An important public service warning - Important, please read (seriously):

The Facts:

- So... sometime around August of this year, right after I'd moved to my new apartment, I got a phone call from buckyrabbit. (He cannot see this post, by the way, and I ask that you please do not alert him to it, until I have a chance to confront him. He does not yet know that I know what I now know. [EDIT: Post now made freely viewable. Share as needed.]

Anyway, so (purportedly), his parents had just thrown him out of his house at the time, he had nowhere to go, and so he called me. I took him into my house without a moments hesitation, and there he stayed with me and Fal for the next several months completely rent free. Often times, Fal and I would even be paying to feed him. In exchange, he did some work around the house, but that's about it. Every now and then, he would offer to try to pay some kind of rent, but me and Fal always insisted to not worry about it so much, and that he should try to get back on his feet first. We were all a cozy, happy little family, or so it seemed.

- Throughout this whole period of time, not frequently, but often enough... various things started to disappear from around the house. Mostly new video games, that I'd thought I'd somehow lost. One day, an entire large glass fishbowl that I had, full of change (about 40 - 50 dollars worth, which I'd just the previous night gotten for laundry), completely just up and disappeared out of the blue. Like seriously, it was right in plain view on the living room table, and the next day, it was just gone. We tore up the whole place looking for it, but to no avail.

The two theories we finally settled on were, 1) the upstairs neighbor kid, kind of shady appearing, must have just walked into our unlocked inside door that day, and just taken it. A disturbing idea, but we had no proof, but... what other explaination could there have been? 2) The second theory, slightly more palatable, and which I personally was rather more hoping to believe, was that Fal, in one of his almost-sleep-walking morning states, had taken it out himself to do laundry that morning, and forgot it, or otherwise lost it somehow.

That had to have been it, right? Because it CERTAINLY could not have been the only remaining final possibility, that being that BUCKY had taken it. No, just not possible... Bucky is our friend, Bucky is, despite his flaws, a trustworthy upstanding guy, and Bucky would never do that to us, his friends who had taken him in off the street and all of that. No, just not possible... Right. And so I still told myself, right up until last night. But, we'll get to that.

Fal, by the way, reported also 'losing / somehow missing 100 dollars out of his wallet, around the same time.

- A day or two later, Bucky suddenly tells me that he has gotten some kind of back payment that the military had owed him, and he wanted to at least give me a little money for letting him stay here. So, he gives me 150 dollars. Coincidentally, just about the correct combined sum of the money that Fal had lost, plus what was in my change jar. Coincidentally.

- One day, I came home from work, went to go get on my computer, and discovered that Bucky had left his email open on there (I let him use my computer during the day).

I know I should have just closed it, but these subject lines were just staring me right in the face, so I couldn't help myself and I checked it out...

Basically, long story short, Bucky had been putting up ads on Craigslist for Weehawken, offering himself up for male prostitution. Yes, seriously. And no, I don't mean just trolling for sex, I mean actually looking to get paid for sex. These emails I saw were some of the responses that he got.

I fessed up to him what I'd seen, and I confronted him about it. He admitted it, and I begged him not to do it, if for no other reason other than his own physical saftety, and those of his friends. He relented and said that he would not, and I figured that was, hopefully, the end of that matter.

I bring this particular point up now, however, because given the huge amount of lying which I now know occured (still getting there), I've no longer any reason to think that he maybe actually didn't go through with all of that after all, and did who knows what with who knows who, and may have caught who knows what? I say all of that because Bucky tries to sleep with absolutely everyone that he knows, at some point or other, and so this is merely a public health warning, at this point. But, I'm getting off track...

- Finally... Bucky 'got word' that he was getting shipped out to Iraq. There were a lot of tearful goodbyes, well-wishings, be safes, and various rounds of going away parties for him. On a certain monday morning before work, he came out to the bus stop with me, and I held him in my arms, as he cried and sobbed about how scared he was. And then, I went to work, and he, supposedly shipped out overseas.

- A day or two later, Malachi our downstairs neighbor (who had been away all weekend unitil this day), came upstairs and reported to us that his apartment had been brokwn into, and xbox 360 had been stolen. Someone had unscrewed the grating covering his basement window, came in through there, and had taken his xbox, all his guitar hero guitars, several of his games (but not all of them), as well as a specialty face plate for it, which Mal had kept hidden away in a very particular place, that, as he said, one would have had to have known what they were looking for. Nothing else was touched.

(Oh yeah, and, incidentally, just a few weeks ago, I finally noticed that one of my large black duffel bags was missing from my room, which I use to take with me to conventions. I know that I had it with me at Furfright, and I know that it made it home, because I remember unpacking it and putting it away. This was also shortly before Bucky left, and now it's gone. It is exactly the perfect size and shape to cary several guitar hero controllers, however...

***

So... It sounds obvious where all this is going, right? And it would be easy to draw certain conclusions, based on all this circumstance and supposition.

Fortunately, I do not need to. And, in fact, even right up until last night, I did not really believe everything that my lying eyes were showing me.

The Confirmation: So, as it turns out, shortly after this past weekend's party at Tigra's place, (which, by the way, Bucky magically showed up to, having been granted a 'special holiday leave' by the Army (he's supposed to be in Iraq now, remember), and, sporting all of his very-long-and-curiously-not-buzz-cut-by-the-Army hair...)

But anyway, what happened was, Bucky got very high, and, while on the phone with another friend of ours CONFESSED TO THE WHOLE THING! Confessed to being AWOL, confessed to stealing all Mal's xbox stuff, confessed to never having gone over to Iraq at all, confessed to stealing my shit. I'm just... beside myself, not knowing how to deal with this betrayal of Bucky's.

Yeah... That whole teary scene, where he was crying on my shoulder at the bus stop, cause he was so scared to go to Iraq? Yeah, right after that, he went and stole Mal's xbox stuff (or, maybe he already had by this point), sold it, and bought himself a bus ticket to Florida, where he has been this whole time up til just recently, no doubt mooching off people down there, and most likely stealing from them too, probably.

***

This is just, the lowest... most pathetic bullshit I can even imagine. The sad thing is, I'm really not even all that surprised. Oh, I'm surprised at it from Bucky alright... But, I'm not surprised that it happened, that people like this actually exist who do this...

I was warned up and down, left and right, from people that came before me, about Titan Rouge (now Jaeger Hyena, or whatever), and yet, for eight months I still refused to believe everying, completely refused to believe, once again, my own lying eyes, despite lie after lie after lie after lie after lie being revealed.... Because, nobody lies *that* big, right? Nobody could be so vile, so completely morally bankrupt as to lie and decieve and cheat and steal *that* big, and that audaciously, right? They *must* be telling the truth! Cause nobody could really ever tell lies that big.

Wrong. They do. They exist. They're out there. I've lived with two of them now, and called them my friend, and cared for them, as they bled me slowly, with a smile on their face, and watched me, without blinking an eye, as I proclaimed right to them the most tortuous twistings of logic, praising their innocense and virtue.

The saddest part of all is... I'm not even all that fuming angry over it all, right now. Titan already got me over the shock that people like this exist at all, I guess.

With Bucky, I'm just... profoundly disappointed. Dissappointed in him for turning out to be such a pathetic waste of space, and dissappointed in myself, for having allowed myself to waste so much time and effort on the undeserving of it.

It's even possible, somehow, in his way, in his twisted moral sense, that bucky thought he was looking out for me, somehow. Stealing from me, in order to pay rent to me, which I didn't even ask for. Hey, it's not stealing, right? Cause 'technically I didn't actually lose any money', I just thought I had. [EDIT: But, I don't have my fucking fishbowl anymore though, do I asshole? If I could get that back, in exchange for never ever having known you, I would make that trade in a heartbeat.] Or 'stealing less from me, than from others', in order to try to get by. Hey, he certainly had completely free access to a lot more of my way expensive shit in my house, that he could have just walked out with, rather than going through all the trouble to break into Mal's apartment to take his stuff.

Yeah, thanks Bucky. Fuck you very much.

How much of an idiot... how much of a fucking idiot must you think that I am, that everyone around you is, that we walk around you, and you do this to us, and all the time we let you, and defend you, and praise you for it? We must seem soo fucking stupid to you...

Maybe we are. Maybe I am. I am soo... collossally fucking stupid, for having ever taken you in out of the rain, after your parents kicked you out. ...if that even really happened, either.

Fuck you. Fuck you for doing this to me. Fuck you, for putting in me the thought now that every fucking time I am ever kind to someone again, that I am just setting myself up to be taken advantage of... to be used... to edge me even a hint towards the automatic emotional reaction that I can never really trust anybody, not really...

You can not have that. I will not let you take that away from me. I will not allow you to make me into that person. So, I'm not going to get screaming mad at you. I don't even want any of my stuff back from you. I don't want any money from you. You simply do not exist. None of this ever happened, it was just some weird several month period I dreamed up. And I never want to see, or have anything to do with you, ever again.

This, I'm sure, will not be completely possible, as it is just a sad fact that our social and event circles will more than likely collide occassionally, at some times in the future. *shrugs* Whatever. In these instances, I'm not going to make a big deal out of you. After this, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of my precious time vendetta-ing on some anti-bucky crusade. You're not fucking worth that effort, or my mental space. Oh, I'll certainly speak up if pressed, or if you try to fuck with me. But, apart from that, as far as I'm concerned, you're a ghost. Just another number in the crowd. You are dead to me.

For everyone else, there you go, there's your warning. Listen to it or not, lest he ever try the same thing with you, either now, or somewhere down the line. It's your problem. Lord knows, I certainly have not listened to such things myself, in the past.

But, I sure wish that I had.

Q.