milliways_bar | (no subject)

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"Go. Go! Take this journal and write down everything you can remember. It will help, I promise you."

"Princess--"

"Do not argue. Find somewhere quiet, where you won't be bothered."

"The kids aren't a bother."

"They are also not quiet."

* * * * * * *

It's been a long time since he's been here, enough that if pressed he couldn't actually say how long. He hadn't exactly meant to come, either, but he'd been thinking about finding somewhere out of the way when he walked out of Shuri's lab, and there's no question that Milliways fits that description better than anywhere else.

About ten minutes later, Bucky Barnes is settled in at one of the quieter booths in the back, the journal open in front of him. (A close observer might notice that each page is subtly embossed with the logo of the Wakandan Design Group.)

He's holding a pen in his right hand and tapping it against the blank page. From time to time he sets down the pen and picks up the cup of coffee waiting beside him instead. A swallow or two later, he repeats the process, swapping cup for pen.

His left hand is immaterial to the whole process, as it's entirely absent. A series of gauze bandages are barely visible under the collar of his shirt, and his left sleeve is neatly pinned shut over where his arm used to be.

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He looks distinctly pleased at that.

"Good work."

He grins back.

"You know, I'm really wanting to ask why it is you don't like Mr. Stark all that much." Aside from that whole airport situation.

"...it's complicated," says the man who murdered Tony Stark's parents as the Winter Soldier.

His left shoulder twitches with subconscious impulse.

"Uh huh. Figured that much from all the 'nobody's telling' part. You don't have to tell me. It's cool. A lot of people don't like him." He shrugs. A lot of people don't like Peter either - stupid bully classmates.

"Like I said, it's complicated. Some of it's his business, and not mine to tell."

He accepts a coffee refill from a passing waitrat and takes a swallow.

"Some of it's that I'm not gonna like anyone who treats my best friend like he did Steve."

He nods. "I get it. He probably won't tell me either."

And he's not the type to push unless there's a really good reason.

"Well, they'll either stay mad forever, or get over it and make up." Hello glowing optimism.\

He's taking another sip of coffee as Peter says this and nearly chokes on it.

"I suppose it's one or the other, yeah."

"Really not a lot of other options." And, yes, Bucky, he saw you try to choke on your coffee. He's polite enough not to call you out though.

"You think they will?" he asks. "Make up, that is." The idea of friends being not-friends for long doesn't sit well with him.

"I don't know," he says, honestly.

"But Steve reached out and gave him a way to get in touch, so..."

Peter almost rolls his eyes. Almost. Not at Bucky. "So, once Mr. Stark stops being stubborn..."

A frown bends his brow again. "Where did you go after the whole shakedown?" Because he's realizing no one told him anything after that. He just went home, went back to school, and basically got ignored until he fell in a lake... got dropped in a lake.

Casually, he flips the journal shut, leaving only the unmarked black cover visible.

"Better we skip that part," Bucky tells him. "They're still looking for me, you know."

Now he feeds Bucky a look. "No one would listen if I told them anyway," he grumbles. "I could literally walk in the front door with you trailing behind me and they wouldn't believe where I found you." Okay, now he's over-exaggerating a little (a lot), but only about the second part. The first part is true.

He raises his eyebrows at Peter.

"Then why do you want to know?"

"Did you think I was asking so I could go tell everyone? I don't even know if you're from the same reality as me." He stops before launching into a whole explanation of the multiverse in a bunch of big scientific explanations that will come rapid fire out of his brain and make Bucky's head spin.

"The stories and stuff have been pretty close so far, but parallel realities can be like that. That's why they're parallel. Maybe in my world you went to Vegas. I don't know." He shrugs. "You don't have to tell me. I just like being in the loop. It's super frustrating trying to do things with half the information being withheld. The scientist part of me wants to understand things and to do that, I need information. But, if you're in hiding - you know, out there and not in here - maybe it's better I don't know. If anything happened to you I'd feel really bad if it turned out to be my fault." Here, Bucky, have all the words.

"I've run into a couple of parallel realities here," he agrees. Like the one where he has a niece - and as he thinks of that, he just barely manages to keep from wincing at what Rikki's reaction might be on seeing him minus an arm.

Oh well. He'll deal with that if it happens.

"I'm in hiding. Out there. And if the people who are looking for me got any idea that you might know something -- they wouldn't be polite about it. I don't want to see that happen."

"Much better. Thank you." He's not being an ass either. This is better. Information and reasoning. This he can handle. Even if he doesn't necessarily like it.

"Okay, enough about all that stuff. I'm not fighting you again because that's just stupid. So, instead, how long have you been coming here?" He motions around to the bar. Bucky's like super relaxed in the various oddities of the place, so he's definitely been here a bit longer than Peter's couple of weeks.

"You're welcome," he says, a little amused.

"Time's kind of messed up for me. But -- Steve first showed me this place back during the war. World War Two."

He reacts very well to people who treat him like a person and not a small child.

"Wow. Really? You've been coming here that long?" Then his face shifts. "Oh - oh man! That's incredible." There's a lot of science going on in the background. "Like, it's a thing that shouldn't be possible, but it totally is if you dig into the theories and move away from what we think we know about the universe. I mean, it's amazing!" Someone should probably stop him before he really get started.

"What theories?"

Peter Parker has the distinction of being one of three scientists that Bucky Barnes is generally willing to listen to, apparently.

(The other two are Shuri and Dejah Thoris.)

"And yeah, that long. On and off. But when talking about how much time has passed here, it's not as much."

He's pretty sure of that, anyway.

"Well, weren't you like... I'll say 'off-line' for some of those 70 years that Cap was frozen?" He sort of shrugs. "So, you could bounce around a bit and time would be really weird for you, I guess."

There are so many possibilities.

"Theories? Oh - um - like theoretical physics that sort of explores the stuff we can't really see or prove - yet." Way oversimplifying, but primarily because he's not that far in his physics studies yet. "There's a multiverse theory. That there's not just one timeline, there's hundreds and thousands of them. Or more. Well, like, scientists where we are haven't proven it, so most people wouldn't believe it exists. Though, even if they did prove it, people still wouldn't believe it unless they actually experienced it. But they haven't been able to disprove it either. So some scientists consider it not really a theory because of that. It's fascinating even before you get here..." he gestures to the surrounding bar area, "...and find out it's real." He stops talking, but mostly so he can take a breath.

"Offline? Sure," he agrees. "Or frozen, that works too. Not the whole time, though."

He frowns a little at Peter's explanation.

"I don't get how people - okay, except here, here's different, obviously - could experience multiple universes when they only live in one."

(The narration mutters something about Marvel realities and throws its hands up.)

"But okay."

"Um - technically, you can't? Like, not at the same time. You'd have to jump between universes. I'm pretty sure if you were in more than one at once, your atoms would just rip apart and you wouldn't exist anymore. But that's way outside what I know of quantum mechanics and super high level physics." That's like PhD territory. Peter's a junior in high school. A genius one, but still.

"See, here, in the bar, I think is sort of a nexus of realities. Like a bunch of them all sort of just link here." He is spitballing hard on this one. Lots of guessing and reasoning. "But somehow without really banging into each other - because, like I said, that'd probably be bad. So, maybe this is a sort of pocket universe that tethers all the other ones together and people sort of drop in here like they went down a big slide through a hole in space."

The mental image makes him grin.

"I guess that's the hole, then," he says, tipping his chin toward the observation window. "Sounds reasonable."

A nod. "Probably. Or that's where you go if your slide misses the bar. Which, if that's a thing, let's hope that doesn't happen."

"You probably wouldn't notice if it did," he points out, dryly.