|| are you still happening there, in your body?

   Podsolnechnik. Bucky's brow furrows as he looks at his palm, at the black "Magic" marker sunflower drawn on it. Flexes the muscles a little. Watches the flower move. Watches —  a lot slower — as a thin beam of morning sun strays across it.

   They've been on the couch a good while before this sunrise. One of those things where it's tough to tell if the day started too early, or the night ended too soon.

   He's got a sort of an urge to stretch. But, well. This couch doesn't always give up its prisoners lightly.

  For a long time after he speaks, there’s no other sound, except that she can hear their breaths. Hers harsh and too-shallow. As her eyes finally adjust, she can see the purple light she’s casting on the sheets, on the wall behind the bed, in Bucky’s shadow melding into hers.

  He doesn’t ask her more questions about it. She’s grateful for that. The subject touches too many other things that are so hard to talk about, soul-baring and exhausting and demoralizing. 

  When she had nightmares as a child, she didn’t wake up her parents for comfort, or only when she was very little. If her parents hadn’t been too smart not to notice, she wouldn’t have told them every time she was sick, either, or tired, or upset. Even then, Alice had not wanted anyone else to know. As the cracks in the armor have grown bigger, so have her secrets. But she didn’t have the choice not to tell Bucky. Besides lying, and she doesn’t lie to him.

  Hasn’t come back to bite her yet.

     She nods, takes a catching breath at the pain, and holds out her hand to him.   “Help me up?”

     The silence presses in on him --- but he can’t say that it’s so much as oppressive. Can’t say quite why, either. He just leans there at the edge of the bed --- shifts only once when his hip starts to go numb. Pays Alice watchful and concerned but carefully indirect attention. The way you keep an eagle eye on someone, without staring.

     Instead he watches the window. The way the curtain moves in a breath of air from the city. Small summer exhale. The ripple of the night-glow in the fabric.

     The other glow, that comes from in here.

     When she finally moves, he moves again. Quick, but smooth, gathering a handful of the blankets and tossing them back. Clearing the space. Then he’s going up on a knee, a little -- mattress creaks beneath the weight, again --- to make sure he’s got a stable position from which to anchor her.

     His flesh hand’s warm, gentle, firm, all at once, as he clasps hers.

     “I got you,”  he says. Soft.

     He could lift her. If she needed him to. But she knows that. The choice is all up to her. Every step. He’s just a brace. A counterpoint. Ready to help her do anything she decides. Stand. Get back in bed. Hell, if she chooses to stay on the floor... He’ll join her there.

     “Fun time, right?”

  She isn’t missing a limb, but she had — has — a whole second skin. The worst thing her body ever went through wasn’t a battle, or with the Reach; it wasn’t even the Negotiator’s teeth. It was when scarab burrowed into her spine, and the shell bubbled up over her, and she was terrified she would drown in it.

  Armoring up never hurt as much again as the first time. But her body remembers.

  Her fingers find purchase in a fistful of sheets and dig in. Breathe in, breathe out. She isn’t sure whether to focus on that internal rhythm or on what Bucky is saying, as if either one is really enough to distract her.

  His words almost bewilder her. She couldn’t say why.

     “No,”   she says,   “there was — no one who knew.”   What a lonely thing to be honest about, after so long.

     It doesn’t surprise him. That nobody knows.  ( Knew. He does. Now. )  But for a selfish half-second he can’t help thinking about the contrast between them. She’d never had anyone to tell when she was hurting. And he’d been surrounded by people who knew about every second of his pain --- but didn’t care. Mostly, maybe, because they’d been causing it on purpose.

     Something in his brain prompts him to say  Thank you,  for telling him. Because some part of him that actually likes being alive keeps trying to remind him to be grateful for every little part of it.

     “I could try.”  At this moment, in the quiet dark, he’s braver than he often feels. He’s always so delicate with her boundaries. Careful, because she was careful with him, first.  “It helps. Me.”

     His brow furrows as another part of his brain tests that to see if it’s a lie. Results are mixed.

                                        A  sometimes  is heavily implied, at the very least.

open.

     “I don’t actually… I don’t know, exactly? How old I’m turning.”

     He remembers reading, somewhere,  “You’re as old as you feel.”  If that’s true, some days must rank him right up there with Methuselah. And while it’s usually her that’s passing comments on his age, hey, it’s only fair he gets to pick on himself once in a while. Maybe set himself up for her to take some more shots.

     “I’m curious… what you think… is a good way to take that…”   There’s a little humor in her voice. A little. Her temple still pressed into the mattress, Alice lifts her arm over the edge of the bed and, with a wince, pulls herself up higher. The question is surprisingly difficult to answer, not just because words aren’t grinding out so easy.   “It’s. It’s not unheard of.”

  But it is rare. The whole time Fynn was staying with her, it only happened once, and he wasn’t home to worry about it. She can’t imagine that would’ve played out well. Fynn reacts badly to threats he can’t punch. 

  Not that she’s in danger. Nothing that dramatic. The purple-blue glow that began by pulsing has slowed to a steadier, radiating light, and Alice racks her tired brain for the right explanation.

     “Phantom pain. It’ll pass.”   It’d better, because it is going to blind out every other thought in her head, and there’s got to be some kind of upper limit on reliving pain.

     His lips pull into a flat line. His eyes empty --- if only briefly --- of the mixed curiosity and concern. It’s that still, quiet face that says  I know. I know what that’s like.  And he doesn’t like that he knows. Or that she’s suffering.

     “I get that sometimes.”  Servos whir and plates clink softly as his metal fingers flex in the sheets. As if the mere mention threatens to re-create the bone-deep ache in bones that haven’t been there for a really long time.

     Bucky goes quiet for a few seconds too long, then says,  “I’m sorry.”

     On the wake of the phrase comes the conviction that his mother taught him to say that, when people around him were hurting. It doesn’t feel like enough, though. Not in the dead-center of his chest where he feels like it should be most important. He’s not sure it ever has.

     “Does anything help?”  Make it go away, that is. He’s suddenly thinking of his own flesh fingers, digging into the tough, scarred skin at his shoulder right before it turns to metal, rubbing so deep into the synthetic muscles beneath that either the phantom pain eventually fades away, or he gives himself new bruises, trying.  “Massage?”

  Alice opens her eyes to look at him, while Khaji Ren murmurs jumbled codes. Maybe they’re meant to be soothing. But her brain is too addled by sleep to make them out.

  She tries to inhale through her nose. A subconscious part of her is afraid if she opens her mouth, to get enough air, she’ll just start screaming. So she doesn’t say yeah, I can hear you, either. Just nods.

  3 am, August… pizza. She knows where she is; at least, she can tell it isn’t the dream ( that the dream must have been a dream ), even if the image in front of her won’t match up with what her body wants her to believe. Her body is still dreaming. Alice flexes her fingers where her hand is wrapped against her side. Not sharp where they dig in. No claws. But it feels like she’s in armor. And a burning sensation is spreading across her back, fanning out from scarab. 

  He’s still and steady and rock-solid. She doesn’t know how to be. With a long hiss through her teeth, Alice finds the edge of the covers and tries again to throw it off, so at least she can move

  If she hadn’t already pushed herself to the edge of the bed, that might have been fine. Instead she slides off — the drop to the floor short but jarring — and sends a pile of books into a landslide.

  So she’s definitely awake, now.

    “For fuck’s sake,”   she starts again, and this time it catches in a laugh-sob. Alice buries her head in the side of the mattress. It hurts to move, too much to try climbing back up right away. Everything hurts. She can still feel it, the teeth in her back, and all along her spine it’s glowing through her shirt.

    A long, ragged breath.   “I wake you up?”

     And --- as he was afraid of --- there she goes.

     Bucky’s eyes tighten into a wince at the thud. Thinks: shit. And the word rides on the leading edge of a dark water wave of guilt. More thoughts have already drowned in the rising flood, and bob to the surface like corpses. Like --- that wouldn’t have happened, if he wasn’t here... If she had her bed to herself...

     He slides himself across the mattress on his hip, feeling the bed cave under his weight as he does. Leans on one elbow, and takes a look over the edge.

     It’s even darker down there, and though his eyes are better than you’d expect, he doesn’t expect to see much. He also doesn’t expect to be able to make out her shape pretty clearly, on account of how her back  ( scarab --- it’s gotta be the scarab )  is lit up like a movie palace marquee trying to pull in a crowd.

     “Wasn’t very asleep,”  he admits, after a second. Still trying to process those lights. To figure out what he should do.  “ --- So only technically.”

     He lets his arm fold under him, so’s he’s not looming over her. Settles mostly onto his forearm and chest. Lets his chin rest on the back of his flesh hand, small bones and tendons rolling under the point of it. Watches her, as he’s been doing.

     Concern is present, but also distant. Like as happens more often than not. Most of his emotions are drifting, like small boats tagging along on lines behind a bigger ship: connected, but not immediately to hand.

  A lightning strike of pain lights up her spine.

  No! I won’t do it, I —

  The Negotiator’s claw wouldn’t even have to touch her. Khaji Ren doesn’t let her disobey ( not really, it can’t ) and trying to always hurts. But he still seizes her by the curve of her neck and shoulder, wrenching her within range of his teeth.

  Alice. But that. That’s not Negotiator, who never uses her name. Solntse. Definitely not. She would pelt toward the voice, if she knew where it came from. It falls through the haze of claws and teeth like rain. Wake up.

  Her eyes fly open. She starts to bolt up and falters, weighed back by wound-up blankets. She struggles to cast them off, wide-eyed, panting. When she opens her mouth, it’s without thinking about what to say or how to say it. It doesn’t matter, though, because what comes out is just —

  Reach language. Which she can’t even make without Khaji Ren. Doesn’t want to make. She breaks off as if she cut her tongue on its jagged edges.

  The moment Alice realizes she’s awake is clear from how still her body goes. She squeezes her eyes shut, her sweat-damp breastbone still rising and falling hard. She tries again, and for a moment her words are still nothing. Just scarab static.

     “<<//:——>>, f–fuck. Fuck.”

     It’s still a strong, protective instinct to reach out for her. This bed is small --- she keeps thrashing around like that she’s liable to take herself blankets and all right off onto the floor. But Bucky represses it. Keeps pressing it down, as he sits, tangled hair around his face, at her side. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t talk. Just watches.

     He’s not sure what to expect, but he tries to be ready for anything. Because at least from personal experience, he knows in dreams like this, anything can happen.

     Still doesn’t make him fully ready for the noises she makes. His eyes, a shadowed gray-blue in the dark of the room, flicker.

     He’s heard a lot of things come out of human mouths.  ( Lots of screams and cries, wails and moans. From himself. From those he’s hurt. )

     But that... doesn’t sound like something that should.

     “Yeah,”  he agrees, softly, when she finally says something he can understand.  “At least.”

     Bucky’s quiet a few more seconds. Still motionless. For some, he supposes, sitting that long without moving would be hard. He’s good at it.  “Can you hear me?”  It strikes him a far more logical question than Are you okay.  “It’s...”  A glance at the still-dark window and a guess is the best he has outside of reaching for his new phone. Still doesn’t want to move that much.  “About three in the morning. It’s August. We had pizza for dinner.”

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.