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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"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."

It takes a long time, and a dozen shaky breaths, for her fingers to relax around his, softening muscle by muscle. She practically has to think about doing so manually. It's so strange to have one hand held hostage voluntarily, and to not only not mind it but find the touch half-soothing.

"You remember them both," she says, and it's not a question. "My...Johann always thought Zola was so timid. He didn't see the isolation wards in the bases."

Sinthia did.

"I do," he confirms. Sinthia is slowly curling her fingers around his, wary as a frightened bird. He's careful to keep still, to let her hold on to him rather than the other way around, even as he makes a sound of disgust.

"Zola was a coward when it came to his own skin. Any of his experiments - that was a different story."

Her fingers curl like an involuntary clench and abruptly, Sinthia looks anywhere but at Bucky's face.

The tabletop. The weave of his shirt fabric, the motion of a rat behind him, anything.

"I want to remember more. I can see bits and pieces of faces. The machines, the...they glowed," she finishes, as if scared to admit that she knows what she was born into.

It takes him a moment to realize what she's asking; what he thinks she's asking, anyway. Very gently, with a light touch and deliberate care, Bucky strokes his thumb over her fingers in an attempt to soothe.

"They glowed," he confirms, in a low voice. "The ones on the battlefield, when my unit came up against them? They glowed, and flashed beams of light instead of bullets, and then someone was gone, turned into nothing but dust just like that. It was a disaster. It was a rout. They rounded up those of us who survived and brought us in, to the factory."

A short silence falls.

"The one in the lab glowed, too. Especially when Zola hit me with a shot from it."

"The one in the lab wasn't designed to kill," she said absently, shaking her head. "Just to hurt. It was easier to get the soliers to talk if they were hurt and scared."

Zola had learned early on the distinct advantages of pain and fear when used simultaneously. So had Sinthia.

"Where you live now..." Which is not with HYDRA, "They're helping you? Do they know?"

"Well, it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, so there's that," he says, grimly. "He never got anything out of me but name, rank, and serial number, though."

It had done more than hurt in his case, activating the changes at the cellular level.

"Where I am now? Yeah, they are. And they know. They know all of it."

Bucky had been one of the few exposed to those cellular changes that survived the exposure.

She sighs. "I know. I remember them telling me." She doesn't remember all of them, not entirely. Barnes, James Buchanan, Sergeant, 32557038 is not one of the ones she remembers, for better or worse. Perhaps both.

"They don't think you're...evil? Or broken?"

"Not evil," he confirms. "As for broken..."

He shrugs.

"Not beyond recovering."

He's not sure he entirely agrees with all of it, but T'Challa and Shuri's promise to free his mind of HYDRA's embedded controls is something he holds on to every day.

"You remember more than I do," she says. "Maybe it's working."

Unsaid goes her addendum that she's not sure what if anything would work on her, because she's not sure what was done differently to her.

"The bar gave me a plant. A flower. She said it would help." Knowing what said flower is mildly worries Sinthia, but she's kept it. For now.

"So far," he points out. "It's not a race."

"A plant? Like -- in a pot?" He thinks of the goats, and of Joe's cactus, and gets a glimmer of understanding. "To take care of?"

"A terrarium," she corrects, shaking her head. She mimes with her hands slowly to approximate the size, and though she is trying not to project, the image of a glass bell jar containing a slender stalk of foxglove in moss materializes.

"She said it would be somthing to do. To keep it alive."

He studies the projection and nods.

"Not a bad idea."

She looks away and the projection breaks, fading away as her brow creases. "It wasn't my idea," she says. "But it's not dead yet." She has actually been taking care of it, though she isn't sure exactly why; but this little delicate plant is something to worry about and check on, even as mechanically as she does it.

There's a checklist she uses. It helps.

"It's poisonous. The flower. Digitalis purpurea."

The corner of his mouth quirks up in a small smile.

"I know that name. Digitalis. It's also used for heart medicine."

There was a time, back before the serum, when Bucky Barnes was extremely well informed about any and all possible treatments for Steve Rogers' many, many medical conditions.

She nods. "It is. It slows the heartbeat. Bradycardia."

But it's also very pretty and very delicate. She likes it. "She also gave me a book on poisonous flowers."