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.”
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