verb.
To come or go back to a place or person.
noun.
The firing of a weapon to counter a shooter's shot.
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They recoiled from their pasts, and in doing so found each other.
But the universe isn't kind enough to let a moment of peace last.
It took se...
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He was strong.
Kat already knew that for a fact, both physically and mentally, Bucky Barnes was one of the strongest people she had ever met, but she was reminded of it so poignantly now.
Because the undoing of his programming would certainly have broken a lesser man. She was sure it would have broken her if she had been in his place. Where he drew his strength from, she couldn't say. She wasn't vain nor naïve enough to think that he drew it from her, because in truth seeing what he was going through made her a nervous wreck. She didn't let it show – not outwardly, but seeing the agony he was put through on the days he spent in the lab, and then the days and weeks of recovery... It made her wake up in a cold sweat some nights, anxiously slipping from her hut to stand in his doorway and listen to his breathing, or to find him seated outside that doorway, sleeplessly watching the stars – either way, she had to reassure herself that he was alright.
Sometimes he wasn't. Sometimes she found him breathlessly clutching at his hair with his single hand, trying to steady the rise and fall of his chest as he shook off some nightmare, some memory. On those nights she would sink to his side, carefully untangling those shaking fingers from his dark locks, soothingly linking her hand with his and letting him squeeze out his anguish through that point of contact. Silently, until he found the words he needed to release from his mind. Sometimes he didn't find them, but she still stayed until the sun rose. She was beginning to see more sunrises in Wakanda than she had seen anywhere else in the world.
She couldn't bring herself to resent any of it though, not when it was becoming apparent that HYDRA's grip on Bucky's mind was slowly beginning to loosen. Since that first night, the night the memory of a trigger being programmed had hit them both like a sledgehammer, things had begun to progress. Like the cracking of a dam, weakened by age and time, trickles of memory were beginning to seep to the forefront of his mind. The walls that had prevented him from recalling his programming were crumbling. Some days he would remember with an alarming jolt, waking from a nightmare where he had been forced to live through it again. Shuri had theorised it could be a number of factors that would illuminate a memory, it could he his heartrate rising like it had done the night he had recalled the first one or he could be triggered by some faintly linked image or sensation.
What Kat was certain of was the fact that what had been done to him, leaving him so haunted by these ghosts, so afraid to fully live would shatter her heart with each new reminder. Sparks spitting from the fire after a fresh log was dropped into the embers had him staggering back from the flames, and when Kat had followed him to the riverside she found him frantically checking his skin for burns, but finding only the memory of them. The physical scars had long since faded, the internal ones remaining seared in place, in the form of a trigger. Pech. One morning she was disturbed in her examination of a broken wheel spoke on a cart by the distant sound of gasping coughs and choking. By the time she had found him he had barely managed to get his breathing under control, slumped against the outer wall of his hut, shuddering despite the heat of the day and the towel he had wrapped himself in. It wasn't until she had managed to shut off the still-running shower in the little solar cubicle behind the hut and had lowered herself to the ground beside him that he had offered the only explanation he could. Vozrashcheniye n rodinu. He rarely needed to elaborate for Kat to figure out what they had done to him. HYDRA had burned him, drowned him, all in the pursuit of meticulously carving away every facet of the man who had been James Buchanan Barnes.
