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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"Well, yes," he agrees. "But why d'you say that?"

"Since when is gardening, indoors, a punishment?" Wei Ying scoffs. "Most of those things are just jobs. They're not even difficult!"

"You're not wrong, but--"

He shrugs, pinned sleeve shifting slightly with the movement.

"-- I guess if you're coming here looking for a place to relax, being made to work's punishment enough."

His expression flattens a little as he adds,

"Plus the cells, for anything more serious. What they think is serious."

Bucky studies Wei Wuxian a little more closely.

"I guess the rules are a little tougher where you're from?"

Wei Wuxian is a thin man, very clearly recently rather underweight and undertrained for someone being critical of routine punishments. He is starting to fill out, but it's... going to be a while to undo the damage Mo Xuanyu left him with.

"Quite definitely. And Jiang clan was one of the more lenient clans - if Lan Clan was running this place, it'd be much different."

Poor Sunshine, she'd spend her life doing handstands and writing lines, for making food with actual flavor.

"Different how?" he asks, with clear interest.

Wei Wuxian's almost as thin as Steve used to be. More wiry, though.

"This place has three rules. They have three thousand, carved into the rock, all rigidly adhered to without fail." Wei Ying informs him, eyes wide. He lies, but unknowingly. It's been over a decade since he's seen that stone wall, and if he'd seen it recently, he'd know there's now over four thousand.

With one specifically about not associating with him.

Bucky stares at him.

"Hold on, did you say three thousand?"

"Right?" Wei Ying is delighted that someone understands how completely unreasonable this is. "When I accompanied my siblings there when I was younger, I managed to break... oh, at least six, the very first night! It was such a mess." He laughs, evidently not too terribly bothered about this potential political disaster.

Things were... simpler then. Not simple, but... definitely not as fraught as they became.

He shakes his head.

"Remind me not to visit. I'd make a wreck of things just by walking in." A quick grin flashes. "Like you, it sounds."

Wei Ying grins, unrepentantly. At least for that night, he is entirely unrepentant.

For most things, he is unrepentant. He mourns the choices, and his inability to beat the odds, more than any particular action.

"I was not an ideal student that summer."

"In a place with three thousand rules? Who could be?"

"Most did alright, though that could be because I was there to draw the ire of Lan Qiren, our shifu." Wei Ying is slowly coming to the realization that there really was nothing he could have done to actually win Lan Qiren's favor, but there wasn't much that he did to help his reputation that summer.

"So scapegoat, bellwether, and decoy all three," he summarizes, even as he files away the unfamiliar term and likely meaning by context.

"Busy summer."

"Mmm." Wei Ying hums, "It was perfect."

It wasn't, it really wasn't - there was Wen Chao lurking around the edges, and Jiang Cheng fretting, and the Peacock dissing his shijie, and the endless Lan punishments he earned, but... he'd met and befriended Lan Zhan, and spent a summer with Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli, an had adventures... it was all he could hope for, in a summer before war descended.

He chuckles at that, as he finishes off the bao he'd taken.

"My friend Steve would get a kick out of that."

"Steve?" Wei Ying asks curiously, not-so-subtly inching the bao pile of doom closer to Bucky. "Does he also 'wreak things by walking in', as you say?"

"Sometimes," Bucky agrees, taking another of the bao. "Especially when he's leading a team."

"He's my best friend. We used to get into a lot of trouble together."

Edited 2021-03-11 16:11 (UTC)

"Used to?" Wei Ying asks, curiosity getting the better of him. "Ah, forgive this one if it is too much to ask."

"It's no problem," Bucky assures him. "Not like it's a secret any more anyway."

"Steve's still causing trouble; fighting the fight, taking care of what's needed." He shrugs his left shoulder pointedly. "I'm off the field for the time being, until I deal with this and get my head on straight, after everything."

There's an odd expression of... recognition, perhaps? Fellow-feeling? Jealousy? Maybe. Just a smidge. He can see, now, out of the spiral that his life had become, it would have been better for him to admit he came out of the war less than whole directly after the victory (or as near as possible, very hard to admit anything when passed out in your soulmate's arms, turns out). He wouldn't have even had to lie, directly - just mention who he'd been captured by, an the rest would have followed.

But he'd wanted to see Jiang Cheng become Sect Leader. He'd wanted to be there, when they reclaimed Lotus Pier. An then there never seemed to be a good time.

And then there were the Wens.

And then there weren't the Wens.

Ah well. At least now his bones don't hurt.

"Is there a plan? To deal with... that?" Wei Ying asks, with an irrepressible urge to fix things. Can there be a talisman to help with a missing limb? ... There probably isn't, but that doesn't mean he can't make one.

There's something about Wei Wuxian's expression that feels ... familiar, somehow. The look in his own eyes sharpens, just for an instant.

"Head first, arm later," he says. "Probably not a good idea for me to get the arm back until we're sure I can't be controlled again."

Wei Wuxian stills like a hunting dog gone on point. This... is something he knows entirely too much about.

Though probably not from the direction Bucky would approve of.

He tilts his head, eyebrows raised questioningly. He has enough manners to not ask directly, but... that's definitely something he has a good chance to help with.

Wei Wuxian may have an entire lifetime habit forcing a need to make himself useful.

That kind of reaction is impossible to miss.

"Looks like that means something to you," he observes, neutrally.

Wei Ying laughs, a little, on reflex - a slightly overwhelmed, slightly despairing laugh. He's never really had to explain what he's done - people have either seen it first hand, or heard of it through various degrees of translation and mutation. He's never really told anyone here exactly the extent of what he did in the war, what the Cultivation world considered heroic, and then demonic in turns.

He's not afraid, not really. Unless Bucky suddenly produces a dog, he doesn't fear for his physical safety. But he does love the sort of anonymity he has here - the Yiling Patriarch doesn't exist in Milliways, except to a few people. He's not looking forward to calling forth that particular ghost.

"In my world, many years ago, there was a war. My world has cultivators - people who work and study to build their own personal qi. In times of peace, we can help suppress and disperse demons, send wandering ghosts to their rest in the afterlife, that sort of thing. Some can even reach immortality. When the cultivation clans go to war against each other..." He grimaces. "I developed a method to take control of the fierce corpses and demons our enemy was creating. Later I was able to return the spiritual cognition of a friend who had been turned into a fierce corpse, though I could still command him, if needed. So I have... experience, in that sort of thing."

His gaze goes from interested to stunned disbelief, then shifts into something much sharper as he listens.

"So," he says, when Wei Wuxian has finished explaining. "You can do mind control. Of monsters and demons. Through magic."

Silence, for a long, long beat. He wraps his hand around his coffee mug.

"And you have a friend who's a zombie? Whose mind you returned? Does he remember what happened to him?"

This guy looks like a strong wind might blow him over, and he's sitting here talking about things that HYDRA would salivate to get their hands on.