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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"Okay," he says, unruffled, and snags a piece of the gauze. "Give me a second."

He brushes it over the table, using it to collect the shards of shattered glass in a single spot on the opposite side.

"There. You can put it in that clear spot."

As if hanging by invisible puppet-strings, the tray follows the tilt of her head and settles on the table in the spot indicated.

"You don't have to clean up. I would have." When might have been the better question about that, but Sinthia glances over the contents of the tray and frowns a little. "It doesn't really hurt. You know that." He, she feels fairly certain, shares her tolerance for pain. It's a somewhat skewed scale.

He shrugs, and sets the replacement glass in front of her.

"Sure. Doesn't mean you don't deserve to have it be taken care of."

"Doesn't it?" she echoes, very obviously unsure of this concept and not yet picking up the voka bottle again.

"No one ever has."

"No. It doesn't."

He picks up another piece of gauze and holds it up so she can see it.

"Why don't you let me be the first?"

Slowly, very, very slowly, Sinthia breaks from the utter stone-stillness she'd been holding as they spoke. She isn't at all sure of his motivations, nor of what this will end with, but her fingertips twitch as she studies him from the way he holds up the gauze piece to the way he so calmly meets her eyes, like he has nothing to fear from her.

How he has nothing to fear from her she does not understand; he got away from what they were. Why would he want to help someone who hasn't yet?

Ever so slowly she turns her hands palms-up, exposing the dozens of little cuts from the glass, some with the shards still embedded.

"Should've asked for tweezers, too," he mutters, studying her hands. "I don't suppose you can levitate those pieces out?"

Carefully, he starts to dampen the gauze in the warm water.

Sinthia hums her assent to that lightly, head nodding, though she's still tightly-wound like a spring under tension. The glass bits tug on their way out, but one by one they do pull themselves free, landing ont he table with somewhat morbid little tinkling sounds.

It's hardly the first time, or the most painful, time she's yanked something out of herself where it didn't need to be. At least the glass isn't stopping worse bleeding, though each of the tiny cuts is now weeping a droplet or three of blood.

"Is it strange, not having the arm anymore?"

"Yeah. It is."

He finishes wetting the gauze, manages to approximate wringing it out over the bowl by squeezing it with his fingers, and shakes it until it's not crumpled any more.

"I'll get used to it eventually. Hold still, okay? I'm going to wash these out."

He moves to dab at her cuts with the cloth, gently.

She is still for quite a while, looking not at her hands or his but the table between them with a pinched brow as she holds her hands steady, gently cupped as if imitating a bowl. It's not painful to watch her blood trickle out, it only tickles like a tiny bug crawling over her skin. It's difficult for her to get words started, but once she does and the first sound from her own lips almost startles her, she keeps going.

"I miss...knowing what to do," Sinthia manages eventually. "Not what it was. But knowing that I wasn't just wrong. I only remember bits and pieces from before Sarajevo. Nothing I can tell anyone."

"Because they wouldn't understand? Or because there's not enough there?"

He finishes cleaning one hand and starts on the other with the same gentle care, changing pieces of gauze when necessary.

She shrugs. "Both. How do you tell someone you know war history so well because you remember it?" No easy answers there.

"I don't remember more than...a year. Maybe two, since the end of the war."

"Around here, I've done it just like that," he informs her.

"If there's more there, it may come back to you, the further away you get from them."

"I tried," she says softly. "But people were just scared when I told them."

She remembers very well how Klaus looked at her, and Emcee as well, how he turned and ran up the stairway.

"What came back for you? What do you remember?"

"Did you tell them just that you were in the war, or what?"

He suspects he knows the answer, but it's probably better to ask.

"Most of it. Eventually. A lot of things are still jumbled up, though."

"No, they asked where I was born, where I grew up. I told them."

She isn't sure what else she was supposed to have said.

He can see how that might not have gone over well, to someone familiar with the war.

"Uh-huh," he murmurs, as he finishes with her other hand. "Do you know where they were from?"

He studies her hands critically, then looks up at her. "I don't think any of these need bandages."

Yeah. It was that kind of conversation.

"Berlin," she says lightly, far more so than she feels recollecting that. Sinthia just glances down at her hands and back up to Bucky, flexing her fingers absently. "I don't like to lie to people here."

"Understandable." Both the reaction and her preference, in fact. His voice is very quiet when he adds,

"HYDRA casts a long shadow."

"I'm not one of them," she says, vehement for all that it's soft-spoken, nearly whispered. "I'm not HYDRA."

She got out. She left. She's not going back.

"I know."

Carefully, deliberately, he moves to slip his hand under one of hers, to let it rest against his palm without aggravating any of the cuts -- if she'll allow.

"I know, Sinthia."

She jerks--in surprise, not in pain--when he slips his hand beneath hers, and she glances up to his face, holding the tenuous gaze without breathing until she can feel her lungs burn. The wide-eyed expression she wears is one entirely too many people have confused for helpless and scared like a baby fawn.

But she's calculating outcomes, weighing consequences of her courses of action; her heartbeat is racing in her chest even though her breathing is still steady and shallow. What would she do if he moved? What will she do, either way?

"How do you know?"

"You told me."

Steady and sure. He doesn't move.

"You got out. I know what that's like, when everything changes because of it."

Sure, she could be lying. But he'd rather risk that, than run the risk of distrusting and hurting someone who's finally escaped the same kind of hell he'd been in.

She lets out a shaky breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding while he spoke, and her fingers on top of his twitch, as if itching to curl around something soft, even unfamiliar, whatever is offered.

Any port in a storm.

"I don't remember anything before the war. Before Johann and Zola and...everything."

"Nothing before, only a couple of years after," he remembers. His hand is warm against her skin, and somehow, he's not sure how, he manages not to jerk at the mention of Zola's name.

(Steve was always more focused on Schmidt, but it's Zola who haunts his own nightmares.)

"Not a lot of time in between."