sixthiterationlogs | i can fix that;

Entry tags:

i can fix that;

WHO: Bucky Barnes
WHERE: Room 2 at the Inn
WHEN: July 21
OPEN TO: Sam Moon
WARNINGS: violence & post traumatic stress

The storms have been raging hell on Bucky's sleep; he's a light sleeper by nature, something as simple as a door closing at the end of the hall is enough to rouse him at least for a few minutes. The rumbling and rolling thunder has been hell, and the cracking bolts of lightning aren't much better. He's got history, is the thing. Has nightmares that even the therapy can't quite eradicate, not with how brief his time had been undergoing it; generally it took a back seat to defusing the bomb inside his mind.

Tonight, the nightmares are particularly bad. He's ashamed to admit he's not even fully asleep when it happens, he's riding that line somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness wherein you know distantly you're in bed but you start to drift and hallucinate, your imagination takes hold and guides you toward the first stages of dreaming.

An extraordinary roar of thunder tears through the night following what was apparently an incredibly close strike; it's accompanied almost instantaneously by another sharp snap of lightning that sends shadows darting across his room like the rapid movement of people around his bed. For a terrified, sleep-addled second he thinks it's the preface to the electrical implementation about to pulse through his brain, the split second of crackling warning before a reset, and he doesn't think, he just moves.

Whirls around and slams a metal fist into the nearest moving shadow, because the only thing in his mind is not again. Except he doesn't experience the satisfying crunch of bone behind meat, the familiar thick feeling of ramming fist-first into flesh. Instead, his knuckles meet nothing but wall, a clean stretch between studs that he slams through easily like a sledge hammer. It cracks through the room a little more thickly and more hollow sounding than thunder, spreading splinters and shards of wood on either side of the hole his fist sticks through. Evidently, he makes it clean through to the other side.

It takes him a second to come back to himself, lips parting, cogs and gears in his brain turning to catch up. Adrenaline courses through him, his chest heaves, and then realization dawns.

"Shit," he mutters under his breath, probably audible from the new fancy sound hole he's punched into Sam's room.

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Sam was sitting on the floor. At least, that's where her body was at the moment of impact. Her mind? Well, that was another matter. Bucky was between awake and asleep. But Sam felt halfway between alive and dead. Too much time awake was bad for even the sturdiest of brains, but she had Ventrue brain. More fragile than any other sort of Kindred. And she had her own history to contend with.

She was the Great Experiment.

There were flashes between the bursts of lightning. Faces of the dozens of women who'd been murdered so she could be created. Pinpricks of needles that she couldn't be sure were real or imagined. Pieces of the sky falling.

Ironically, it fell again just then.

A fist came through the wall, the one where she'd begun coloring in her mural of the LA skyline, overcrowded with raindrops of DNA. Sam might have put some thought into what she saw. But she was half-dead, haunted by reality, her eyelashes crusted with blood. So she didn't think at all. She rolled to her feet and grabbed the first bottle she could get her hands on, cracking it against the window frame so it broke into jagged edges. And she threw herself to the wall. Ready to rip. Ready to shred. Ready to die.

It's lucky for the both of them that the arm sticking through is made of vibranium; her ripping and shredding doesn't so much as scratch the surface. It does, however, jerk him abruptly forward so that his shoulder slams into the wall. The metal connecting joint tugs against the muscles along his neck and shoulder, and he bites out a gasp of pure surprise - not exactly the reception he'd been expecting. In fact, he hadn't expected anything at all except perhaps a colorful what the fuck?

A quick heartbeat is all it takes for him to react, jerking his arm back through the hole and staggering back from it. He dips, ducks, a few feet back to peer through in utter bewilderment. Probably checking to see if that's even her, because what the actual hell?

Metal. Arms weren’t metal. They were flesh and blood and grabbing. Sam pulled back with a startled gasp, though she maintained a death grip on the neck of the bottle. It took her much too long to come back. To remember that some of her nightmares weren’t the past. Some were the present. Some were her empty room in a Skinner Box.

She took a step back from the wall. And another. And another. “What the fuck?”

Who was she to fail to live down to expectations?

Sam brushed her hair out of her face. And then realized it was her hair.

“Shit...”

And there it is, that what the fuck he'd been expecting; evidently he's not the only one here wherein the fight reflex comes before the flight reflex. He sees her distantly through the hole- not all of her, just one arm and her waist as she gently backs away.

All he can think to say initially is a sort of conflicted sounding, "Uhh-" like he's not quite sure how best to proceed.

And then he figures having a conversation through a hole in the wall's probably not going to do either of them any favors considering they're both having a hard time being functional people right now. So he pads forth, barefoot and shirtless in naught but his scrub bottoms. Tugs his door open and pops around the corner. Falters, and then awkwardly just sort of... knocks.

There were more than a few causes for concern. She was in her underwear. Her eyes were crusted with blood. And, of course, she'd just gone after him with a broken bottle.

None of that registered.

All she could think about was her hair. It was both a deeply-indulgent and girly concern, but also something much harder to explain, even to herself. But given the options of what to cover up, it was her hair she chose, quickly gathering it in both hands at the base of her neck and tying it into a knot. She pulled her wig on over it, but didn't bother with the pins. They still hurt too much any way, from all of the burn scars against her scalp.

Quickly, she padded over to her door and opened it, peering out into the dark hallway, trying not to look completely fucked up.

She cleared her throat. "Uh, hi."

Her first concern seems to be his last, because his hair sticks up in wild directions, sweaty and poking up in places, matted in others. He doesn't seem all that bothered by the fact that she's in her underwear either; he's seen women before, he's not a prude.

"Sorry, I-" it's on his lips as soon as her door starts to open, apologetic and quick. He cuts it short immediately when their eyes meet, though, and he sees dried god damn blood lining the edges of them. Was that from him? "Shit, are you alright? Is that-"

"What?"

Sam wasn't playing any kind of game. She genuinely forgot about her other woes for a second. A human might have blamed it on adrenaline. But, of course, she didn't have any of that. Not really. It was all psychological.

Avery had a file on it, back home.

But she realized what he was looking at and touched the corner of her eye. "Oh. It's fine, it's--"

Kindred were really quite disgusting. Sam sometimes managed to forget that. Until moments like this, of course.

She swallowed hard and stepped back from the door, gesturing him inside. "Assuming you use doors, instead of coming through walls like the Kool-Aid Man?"

He enters if only because the pair of them are standing pretty exposed, barely dressed, too much skin flashing in the halls in the middle of the night. He's sure to gently click the door shut behind them; he doesn't flip on her light, isn't sure he should, doesn't want to blind her.

It looks a little worse on her side of the wall; the fragments all projected outward. He steps around her bed to get a better look, lips twisting down, reaching out to gently touch the sharp outwardly stabbing teeth. He drops his hand away, grimacing.

"I, uh-" He scratches absently at the back of his neck. "Sorry, I thought- I had a dream, and I just-"

Nightmare is the word he's looking for. Walk it off, Barnes.

"You sure you're alright? You came at me like a damn cage fighter."

For better or for worse, the mural on their shared wall was Sam's least favorite. The one she'd spent the least time on, probably because it was behind her bed and she didn't spend much time looking that way. On each of the other three walls, there were more elaborate murals. An underwater panorama. A starscape. A forest. Each one filled with thousands upon thousands of double helixes. And only just now starting to show signs of color. They gleamed in the dark, like figures in a shadowbox.

Sam closed the door and leaned against it, taking a brief moment to admire the muscles of Bucky's back. He was gorgeous, Kool-Aid Man or not.

Someday she'd work up the nerve to draw him.

But with a sigh, her eyes slipped back to the wall. "You came through my wall in the middle of the night, Blue," she said. "I don't know about girls in the 1940s, but my generation doesn't take kindly to that."

A weak joke, but the beginnings of coming back to herself.

Her forehead crumpled in sudden concern, though. "Did I...hurt you?" She couldn't smell any blood. But there were other ways to hurt.

Edited 2018-07-22 03:43 (UTC)

He's never seen the walls of her room before; perhaps glanced at them in passing if her door happened to be open, but he's never gotten a good look. He still doesn't, not in the darkness, not like this, but he catches pieces. Snippets of beauty, of hard work and a delicate hand just like Steve used to have. Steve had done something similar; rather than draw on the walls proper he papered them with sketches he found himself particularly proud of. His ma would have given him some harsh words if he'd gone as far as to sketch on the wallpaper.

He huffs out a soft laugh, partly at her joke, partly at the fact that he'd just rammed a fist through her wall and now she's asking if she hurt him. He doesn't mean to be offensive, he knows she's a vampire and dangerous in her own right, but hearing the tentative question from her slight figure as though he were fragile? Yeah, not exactly.

"No. Metal beats glass," he says, giving his metal arm a little roll as though to remind her it exists. They pass crappy jokes back and forth, and already he can feel his heart rate slowing again. Settling into the deep calm that always follows a burst of emotion and adrenaline once it wears off. Abruptly, he seems ten times more tired than he'd been on the other side of the hole. "Sorry about your art. I can probably fix the wall tomorrow, but I can't fix that."

"Never played that version of rock-paper-scissors before," she said, falling easily into the joking pattern. As she'd said to Karen on more than one occasion, if she didn't have black humor, she didn't have any humor at all. But all the same, her heart wasn't entirely in it. And it didn't take a lot of soul-searching to reason out why.

Sam knew about bad dreams. She knew about nightmares.

She knew about feeling so utterly and completely trapped that you'd do anything to get out of it.

Anything.

Slowly, she walked over to him, leaving a respectable distance, but closer to him and farther from the door, as if leaving that part of their lives behind for the moment. "What was it you were dreaming?" she asked.

Maybe it's because she's got the same black humor that him and Steve tend to share in tense moments, maybe it's because he's still sleep addled, or because he saw her eyes rimmed with blood, or because he punched a hole through her wall. Whatever the reason, right now, in the middle of the night in the climax of a thunderstorm, he feels like he owes her a little bit of honesty.

He's not in the habit of opening up and talking about his past, it's a scabbed and gnarly scar in his mind worse than the tissue around his prosthetic. So he moves slowly, carefully, cautiously, to settle at the foot of her bed and scrub a hand over his face haltingly.

"They used to... reset me." He says slowly bitterly enunciating the last two words. "The people who gave me this-"

A little shift to the arm. "They programmed me to complete missions, and after every one they'd... put me in this chair, and they'd wipe my brain with electrical pulses like god damn shock therapy. Take away everything, blank slate. For a second, I thought- when the lightning..."

And there's where he trails off, because he figures she can piece the rest together through context.

Kindred, by nature, were not honest creatures. Everyone walked through life like they were playing an extended game of poker. Cards close to the chest and all of that shit. In her earliest nights of the requiem, Sam had it drilled into her head again and again that she had to hide the truth. That if anyone learned who and what she was, they would inevitably use it to their advantage. Her truth was a weapon. A weapon that would hurt her.

She didn't need Avery's skills in aura perception to know that Bucky was telling her his truth. As much as she lacked people skills, she just felt it. It was thrumming in the air, like the string of a guitar, reverberating one final note. It brushed against her skin.

And, somehow, she didn't want to use that truth to hurt him. So maybe there was more to the Kindred than...there was to the Kindred.

It was a nice thought. A nice thought in the midst of one hell of a horrible confession.

Sam grabbed a washcloth off of her nightstand and took a seat beside Bucky on the foot of the bed. She twisted it between her hands. "There's a difference between knowing that won't happen here and knowing that won't happen here," she said gently. Or, well, what passed for gentle with Sam, anyway. "I won't waste your time with platitudes." She wiped her eyes, the blood flaking away. "But if nightmares are the problem, I'll stay awake with you."

He doesn't think she could use this truth to hurt him any more than he already hurts himself with it, any more than he lives and breathes in the knowledge of what was done to him. She can't hurt him any more than the flashes of lightning do, any more than certain words spoken in the Russian language does. Any more than the occasionally pitying look Steve carries in his eyes, or the flooding of guilt when he hears Tony Stark's name. She can't beat his fists into the rocks any more than he already does.

And so he huffs a soft, fatigued sounding laugh at the offer. If she wants to stay awake to help him avoid nightmares, she may as well agree to never sleep again. He doesn't say that, though; he only shakes his head. Lets it drop an inch or two so that his hair falls around his face.

He doesn't need consoling, he just felt the need to explain to her why there was a god damn hole in her wall in the middle of the night. His lips twitch into a grimace that only lasts a second, and then he's redirecting his energy. "What was with the..."

He gestures vaguely to his own eyes, but he means hers.

She sighed softly, watching the way the dried blood formed patterns on the cloth, like a Rorschach test. She always saw the same thing, any time she looked at an ink blot: DNA, RNA, and/or variations on the letters G-C-A-T. Oddly appropriate under the circumstances.

"Your second lesson in vampires," she said, shrugging one shoulder. "The only fluid we have in our bodies is blood. No sweat. No tears. And if you're a dude...no...stuff."

Way to sound like a scientist, Samantha.

"When we get kind of worked up...we cry blood. It's...disgusting. Messy. A huge waste of energy. But it can be hard to control. Especially for someone like me. I mean, I'm barely considered even a person by vampire standards. They called me a 'neonate.' Still in the span of my mortal life and junk."

Which was so, so beside the point. But Sam liked this whole 'being honest' thing. It was new and different and super liberating.

His lips part into a soft look of gentle understanding; he guesses it makes sense. In a... weird gross way, less so the tears and more the concept of ejaculating blood. Hard to keep a look of mild distaste off of his mug for that one, but it slips away quickly back into something schooled and less offensive.

He thinks he's piecing together from context that as vampires get older they're less emotional, less prone to crying or feeling sadness. He can relate, before the war he'd been a boundless bomb of emotional energy. Love and fondness, charm and charisma, anger and temper and hatred and lust. After seventy years on ice, he's been mellowed out to a more or less unshakable baseline of measured control. He still fluctuates above or below that line sometimes, but the overall wavelength has gotten a lot straighter.

And anyway, he'd like to focus on the unspoken bigger picture, "Why were you crying?"

Flat out blunt question, no beating around the bush. It is, at least, asked with a soft sort of calmness that doesn't come across as pity or judgement, just tentative curiosity. An attempt at relating.

Sam actually started laughing. It wasn't funny. But that's sometimes when things were the funniest. Maybe it was the context. Maybe it was something else. It didn't matter. As much as Sam took delight in over-analyzing things, it just didn't matter.

She wiped her eyes again.

"Night terrors," she said. "Had them since I was a kid. Could never stay in a foster home more than a couple of months before they couldn't handle the screaming. They say even when I was a baby, it was bad. But I don't remember what I dreamed then. I mean, babies had the fucking memory of an earthworm."

Although she had a few guesses. There were more than enough horrors in her past.

"They've been bad here. Worse since..." She pulled back a few curls on her wig, revealing one of the many burns on her head, from where the lightning had overheated the bobby pins holding the wig on.

His lips quirk up as she laughs; he's not quite in a mental position to laugh with her just yet, but he appreciates the absurdity and the humor.

He adds some facts to the mental profile he's been building for her; foster child, night terrors. They're not quite as shocking as the vampire revelation, but they're still key pieces to the puzzle that makes her up.

His eyes flick up to her wig, bounce between the burns he can see on her scalp, wicked and unpleasant. Between the two of them, he's not sure who's carrying a bigger aversion to the lightning right now. He's not sure what to say; how to apologize for a night terror, or the injuries, or for punching through her wall. All he can really do for a minute is share sympathetic silence with her, brows scrunched empathetically, body sloped forward with his elbows on his knees.

Eventually, something comes out.

"So you think they assign rooms based on where we fall on the fucked up scale, or?" Because if so, it seems to make sense that they're neighbors.

That made her laugh again. She knocked her knee against his. "Hey, I picked this room. Couldn't exactly live in a house by myself. Houses are for people who...belong to other people."

It started out as a joke, but she lost the momentum in the truth. Sam didn't belong to anyone. Not here and barely at all back home, especially in light of her final memories of LA. Of Avery looking into her eyes.

"One of my guys is going to be waiting two blocks away, at the corner of Madison and Amelia. Sam, I want you to listen to me very carefully."

Startled by the urgency in his tone, Sam's eyes met Avery's.

And that was her big mistake.

It was hard to describe the way it felt. The best she could come up with was a sense of tiny, invisible fish hooks shooting out of his eyes and going directly into hers, latching onto the tissue of her brain. It was more than just her brain. It was her Self. It didn't hurt. But it wasn't pleasant either. And she couldn't squirm free.

Vaguely, she was aware of Avery talking again. His voice sounded far-away and cottony. "If I die in this attempt, I need you to drop everything and run for that truck to save yourself. Don't look back. Don't try to save me or anyone else. Just escape."

For some reason, that sounded like a very good idea. She nodded absently.

She frowned a little bit, dropping her hair, grinding her knuckles into her palm. "For what it's worth, though. I know what it feels like to have someone play Cat's Cradle with your mind. My particular vampire family, my clan, it's a natural ability we can cultivate. Playing with minds. Forcing obedience. Changing memories. After I got turned, I decided I didn't want to go down that path. My brother, he got really good at messing with people's memories but I...I couldn't do it."

Ironically, he picked his too and for much the same reason. Houses are for people who do... house things, like mow th lawn and wash the windows, who share dinners with people who live with them, who cohabitate. He doesn't see himself as a house person just yet, but he thinks maybe one day he might be. Provided he doesn't punch holes in all his walls.

Her empathy starts out strong, but by the third sentence he's got a zinging sort of discomfort running down his spine. It's a natural ability we can cultivate, she says, and dimly he's aware of standing up and striding a few paces away from her bed. He does his best to mask his discomfort, ducks his head and absently rubs the back of his neck. Fixes his eyes upon the floor like he's pacing, but it's not the truth.

The truth is now that he knows she can do that his gut instinct is to get away from her. Even though she says I couldn't do it, the fact is she could if she wanted to. Couldn't and wouldn't are two strongly different things. Changing memories, forcing obedience. He'd rather put a bullet in his brain.

"Uhhm-" He murmurs absently, struggling to find a good answer to her confession while simultaneously feeling disturbed by it. He falls short, because a small part of him thinks he ought to just bolt. It's probably just the nerves, the recent dream, the storm. "I can, uh- I can fix that hole. Tomorrow, sometime, not... right now while people are sleeping."

Sam was used to saying the wrong thing. It was kind of her only true art form. But it wasn't what she'd meant to do. And she couldn't retrace her steps to figure out exactly what it was that had sent Bucky across the room.

Figured. The one person she could stand in this place and she'd managed to fuck it up somehow. It was an entirely typical act on her part.

What wasn't so typical was a sudden surge of need. To fix it. Somehow.

"I don't care about the wall," she said mildly. And really, it probably didn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things. She had literally nothing to hide any more.

Except her hair, maybe. But that was mostly a her being crazy thing.

She stood up, leaning over to brush some concrete and debris and dust from her rumpled bedding. "C'mere," she said, patting the center of the bed. "Lemme show you a trick I learned to help with sleeping. I know it's gonna sound fucking New Age, but I promise you, it'll help."

Edited (Spelling is haaaaaaaard) 2018-07-28 00:25 (UTC)

He knows it's insane, he knows that she's been nothing but sweet to him (granted, usually wrapped around the worst language he's heard since the damn war), he knows that she's never so much as threatened him even when her teeth were an inch into his neck. And yet.

And yet, she says C'mere and he freezes there warily, a deer in the headlights, pinning her with an uncertain gaze. They'd only just been talking about how she can manipulate minds (and that she wouldn't, but that's a secondary fact), and now she wants to show him a trick to knock his ass out.

His legs stay rooted firmly where they are.

"I'm not..." He starts, then shakes his head. Decides to flatly ask first instead, "What's the trick?"

What the actual fuck?

Sam hit the rewind in the TiVo of her mind, going back and back and back. It had to be the way she'd talked about Dominate. Nothing else she'd said felt weird. Maybe she should have known better. He'd been talking about having his brain fucking reset. She'd just been trying to relate.

But that was the problem, wasn't it? Kindred weren't people. Their experiences weren't...human.

They were, literally, different species. And not just because of the differences in how they looked.

Sam blew a piece of her wig out of her face. "Pressure points," she said. "Hipsters call it the 'interior front gate.' I don't believe in that shit. But I do believe in biology. It used to work on me, back when I was...not murdered." She paused a moment, trying to clear her voice of its usual bite and edge. Trying to be sincere. "I'm not gonna mess with you, Bucky."

And that seems to do the trick, at least - just a verbal confirmation that she's keeping her mental feelers to herself. Yeah, he knows, he knows how he's being right now. Jaded, wary, suspicious, knows that he's not giving her the credit she's deserved for being a good friend to him so far. Knows that they have a sort of underlying understanding between them that should count for something, at least a little bit of trust that she wasn't going to do things he didn't want done.

But all of that is logical and fear is far from it. Mental scars take the longest to heal.

At least his legs seem to unlock, and he moves forward again with an apologetic kind of grace, lowering himself casually and carefully onto the rumpled and plaster-dusted bedspread.

"I know," He mutters earnestly, and he does. "It's just..."

Lips purse, and he shakes his head. "It's just... how things are."

With him, he means. With his history. With his thought processes. It's just how he works right now. But anyway.

"...Pressure points, huh?"

"I know," Sam said quietly.

And she left it at that.

Too late, she realized she was on the wrong side of the bed. The dude had a metal arm, and as much as she still wanted to examine the damn thing, it definitely didn't have any pressure points. Awkwardly, she leaned over him to reach for his far hand. Carefully, she measured out three fingers from the crease in his wrist, and then she pressed her thumb into the indentation between tendons. She started to move it in a slow, circular pattern. "Anne...the lady who adopted me...she used to do this for me at night. She'd say it was about letting the body trick the mind. They do that a lot. Body and mind. They play tricks on each other, lie to each other. I mean, look at my body." A pause. "Not...literally." She really ought to have put on some pants. "I'm dead. But because my mind tells me that I'm not, the rest of me tries to go along with the program."

Maybe it was all just hokum. Like Bigfoot sightings or the social sciences. But she couldn't dismiss the placebo effect entirely.

Or talk about it, if it was going to exist.

He surrenders his wrist with much more compliance than one might expect, and with much more gentleness than his size might imply. Surrenders it over to a five foot something slender being with a mission, and that at least isn't exactly a new feeling. He allows himself to be manipulated too easily and readily.

She presses her thumb down and, while it's not exactly a Swedish, it's pleasant. He breathes out slowly through his nose, a long and deliberate exhale like he's trying to force the rest of his muscles to get with the program too. He's not had a lot of positive tactile reinforcement in the last seven or so decades, so even small things like this are a Big Deal. They mean something.

"I'm not so sure that's how the science behind being a vampire works," he comments wryly, dusted gently with amusement.

"You'd be amazed," she murmured, "at the scientific community in the vampire world. We've contributed some of the greatest medical breakthroughs known to mankind, in my world. Cures for diseases. Patents for devices. Some really fucking cool shit that serves no purposes whatsoever. But also some of the most tragic..." She didn't even know how to finish that sentence. The word 'tragic' wasn't nearly enough. Devastating. Traumatic. Inhumane. "Well. Let's just say things like The Great Experiment weren't exactly meant to benefit the human race."

Or necessarily the Kindred either. Sam's feelings on the matter were complex to say the least.

Best not to go there. She wasn't nearly drunk enough for that, anyway.

She chewed on the inside of her mouth, working his pressure point for a moment in silence. And she turned her face down, to look at him, shrugging her hair back so it wouldn't fall against his skin. "There's something I've been meaning to ask you," she said. "You don't have to answer if you don't want. If it's too personal or something like that. Maybe my millennial is showing here a little but...where does a name like 'Bucky' come from?"

She's mentioned this before, The Great Experiment, said audibly in capital letters. It's a big deal, he thinks, he knows, he can sense it. It's something she's obviously tight lipped about as well, and he's going to have to remember the next time they have a surplus of booze to ask her about it.

It sounds disgustingly like Hydra.

His eyebrow quirks up at the lead-in to a question, and the question itself draws from him a proper laugh.

"It's- ah. My middle name, actually," He answers huffing in soft humor. "James Buchanan Barnes. It... wasn't so weird back in the 40's."

"James Buchanan," she said, feeling a strange and wonderful sense of accomplishment that she was able to make him laugh, even a little bit. "Like the president?" If there was anything a decent Chicagoan knew, it was the names of the presidents, considering the fact that they were the goddam streets.

Of course, she couldn't remember anything about Buchanan. But who cared?

She moved on to the second pressure point, the so-called 'spirit gate,' about a thumb's width away from the 'interior front gate.' Like before, she rotated her thumb slowly, in a clockwise circle, against the hollow along the side of his wrist.

"Well, that sounds like a very patriot name."

He nods, a wry smirk gracing his features. Like the president is something he heard way more back in the day than he does now; turns out people aren't as savvy with the history of the united states government here in the 2000's. Maybe it's just too many decades of separation since he served.

Whether it's the conversation, the shift in tone, or he does actually have pressure points in his spirit gate, either way it seems to be working. His forearm is limp and malleable, and his entire shoulder seems to be on course for the same.

"My ma thought so," He agrees, sounding very much like he's not on the same page. Truth be told, he never gave much of a shit about James Buchanan (either version) so he can't claim the trait. "If we're in the business of giving out middle names, fair's fair."

And he levels her with an expectant look.

Well, there was a question she'd never been asked before. "I don't have a middle name," she said. "By the time I was adopted, it was pretty firmly just Samantha. My Hebrew name is Shmuela." She wrinkled her nose, making it very clear how dissatisfied she was with that. "And my radio handle back home was Skywalker."

Now that one, she'd chosen for herself.

Ironically before she realized that her parents were, in fact, pretty much the supernatural equivalents of fucking Sith lords.

Everything was funny as long as it was happening to someone else. She grimaced. Or smiled. Or maybe both.

And she started to change the pattern on his wrist, holding down the left side of the pressure point for a few seconds, then holding down the right. Back and forth. Back and forth.

"My mother was orthodox," He muses, opting to take the high road rather than give her shit about her name. His grandparents would have never let up on him if they heard. "'Til she met my father, anyway. Guess it was more her parents than her, but they never forgave her for marrying a catholic."

The good old days when split religion marriages were the height of taboo, probably simply because they were the only thing legal at the time. He never prescribed to either side, though. They didn't teach him much about anything, they kept it out of the house to spare Bucky and his sisters the fighting, he thinks. Brooklynn was overrun with catholicism though, so his customs lean more heavily toward that than anything else.

Whether her pressure point thing is loosening his muscles or his mouth, well, hard to say.

Shit, he was a part member of the tribe. And he looked like that. For a second, Sam entertained the hysterical notion of what it would be like to bring him home to meet her folks. You know, assuming they and her home still existed.

Anne would definitely not let up on the matchmaking. That was for sure.

"Catholics believe in forgiveness," she said. "Jews believe in guilt."

Was that from something? She felt like it was from something.

"I converted after they adopted me," she said, continuing to work on the spirit gate. "I don't know. I liked the idea of belonging to...something. And the idea of a religion that encouraged you to ask all the questions, you know? To investigate and interrogate and be a little pain in the ass. But...I don't know if it was ever really about...believing. Especially after...I mean...some vampires thing the origin of the species lies in Cain or Longinus or Lazarus or something but...there's no evidence of anything. Just more questions."

Sounds like he was more his mother than his father then, because he carries the guilt like a cloak and he hasn't touched forgiveness for himself in decades. Then again, there isn't a thing on the planet Steve Rogers couldn't get away with, so maybe he's got a touch of both after all.

There's something inherently normal about discussing something as human and common as religion. It's not vampires, or world hopping, or aliens, or time travel, it's the same tired thing people have been tossing back and forth speculating on for centuries. He must've had a dozen theological conversations in the darkness of a tent pitched in the middle of nowhere, Germany during the war.

"Guess I can see the perspective," He murmurs agreeably, shrugging an absent shoulder. "I never really jumped on board either ship. Never really thought there was any point and wondering whether or not it's true, and if it is- why he lets bad things happen to good people. It's not like we'll ever find his diary on the matter."

Sam pulled her knees up onto the side of the bed, sitting her heels. "Agreed," she said. "But don't say that to our resident Padre."

Father Mulcahy was a complicated man. Or so it seemed to Sam. She had a certain fondness for him, even before he carried her to the medical tent, after she was hit by the lightning. But she couldn't exactly claim to understand him.

But then again, when had Sam been able to understand anyone? Including herself?

"Okay," she said, "I'm going to move to a pressure point called the 'wind gate' for some reason that defies logic. Are you weird about people touching your hair?"

She asked mostly because she was.

He'd met the father only once; he seemed kind, earnest, gentle. Compassionate. Seemed like the best version of a priest someone could be, and it made Bucky uncomfortable as hell. Not that he minded religion itself, but seeing a man who seemed so inherently good was such a god damn juxtaposition between what he considers himself that he had a hard time stomaching the interaction. He's pretty sure if they were to shake hands he'd burn like a demon touched by holy water.

It's an overreaction, but the discomfort is real.

He doesn't have any discomfort about the wind gate, though, and so he gives his head a little shake.

"Knock yourself out," He says dryly, but if he's honest he doesn't think his hair's been touched by anyone but himself except for in passing in seventy years.

Sam leaned over him, cupping her hands around his neck, at the base of his skull. Her thumbs found the two hollows at the back of his head and slowly started working in gentle circles. His hair was...less gross than she'd been expecting. Both given their circumstances and given what she sensed of his personality. It was severely in need of cutting though.

They'd build up to that, someday.

She smiled a little at the idea of it. She could only imagine how that suggestion would be greeted.

"This was always my favorite one," she said, tossing a few curls back over her shoulder again.

He washes his damn hair, thank you. It's not his fault it's the first thing to get oily when he sweats; as it stands the only sweating he's done tonight is the few minutes before and during the nightmare, so her fingers are going to come away from it clean.

She can fight him over the haircut. He'll take it to the grave; at least most of it. Chin length is the shortest he'll go anymore, it's a vivid distinction, it's the one thing Hydra never bothered with. They'd shave his face and mark his skin, but they never gave a single good god damn about his hair.

He's not so worried about that now though, not when she's in such close proximity. Not when there are delicate fingers pressing into the tension at the base of his neck, when her mouth is so close to where it'd been the one time they'd tried a voluntary donation. Not when he's not used to being this close to people and especially out of practice being this close to women.

He becomes a quiet, hushed thing. Knows what he'd have done if this were seventy years ago and he was out on Furlow in France or London. Seventy years ago he'd have angled his chin a little to the left so his lips could ghost her neck. Seventy years ago before he became something broken he'd have murmured something like think it's my new favorite too, doll.

Except that's not who he is anymore, and while his body isn't much more aged his mind has grown up a whole hell of a lot more. So instead of kindling any fire he might feel sparking in the moment, he simply murmurs a soft, "Thanks," into the space above her shoulder.

The proximity didn't escape Sam's attention. Her admiration for Bucky was...well. It sure was a thing. To hell with admiration. It was a fucking crush. Like she was in high school all over again. But her intentions, at least, were pure. Besides, he was so far out of her league that the possibility of possibilities was kind of hilarious. He looked like him. She looked like a barbecue fork.

But that didn't mean she was...dead.

Metaphorically speaking.

She lowered her eyes to the hollow of his throat and continued to methodically apply the pressure.

"Breathe deep," she told him. "The more oxygen in your blood, the better. It relaxes your body. There is actual science involved in this shit, I swear. I wouldn't recommend it otherwise."

His pulse thumps a slow and steady beat, the perfect BPM of an athlete, arteries practically singing in perfect health before her eyes. His head dips a little, just an inch or two, hair falling forward off of his shoulders and granting her better access.

He's not so sure it's the science of pressure points so much as it is the science of getting touched kindly by another human, getting a good god damn neck rub. Whatever it is, it works. It's a rare occurrence, but for the first time in weeks Bucky Barnes seems to be completely relaxed. Shoulders slope down, eyes close softly, and the soldier obeys.

Breathes in deeply, long and slow, practically yoga breathing. Good job, Sam, now tell him to do Downward Facing Dog and he'll probably listen.

Frankly, Sam wasn't exactly sold on yoga. She'd been told by more than one inmate in the clown rodeo that she needed to at least attempt meditation. But fortunately for Bucky, yoga was pretty much off the table.

There was something immensely gratifying, though, about watching the way he relaxed. Pre-med was long off the table, but she suddenly understood why people became doctors. The kind of doctors who dealt with patients, anyway. The ability to look at your handiwork and say, 'I did that. If fixed that person's problems. I made it better.'

And yes, okay, she hadn't fixed Bucky in any kind of permanent way.

But he just looked so...at peace.

She continued to massage the pressure points for a few moments, but her touch got lighter and lighter, until she carefully slipped her hands free, sitting back and watching.

He's been thrown the meditation line too, and for all that people bitch about therapy Bucky actually respects the process. He tries it from time to time at night, clearing his mind, focusing on nothing. It's not a habit he practices regularly, he's not even remotely good at it, but he gets the principal behind the matter. Maybe one day as he slowly gets his shit together he'll take it up and become a damn Buddhist or something.

Her hands drift off of him and it takes him a second to look up. To break the gentle posture he'd fallen into. Slowly he does, though, settling his eyes on her with an indecipherable sort of keen interest, like he's never been told that holding eye contact too long is weird.

"You gonna do that every time I punch a hole in your wall?" He asks, quietly amused.

She smiled a little. "We have a barter culture around here. There are only so many things I can offer anyone. Despite evidence to the contrary, vodka doesn't solve every problem." Although she was pretty sure she needed it to solve some of her own. Already, she'd begun doing some calculations, considering possible ways to use vodka to give her supply of squirrel blood an intoxicating side-effect.

It needed field testing. Lots and lots of field testing.

"How do you feel?" she asked, shifting her weight to flop down next to him, leaving a polite distance between their bodies. "There are other pressure points I can try, but they're in your feet and if you're ticklish, it's pretty fucking counterproductive."

Also, feet were kind of gross. Although if anyone was capable of having handsome feet, she was pretty sure it would be James Buchanan Barnes.

He'd take a hard pass on the feet touching, he's of a similar mind that they're kind of gross and not really his deal. Especially having his own messed with; lord only knows if Hydra's most deadly assassin is ticklish, but not a single person is going to find out over his dead body.

The sentiment seems to come across a little, just in the incredulous tilt to his brow and the way he shakes his head. For the most part though he seems calm, complacent, content to watch her flop backward and settle his shoulders back into a resting neutral spine.

"Good. Better." He says, with clear notes of humble gratitude. "I'd offer you the same but the closest thing I know to pressure point therapy is about fourteen different ways to break a wrist, so..."

"Hard pass," Sam said. She'd broken both wrists at different points in her childhood and had no wish to repeat it. Especially in light of the fact that she wasn't really sure she could heal at all, any more. Her blood didn't seem to be working that way. Not on her burns.

Maybe it was the squirrels? Squirrel blood sure as hell wasn't human.

It was possibly a little grosser than feet, even if scientifically speaking, blood was blood was blood.

"Anyway," she said, "pressure points don't work on me any more."

What, turning down a free broken bone? Shocker. Color him completely surprised. He wears a sarcastic little smile that says everything he doesn't to that affect.

Vampire physiology aside he's sure in a pinch he could figure something out, but the way she's retracting in on herself and the way he can't seem to hold a conversation let alone a hand keep him from pushing the point. Instead he just shares a sympathetic moment with her in the dark, lightning gently flashing through the hole in the wall and through her window. It's less ominous now, though. The thunder is distant, the mood is soft, and it's the middle of the night.

So quietly he rises, pushing his hair back, studying her form (above the waist), before ducking his head.

"I'm gonna try and sleep. If that-" He nods vaguely at the hole. "Bothers you I can cover it up."

Not that he's going to be peeking in on her in the middle of the night like a fucking creep or anything, but the offer stands in earnest.

She considered inviting him to just...stay. But ultimately decided against it. If the nightmares returned, he could probably do a lot more damage to her than he'd done to the wall. Vampire or not, Sam knew she was built like kindling.

Honestly, the idea that she'd even thought...

Well. It didn't matter.

She pressed a hand to her head, to keep her wig on as she sat up. "Doesn't bother me," she said. "Leave it. Maybe you can sleep better if your mind tricks your body into believing that there's a big, bad vampire standing guard over you." While the odds of him actually being attacked were slim to none, she would, in fact, defend him, if necessary.

Sam knew the value of loyalty.

He'd like to think any sleeping partner would be safe from his nightmares; he's never attacked anyone without the blunt force of the weapon in his mind. Never sprung up at any of the homeless shelters or hostels he'd stayed in, never choked out the nearest passerby. The closest he's ever come, actually, was also here- laying on his back by that fountain, dazed and confused, displaced, a metal hand shooting up automatically to wrap around Claire's neck. This time, it was just the flickering of light, the darting of shadows, the movement and the lightning. One time affair - at least he hopes.

He chuckles quietly at the implication; then again, she'd been quick and damn deadly to try and peel his arm off with some broken glass, hadn't she?

If anything, it's a small strange comfort- a window to another living thing, breathing quietly and existing in the darkness.

So he slips back to his room, and he leaves it open. Tomorrow he'll fix it; tonight, at least, he sleeps.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

i can fix that;

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