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He didn't die in battle. Not really. There were times, in the dark night of the soul, in the wee hours in SHIELD's prison or the few lucid moments in Siberia, post-waking, pre-wipe…..when he wishes he had died in the war. A German bullet, one of those horrible crystal mines….anything better than what he became. And perhaps that explains why his little piece of limbo looks like it does.
It's a camp. Not one of the death camps with the smoke of genocide over them like a permanent haze. No, one of the POW camps, with their long, wood barracks cabins and bare, frozen mud grounds, roiled by too many booted feet before the cold made them hard as cast iron. There's an indistinct gray haze, like fog or mist that makes distance vision nearly impossible - nothing beyond the barbed wire fencing and the watchtowers but that amorphous nothingness. Bucky himself is sitting on the steps to one of them, nearest the main gate. There's no one else there - no guards above, no fellow prisoners. He's clad in his old uniform - not the generic servicemen's fatigues, but the blue coat and dark pants bloused into jumpboots. There's a distinct chill, but he doesn't seem cold. His hair's even in that old shortcut, and all that keeps this image from being some odd facsimile of one of his old war photos is the hole in his cheekbone, tucked not far from beneath his right eye. It weeps blood in a slow runnel that somehow dissolves into nothing before it drips to stain that coat.
*
The windswept world beyond the concrete and fluorescent lights and tulips and neon signs of New York lacks all those characteristics humans deem familiar and everyday. What would the world look like depicted only in black and white, where the slightest impression of colour comes through a rotted rust or a plain dun, leached of intensity? Imagine a dreary place filmed with a vintage noir appeal, rainy and wet, coated in a dusty finish, and oozing melancholy from every pore. That's death, above and beyond the reach of religious fervour. There are dimensions beyond life's primary realm, endless wastelands and empyreal cities in warm silver glows. Projected familiarity is a mistake.
Misdrawn shadows cavort at the edge of sight, misshapen figures haunting periphereal vision in a failed attempt to spook or terrorise. Gaunt shapes that haunt the darkness might reach out bitter, gnarled fingers shaped to claws by rigor mortis or the concentration camp brutality death can enforce on some. The great leveler is the death.
This place operates by its own rules. Until she knows them, she is at risk. But unlike the others, she still burns with the light of life concealed under the damp rags of her gown. The face of the three fates chooses to be young in this aspect, dusky-skinned and golden-eyed, hair worn in a damp brunette haze of waves. The stamp of her skin would put her as a Sinti or Roma victim in the East, feeding the great smokestack pyres at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz. No vertical blue and white stripes for her, but every step that touches the moist ground leaves an imprint stamped in defiance and denial. Not for you. Another step. I lived. Another step. Turn away, Lady Death, I am forsworn.
*
He watches her come with expectation, but no apparent curiosity. His hands are on his knees, and both of them are made of flesh. A young man's hands, albeit with a gunman's calluses - the way the lines of tension he wore are gone. The wound on his cheek doesn't seem to pain him. It's as if he hadn't noticed it.
No armaments at his belt, or slung over his shoulder. Then there's a flicker of something, in his face. Confusion. Hunger? Though the body here looks healthy enough.
*
Nothing in her clothing is modern, nor particularly easy to place in time. The stirring of those long skirts could well be a cloak or a cape, drifting off her shoulders. Incisions give proof to a feminine shape, cut to the brutal hourglass. Glimpses of metal, wood, and bone angle from waist to opposing hip, at least a pair of them coins. The ancient obolos payment of death, among others. One never knows what ferryman comes to meet the lost and the living, and the Styx is a river unkind even to those children not born of ancient Greek.
Wanda Maximoff, scion to a blighted line, raises her head to gaze at the taller man. Blood runs from the wound bright as cherries, and her own mouth is scarlet with pomegranates she bit into. Juices stain them in a glorious wash glistening bright. Hand lifted, she flicks a gesture to ward off the evil eye, as ancient as civilisation itself.
*
There's a sniper's patience in the way he regards her, for a long moment. Again, that glint of something, like the old amnesiac confusion, even here. Then he touches the line of blood on his face with a forefinger, points at her with a scarlet fingertip, rubs finger and thumb together as if asking for cash….and then sticks them between his lips, as if depositing a scrap of food there. Then lifts his eyebrows in a mute question. Did you get that, witch?
*
Deliverance in the midst of nothing. What is anything in this place, except visions of possibility and wonder? She extracts one of the lozenges from her belt, this one longer and more like a bone-white bit of birch. Murmuring something, it ignites at one end, and she hands him the tube to see what the soldier might do with it. Tobacco is a commodity beyond price in certain places, and even if something is ephemeral, it might prove insightful. Her fingers are dry where his are wet, the curve of her nails marked by a glittering finish that limns her entire body if he looks at her oddly. The wrong angle and the inherent transparency of her features might resolve itself for just a moment, and vanish again.
*
He turns it ruefully in his hand, looks at it….and then tucks it behind an ear, with the hand not stained. Not, it seems, what he was looking for. His gaze is fixed on her eyes, and there's pleading there. A moment where he holds hands out again, cupped. Then he points to the streak of blood on his face, which never seems to dry or clot or cease…and then points a finger at her. A beat of hesitation - Bucky was never any damn good at charades - then he turns one hand over, and mimes scratching across the delta of veins at the wrist.
*
Oh, there might be worse. She holds up her wrist, and there upon the bracelet might appear a charm. No mere charm: a small vial containing blood itself, a mirror to the one preserved upon cheek and body. The exact shade differs but with a critical matter of import: it's his blood from the glass, taken from a smear the night he escaped his cage. Some faint spell maintains its somewhat liquid state.
"«Speak.»" Has he voice, one silenced by death? She certainly has no trouble doing so in a dictate that any shade may understand. Though astral space is strange, so is death. English is the first choice though she is more competent in Russian or German. Might as well honour the man's birthplace. Of course, the choice to speak is a strange one, not without price. Life's blood, the means to open the way. It won't be the first time that she has to guess in unknown measure. She reaches out to touch the wound on his face first, fingers sanguinated. Next comes the dagger, one of many always carried. (Her father relies on it, no less.) The knife she plucks from a sheath at her boot and closes her hand around its blade, looking pointedly at him. Both hands are held out. The point is clear enough, at least to a damn Roma witch.
*
Gently, gently, he takes the hand closed around the dagger. Exerts just enough pressure to make the blood well in her palm….and then opens it, fastening his mouth to the cut for a moment. His lips are so cold….and there's that devouring eagerness for a moment, the greed of the dead for the quick. But he forces himself to stop and sit back, licking the last from the corner of his mouth. Then there's the first breath he's actually taken, some color fading back into him. Not much - he's weirdly like one of those old hand-tinted daguerreotypes. "Sorry," he says. "'s the rules." A student of the classics, Sergeant Barnes….or caught by some remnant of a parochial school education.
*
Cuts on her palm rise lightly, and her fingers are certain to bear the bloodied marks just as certainly. That knife is brutally sharp, almost sufficient to slice through fabric. It need be, when her arts rely so heavily on precision or slamming through the innately tough hide of demons of various kinds. Especially those in service of her maker, that other man called her father. For all the secrets are held in the blood, what might Bucky discover in partaking of her?
She tastes unquestionably of roses. Not the red roses of a bouquet in every market at this time of year, the black flowers grown only in one town in all the world, the age-old valleys of Halfeti. Spice and attar flow alongside the mana-supercharged through her pattern, and for a long moment the corresponding damage done to the girl appears on her meditating form. Such wounds ought to bleed ectoplasm, maybe they do. It could be the red iron-heavy ichor is only imagined rather than brought from someone who walks the deadlands, and he's drinking of her. In which case, the taste is chaos itself, the dreams of the dimension's most powerful Sorcerer carried in every hemoglobin lock, a gossamer strand of wildfire connected to Chthon himself, and so much less, so much more. She is possibility dancing, Persephone at the cusp of summer, the witch and the woman, the mother and the maiden.
"It often is. Pay the price. Better than a coin under your lips." Hence why she wears hers, but not on her eyes. The price of pomegranate is better than the Jovian covenant of lead.
*
"Yeah," he says. Breathing….it's not even, natural. He has to think about it, to get enough of the not-air of this place to speak. "So. I was Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. I remember you from the subway. You and the other two." He never learned her name, nor Stephen's nor Pietro's. "But you…..I didn't kill you, or I wouldn't be able to speak, now. So…..you came here for me, I guess?" The same guileless stare, dreamy, but not dull. "What now? I mean, if it's all the same to you, I'll wait for Steve. He'll be along directly."
*
The girl in the prison, the girl in SHIELD. She who walked between the agents and sat there, speaking in Russian. Deliverer of cigarettes. Not the little match girl, per se, but close enough. "Balance," she says simply, the answer as close to the truth as she might be willing to offer in a place where much higher powers keep watch because they can. "Your path does not stay here. His does not come here either. It is not the spot for you to stay."
*
That makes his brow furrow, but it's mostly resignation. "No?" he asks, and it's a hair plaintive. He wipes at his brow with the back of his wrist. "What do I do now, then?" He looks past her, to the mist beyond the fencing.
*
Wanda shakes her head. Whatever certainty drives her may have something to do with certain reports jotted down in SHIELD, privy knowledge from the other side of Hell where bureaucrats and journalists happily type up their stories. She slides the bloodied blade to her lips, washing away any hint of its copper traces. And then it goes right back into the sheath, though not without her vaguely suppressing a faint hint of distaste. Flattened mouth and the bitter copper tang are enough to leave that expression. Hand curled into a fist, she raises it to her opposite shoulder, allowing gravity and her heartbeat to do its work with the weird physics of the world in play. "No. I came here for you. What do you remember before this?"
*
IT's clear, before him, in a strange way. His gaze goes distant. "I….was Steve's friend. We went to war together. I….the Russians got me and they made me their slave. I did terrible things for them. But….when I came to America, there were those who remembered me, and tried to help me remember them. Sometimes it worked. But….I got out and away from them. I killed Steve, but someone saved him. There were bombs, but I didn't plant them. They caught me again…..you helped. And then….I was being moved….there were mutants. I don't know why. Ava killed me, to make sure I wouldn't be the Soldier anymore." His tone is only offhand. These memories lack force, lack light. Tales told about the life and times of a stranger.
*
Ava. That's news and the young woman narrows her eyes. But silence is held, even as the air around her trembles with her aura turning over, flickering burns that vanish through the brighter end of the spectrum. Wanda takes in the story and nods. "You were shot to stop being him. Conditioned." A thoughtful flicker in her gaze, pushing through the distant spin of thoughts. "Are you waiting here? Has anyone else come?"
*
"I am waiting, and no, no one else has come," he affirms, still in that calm voice. His….it's corner-of-the-eye subtle, but there's a corona around him of what looks like smoke, roiling upwards from his head. "He's dead, the Soldier. He was only a construct." Then, reciting, in a smaller voice, rather than singing, "I've got no strings to hold me down, to make me fret or make me frown. I had strings, but now I'm free. There are no strings on me."
*
"You are free of him?" This is something to report back, later, and something to acknowledge, now. "You are yourself." No strings. The man is dead, the ghost is gone. Long live the man, not the ghost. Her fingers ache and her palm burns, but these things mark a truth laid out there. A shimmer of smoke gives her curious regard, mouth tightening slightly. "You wait for him. Captain America. You wait for many things. It could be a while. What are you thinking about?"
*
Bucky shrugs, fractionally. "Here, I am. I left my body on the street. He…he was something they did to it. Like a parasite. Or a mask." The blue eyes are calm as stones now. "Yeah. Well, I'm waiting for Steven. When he gets here, he won't be Captain America anymore. That's a costume and a job, and when Steve is ash, too, someone else will be the Captain." He turns his palms up. "I have time. All the time there is. I know there's more, I can feel the path. But I want to wait for Steve. He has a full life to live, but I can wait."
*
A blink follows. "The Soldier." That takes a moment to translate and parse; fortunately, she holds her tongue long enough to understand his meaning. "You had the right to a full life. A chance." Her fingertips skim a pattern in the air, not enough to distort the mist, but crooked and determine a way. How many lives end too soon? How many tangents of their life interconnect with one another, severed? Questions without answer from a power she doesn't dare to question. "I am sorry. We tried. It was not enough then. Many times the fates play unfairly and you have been treated wrongly." It bothers her. Her voice says as much. "When you went rather than let everyone in SHIELD to die, I liked you more than SHIELD. All its agents nearly."
*
Carol and her son? Well. That's another matter.
*
"You did. That's all anyone can ask for," The voice, though distant, is somehow more gentle. "You were as kind to me as you could be. I think you for that." He glances down and to the left. "So did all my buddies in the war. But so many of 'em didn't come back. What can you do? I'll see them, soon enough. When Steve gets here, we'll go on. And maybe I'll see all those I killed, when I was him. There's no hell for him, no purgatory. But that's their right, too. At least there will be no more."