Reality in Motion

being better

"Where is the nearest metro station?" Bucky asked in Romanian.

"Two blocks down and to the left." she answered him easily, having mainly spoke the language with him for the past three months.

"And what time does it come?" he asked, switching to French rather smoothly. Her brow twitched for a moment, working through his question and pulling the language from a corner of her mind,

"It depends on the line you want to take." she responded in the same language. The corner of his mouth quirked up, which Q knew meant he was going to try and trick her.

"I'm going to be taking the blue line." he told her in what she thought was French again, but she paused before responding. The word for blue was similar sounding in both French and Italian. Her brain took a second to work through the rest of the sentence before settling on that he hadn't made the switch based on the a few other pronunciations.

"Then it comes every fifteen minutes." she responded confidently in French. Bucky grinned at her; she clearly got it correct and he continued,

"I guess I should leave soon then." he finished in a different language. But before she could open her mouth to respond, Dawson's annoyed groan filled in.

"Jesus, Latin?" he asked in English with raised eyebrows, "Nobody speaks that anymore - hence the whole dead language thing." he raised his hand up and waved it a bit. Q tried not to smile while Bucky just looked mildly confused.

"You know Latin?" he asked, switching back to English. Dawson gave him a very familiar duh look, having gotten over the whole "former Hydra assassin" thing a long time ago. Now he just treated Bucky like he treated almost everyone else: like an annoyance.

"Uh, yes. Basis of every program ever." he twirled the screwdriver in between his fingers, "But I don't go around speaking it like some idiot from the dark ages." he made a face and then gave a pointed look at Q, who rolled her eyes.

"We're just trying to figure out how many languages I know." she reminded him with a point to her head, "Apparently it's a lot."

"Apparently you can help a lot of tourists get to the train." he shot back, pulling down the corners of his mouth as he teased her a bit. She gave him an unamused look before crumpling up a piece of paper and tossing it at him. He batted it away easily and gave a triumph huff of a laugh. Bucky watched the two of them interact, being reminded of the friendship between him and Steve. Longing filled him for a moment, then quickly dissipated when a shock snaked down his metal arm, jolting him back to the present. He glanced down to see that Dawson had resumed his tinkering with the metal prosthetic - something that Q expected would happen at some point once Bucky became more comfortable around him; she knew how interested Dawson was in the technology behind Bucky's arm.

And it didn't seem like Bucky minded. She had heard him ask Dawson a few questions about the arm itself or the two of them getting into long winded discussions about it. Almost like he didn't know certain things about how the arm worked, like he had just treated it as an arm that was a little more enhanced than the other parts of him. It also amused her to learn about how much a science nerd Bucky was.

Over the last month, things had settled. With the help of Bucky, she had slowly been working through her Hydra trauma and learning what the side effects were. While Dawson had been able to help her in the beginning, being with someone who had much more firsthand experience under the restraints of Hydra was much more helpful. Bucky had been able to explain certain things or figured out other things that ended up making much more sense after he connected the dots.

And in a way, it had helped him begin to work through his trauma as well. Besides having little nerd conversations with Dawson, Q had given him the research she had done over the years in her search for him, letting him page through the documents and journal at his own pace. They had talks, not unlike the ones she had with Steve all those years before, both of them contributing to the conversation about Hydra. He was healing, slowly. They both were.