#hepl

Scandalous full sketch down here 👇

bear with me for a minute, i promise i'm going somewhere (?) with this.

look at that. look at that sad boy. the dishevelled appearance. his tie is missing, his shirt is partly unbuttoned, his hair is coming loose from its neat side part, like he's been running his fingers through it.

his jacket is unbuttoned too, and his neckline is currently plunging so low that you can literally see his undershirt.

this boy. deliberately sitting apart from the rest of the newly-formed team, and nursing a drink like it's all he can do not to fall apart.

and all of it in glorious, painful contrast with primly dressed and polished steve, the golden boy, the fresh-faced hero, out there winning the hearts of men and women alike.

yeah, bucky's really Going Through It, isn't he. and we know he's got plenty of great reasons why.

but why stop there? let's play a little game. let's play How Screwed Is Bucky.

'cause when you watch this scene, you definitely get the feeling that bucky's in an altered state, emotionally speaking. and i can't help but wonder. is bucky "just" upset, or is he also somewhat inebriated here?

we don't even know for sure that he CAN get drunk, at this point in time. we do know that bucky has already been injected with zola's serum, which isn't exactly the same as erskine's, although we don't know to what degree they differ. with the sparse info provided by canon, we can only guess at how this version of the serum might interfere with bucky's metabolism.

which leaves us with two main possible scenarios.

OPTION 1:

this bucky is at least somewhat tipsy. he's had a few rounds by now, and it's affecting him. and how could we blame him for trying to drown his sorrows?

he's dealing with so many warring emotions. he's struggling to cope with the aftermath of captivity and torture; he already knows he's going to march right back to the front line (because he knows steve, and he knows that steve is gonna want to stay and fight, and that means that bucky is gonna stay and fight too, that's not even a question), and he's scared for his own life, and for steve's life, and it's all of it too much, too soon. he's trying to drown out all this noise in his brain, and this

is him in the process of getting supremely wasted, because right now??? it's all he can do to just try and stay afloat, smile for steve and act like everything's just swell, no bucky's not secretly dying inside, no sir.

OPTION 2:

all of the above, EXCEPT. except that bucky's just finding out, right now, live in technicolor, that he can't get drunk. he's been at it for a while now, yet nothing is really happening. so this

is him being 100% stone-cold sober (!!!!), and getting progressively more desperate about it (and disturbed, and scared), because tonight of all nights he needs to dull his senses somehow, but apparently he. just. can't.

and steve is there looking like a dream, like an angel, like everything good and fair in the world, eager to make a difference, to do what's right, to throw himself into this war, and there's a woman throwing herself at steve and strutting in like she owns him, and bucky can't do anything to stop any of this, and - he can't, he just can't, he can't do this right now. but it turns out that whatever they did to him back in that factory, made it so that he can't even get drunk about it. and that's horrifying for a different reason altogether.

and that's it, that's the post. tbh i'm just trying to decide which scenario hurts me the most :D *screams in anguish*

I guess I'll turn my back towards the Sun...