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[b]Washington D.C.
March 26th, 2005
17:27pm[/b]

It was wrong. He was wrong. That [i]thing[/i] was not Steve Rogers. Bucky knew that and yet he felt compelled to sit down. Without a word of protest he followed after Steve and sat down when he gestured to him to do so. On the table was a slab of meat that resembled a half-eaten heart and given the chunks of flesh between Steve’s teeth it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out who’d been eating it. The elderly man picked up his utensils with surgical care and began to cut a small piece of the heart free. Once he had managed to do so he offered the piece to Bucky and smiled at him weakly. Barnes shook his head and Steve shrugged his shoulders and slid his teeth along his fork until the meat was in his mouth. He chewed on it greedily for a few moments, moaning euphorically every other second, and then looked up at Bucky as if he’d forgotten he was there.

"That uniform does not belong to you," Steve smiled mischievously at Bucky from across the table. "Did your mother never teach you that it was unkind to take things that don't belong to you?"

It was Steve's voice but the speaking pattern was nothing like Bucky had remembered. With each second in his presence it became clearer to him that the thing opposite him was not his friend. Those eyes though, the way they shone in the light and looked as if they saw straight into your soul, Bucky found it damn near impossible to believe it [i]wasn't[/i] him. He steeled himself and tried to force some inquisitorial statement from his lips but something about the way the man looked at him forced him to confess his deepest, darkest thoughts.

When Bucky spoke it was more blubber than the bluster he had in mind. "My mother died when I was a child."

“Of course she did. That would explain why your manners are so lacking,” Steve mumbled from behind the napkin he wiped his mouth with. His eyes darted towards Bucky’s arms that were resting atop the edge of the table. “Elbows.”

Barnes pulled his elbows away from it and placed them in his lab obediently. “Sorry about that.”

“You are forgiven,” Steve said with a polite smie. “It’s not often that I have dinner guests. Not willing ones at least. I am afraid it’s been some time since I last entertained so I do hope you’ll be as forthcoming with your forgiveness if the locale leaves something to be desired. I did not have much time to prepare. Much the opposite in fact. You see, I could feel it, I could feel the madness. It had been too long since I last fed and it had begun to fetter my brain until I could think of nothing other than doing harm to my fellow man. That simply wouldn't do, would it?”

Bucky's hands twitched a little as the man spoke. He tried his best to calm them but his body seemed to be fighting against whatever hold the thing posing as Steve had over him. Every time he opened his mouth to speak it seemed to erode his control over Bucky and now Bucky's body seemed to have taken up the battle where his mind had faltered. Barnes spotted those piercing blue eyes lock on his hands and he held them against one another tightly to quell the twitching so as not to arouse his suspicion any further.

"Yes," Bucky smiled politely as the old man looked back at him, visibly unconvinced. "I understand."

Steve shook his head gently. "You are a resilient one, Captain, it is not often that I encounter men like you. Even now you try to suppress it but you must not. You see, were I not to feed, were I to suppress my urges, I would succumb to the madness and become something [i]truly[/i] monstrous. What would you become if you failed to suppress your most base impulses, I wonder? Should we investigate what it is you fear?"

In the blink of an eye "Steve Rogers" became something else. Something Bucky at once recognised intuitively and felt completely detached from. It was [i]him[/i]. There was something different about him though, a dullness to his eyes that made him deeply uncomfortable. His hair was long and shaggy and a black domino mask rested atop his face. His doppelgänger reached for a glass of wine in front of him and drank from it with a contented sigh before looking up at Bucky.

To his surprise a thick Russian accent left his mouth. "You are [i]full[/i] of surprises."

Bucky searched his memory in an attempt to recall some clue as to why the doppelgänger might have taken that form but found it blank. He had nothing. Whatever this thing was, whatever it was trying to do, it had seemingly fired a blank. Seeing Steve sat before him had unsettled him so much he had succumbed to the hold of the being in front of him. This bizarro impression of him had broken it. The shaggy hair and domino mask slithered away and the man's true face was finally revealed.

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He was horrific. Impossibly skinny with blemished, jaundiced skin and a half dozen ginger rags atop his greasy scalp. His teeth were jagged, yellowed points that looked as if they were barely cling to his rotten gums. Bucky noticed a flash of recognition across the man's eyes as if he noticed that Bucky had broken from his hold. He lunged towards Barnes with his fork and attempted to stick him in the neck. Bucky parried it away and twisted one of the man's arms until it snapped in two like a twig. He howled in pain and suddenly the man's hostages burst into life, as if freed of his hold too, and began to flee to the exits.

There was a crackle of energy as Bucky's arc shield burst into life. He took a glance towards the diners that sat dead, their skin flayed and their rib cages burst open, as he approached the hideous man with a grimace. Bucky rained punch after punch down on the man until the yellow pins in his mouth were cracked and broken. The man hacked up blood in Bucky's face and used his last free arm to scratch at the exposed mouth of his cowl. Bucky broke that arm as easily as the first before beating the man in the face with his shield until he slipped out of consciousness.

He stood, breathing heavily, and glanced down at the beaten mess that had taken once take his and Steve's forms. He lifted him from the ground and threw him through the window of the restaurant onto the street outside. Bucky stepped out of the broken window after him and glanced towards the end of the block towards the police cordon. The crowd had swelled, there were more patrol cars than there'd been when he'd gone in, and everywhere Bucky looked a phone was brandished in his direction.

Bucky Barnes might have been dead as far as the world was concerned but they would [i]all[/i] know that Captain America was alive after tonight.