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[thelivinglegend]

Mundane, you got a minute?

I might be wrong, but didn't you say you didn't have any intentions of putting me in one of these games?

I'm not bucking orders, here. You want me to go, I'll go, no arguments here. But is there a particular reason why you chose this game?

No, I understand the choice in canon point, as you put it. I get it. If I'm going to end up waking up in a new world anyway, that does seem the obvious choice.

However, it doesn't help matters much if my actual past, Bucky and the squad and Peggy, is going to be a set of alternate memories. Just a mirror of a past you made up just for this game. Dealing with one past where I lost everything isn't good enough, I've got to have two, and not know for sure which one is the real one?

...

Ma'am, I'm starting to get the impression you just really don't like me.

Comments

[thelivinglegend]

What would be without them, right?

[ There's a little twitch at the corner of his lips, dryly amused, before Bruce clarifies.

That smile dies. Just like that. ]

Right...I meant in general. Not we as in...

[ He knows he'll be alone. That stinks, no getting around it. But there's nothing that can be done about that, right? ]

Anyway, I don't think it's a shift in personality, so much. That's why our lives are meant to be so similar to one another, I think, so we end up the same people at the end of it. I might not be Captain America anymore, but a change in title isn't going to change who I am.

[hulkish]

[ bruce feels like an ass when he watches steve's face fall, but he's a realist. has to be.]

Right, you're right, it's less personality based on traits, more personality based on experience and memory. [ as always, the theoretical sparks fascination in bruce. ]

[ steve's earnestness makes him smile. ] Yeah, you'll be fine. Your brain-- [ he stops himself right before saying 'can handle an extraordinary amount of trauma' ] --is highly adaptable. We barely know anything about its functions, even now.

[thelivinglegend]

Oh, I'm sure they'll want their chance to poke and prod at me once I'm out of the ice.

[ So dry. Everyone's interested in him for the parts. So long as they don't plan on keeping him in a lab, he'll be fine with it. ]

A lot of the way this world seems to function relies on a person's mind, so let's hope so.

[hulkish]

If you keep talking about yourself like a lab rat, Steve, they'll keep treating you like one. [ there's a note of concern in bruce's voice. he doesn't like hearing steve talk so casually about being experimented on. ] And who knows what kind of ethical code they have in this place.

[thelivinglegend]

[ Too late, he realizes that might have been a little thoughtless of him to say. He signed up for this, knew the sort of focus that would be put on him, even if he didn't know then exactly how much. Bruce didn't have that luxury. ]

The value of ethics sort of varies, depending on where you go. The Ark's big enough to be its own self-sustaining little world. Some places are more civilized than others. Where I end up, I don't think there's too great a danger of that.

[ They'd much rather use him for propaganda. What is his life, sometimes. ]