don’t deserve it, and it’s real nice to think about that for a little while.”
He crossed his arms across his midsection, looking down at the floor so his face was almost totally covered by his hair. “If I was just some guy with problems in his brain,” he said softly. “And I didn’t deserve any of this because I never did anything that terrible. So like. I could get help.” He shook his head a little. “It’s kind of nice to think about. Humor me.”
He looked up to the camera. “So here’s the trippy part,” he said, and held up the metal hand. “I cannot, cannot make myself think this is a normal hand.” He flexed the fingers. “It looks metal to me. It looks all crazy and shiny and like, articulated plates and shit, it looks like a crazy killing machine arm. Even when I’m not thinkin’ about it. I got a camoflage thing I can put on it, make it look normal sometimes, but even then, I like– I know. I can always feel it. No matter what, I can’t forget about it. All the other stuff, it comes and it goes. But I mean– it seems sometimes like other people see it too. It’s so real.”
He flexed the fingers again and laughed. “What does it look like to you? Am I this crazy guy holding up a totally normal-looking hand and like, making you look at it, and I’m crazy so you’re humoring me?” He rubbed the fingers together. They made a clicking noise. “It’s just, it’s so real to me. I know I keep using that phrase. I don’t know what else to call it. I can feel it all the way up. I can feel where it’s hooked into my spine. I swear I can feel it where the metal goes under my skin and my skin is all fucked-up and keloided to shit. It hurts all the time, the skin and the spinal attachments, and the whole thing just– when it’s covered up it feels like static in my teeth, it’s like the whole thing is scar tissue, but I can’t keep it uncovered because it’s too fuckin’ cold.”
He leaned in. “Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe it’s really an old injury and it’s all fucked-up and scarred and whatever, and– my brain just seized onto the delusion that it’s metal instead of dealing with how fucked-up it is.” He made a fist, staring at it. “But it works pretty good and I feel like if it was all that injured it wouldn’t?”
He made a face. “So that’s, I don’t really know what to do with that one. I feel like it’s proof that the delusions are real and I’m really the Winter Soldier.” He lowered the metal fist, and brought his right arm across his body to hold the left elbow from above, tucking it into his garment-bulked body.
“So that’s disappointing,” he said. “Because here’s the thing about the Winter Soldier, he has a healing factor. He has all kinds of shit that means he’s functionally immortal. He’s kind of self-repairing. If I don’t have that stuff, I should really be a lot more careful about stuff like frostbite and gettin’ hit by cars and gettin’ mugged and stuff. Guy pulls a knife on me I really shouldn’t laugh and tell him to just do it if all these memories I got of coughin’ out lung tissue and keepin’ on going are delusions.”
He paused and made a face. “They’re really vivid memories,” he added. “Like, if these are delusions, I have a seriously good imagination, and also a real fucked-up one. Like, fuckin’ really.”
He pondered that a moment, then looked over at the camera again. “But on the other hand,” he said, “I mean, I know I talked about like, wantin’ to off myself, and the reason I don’t is that I got shit to do, but that’s just a real transparent self-serving lie. Because the real reason I don’t is I know it won’t work, I can’t just– die, like that, I’m self-repairing, so there’s just no point. And I also know it’s not worth it yadda yadda but Jesus Christ. Jesus fuckin’ Christ, if I could do it and it would fuckin’ take– “
He stopped, and he was breathing kind of hard and not looking at the camera. “Sorry,” he said after a moment, eyebrows pulling together. “Sorry. Sorry!” He looked over at the camera, and behind the obstruction of the glasses, he looked almost pleading. “I know some of you been thinkin’ about it too and I was tryin’ to be good with solidarity and stuff and so don’t do it. Don’t. Don’t. I mean that. I just– I don’t mean to set you off to thinkin’ about it again. Don’t do that.”
He breathed, for a moment. “I just, fuck.” He rubbed his face again, this time pulling up one of his several shirts to do it. “I won’t test it,” he said finally. “I won’t test the hypothesis. Because if I am the Winter Soldier, it won’t fuckin’ work anyway.” He pulled the shirt back down. “And if I’m not, then I’m just some poor asshole who doesn’t deserve to die without getting some fuckin’ help and remembering who he actually is.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, then leaned forward, reaching out for the camera with the left hand. “The real Bucky Barnes is a homeless veteran who served in– he’s not clear on it, but I think it was Iraq. He’s black and about five-ten, and he sits down by the Union Square subway station and has a navy blue nylon coat and a red hat. He probably has schizophrenia, and he certainly has PTSD, and he doesn’t have anywhere safe to sleep. And he thinks we should help refugees. He’s a real gentle kinda guy, a little sullen because people laugh at him, but if you don’t laugh at him he’s real sweet. He’s probably a better person than you are. So think about that, Tony Stark, and if you got six million dollars to put on a bounty for me you could probably buy Bucky a cup of fuckin’ coffee.”
The screen went black, and a list of veterans’ charities scrolled by.
q: why are you homeless? have you been homeless this whole time?
a: no, I had a few places I was staying, but as the bounty on me keeps going up, I have to keep moving. There was one person I felt safe with but she left, sort of suddenly, and I’m scared to death something bad happened to her, maybe because of me. I have friends who’ve offered me places to say but I mean, either I’m a delusional paranoid schizophrenic which means I don’t even know if I’m violent or dangerous or whatever, or I really am the Winter fucking Soldier and I shouldn’t really be near places where people are.
so it’s not that I have nowhere to stay, but I don’t have anywhere safe. And the heat means I can’t really get gigs anymore, so I can’t work, so I don’t have money, so I can’t stay in motels anymore, so it’s just gotten real complicated lately and I’m over-sharing because I’m real tired. It’s been this bad for a while, I just was better at not talking about it.
and I’m really, really, really scared something happened to my friend. I really cared about her a lot. I got other people I care about and just thinking of something happening to them too is enough to keep me up at night. So even if I had somewhere safe enough I don’t know that I’d sleep.
q: did you know that the Stark Foundation already endows a number of veterans’ charities in the New York metro area?
a: i don’t give a fuck how much guilt money he’s poured into this shit, there’s still an awful lot of guys with no place to go, and you know, it makes it a lot easier for a bum like me to move around unseen when I got so much company. Maybe devote that bounty money to getting those guys somewhere warm to sleep, you’d be able to find me and not have to pay anybody. Spitballing here, but it’s a thought.
And sorry I know it’s not really Tony Stark asking this question but I just got, like an image of him hunched over like all mad at me writing me shit on the Internet. I know you’re a PR lackey, I’m sorry, I just, like I said, I’m a crazy paranoid guy and it gave me a really good laugh break to think that, like, I pissed Stark off calling him out like that.
I don’t think Stark gives a fuck or is in a position to care about what I say but if I’m gonna be delusional anyway, I’m just gonna cherish the delusion that he personally wrote that post, like, all prissy and mad. Because I noticed he upped the bounty again, and i know he does it in response to other people upping their bounties, but I’m just imagining him like “fuck you! SEVEN million for your head in a plastic lunchbox! you’re such a dick! you could never understand how hard it is to be so stinking rich!”
You’re damn right I can’t, I spent the night under a fucking Dumpster lid and I smell so bad right now it makes my eyes water. I know you’ll get me eventually and I hope I smell real bad when you do so you gotta deal with this too, even if just for a minute.
Seven million dollars. Fuck you, pal.
