Rescue from Bakerstreet - Layla and James

[worthallthis]

Continued from here.

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[worthallthis]

"I haven't had kebabs before," he admits after a moment, squinting at the plates on offer. "I've had lots of rice." Rice is cheap and filling, and though he can't make it himself, given his lack of a stable kitchen situation or even any understanding of how it's made, he can get a lot of it at take-out places, and it was one of the easiest things on his stomach in the earliest days, recovering from the drugs.

He shakes himself a little out of memory. "I'm sure it's good." Then he finally drifts over to the table to sit down and try these kebab things curiously.

[scarabwings]

She gives him a little smile, and sets a cup of coffee down at his place. She's on her second, too much caffeine for this time of night, but it's been weeks since her circadian rhythm actually knew what the hell it was doing. If she's not careful, she'll wind up fully nocturnal.

"I'm making a supply run tomorrow. Let me know if there's anything you'd like, and I'll pick it up for you."

[worthallthis]

He looks blank for a moment, staring at the coffee, trying to compute what someone else might pick up for a supply run for him. "I'll think about it," he finally comes up with. Maybe he can make a list once he verifies what he still has. "I need to get my stuff. I can do that tonight."

Though "tonight" will be soon, here. The sun is going down, and it'll be dark before too long.

[scarabwings]

The blank expression is a little unsettling, and coupled with his slightly-forlorn appearance, damp and bundled up in the overcoat, it's enough to stir faint embers of anger in the pit of her stomach.

What had they done to this man?

She swallows the question - too prying for so short an acquaintance - and nods. "All right," she says. "After you've eaten."

She eats her own meal in silence, sunk deep enough in thought that she doesn't feel the need to fill it with conversation. Only when they're both done with the food and she's sipping the last dregs of her coffee does she venture, "You said there'd have to be rules."

[worthallthis]

He's been cradling his coffee mug, not thinking much of anything, which startles him a little when she speaks and he realizes it. Not even threat analysis. Apparently he no longer considers her a threat. Huh.

Then the words filter through, and he shakes himself a little. "Yes. Rules. To keep you safe. If I have nightmares. Do not touch me or try to wake me up. I might wake up and try to hurt you without knowing it's you. If I start shaking or the arm makes loud rattling noises, do not touch me. If I start speaking in another language and act confused, don't touch me, either." He pauses. "Actually. Probably a good idea not to touch me no matter what unless I ask you to." Which he kind of doubts will happen, but he should make that exception available just in case.

[scarabwings]

Layla nods solemnly, though that spark of anger flares a little higher. "Okay," she says. "I can manage that. With one caveat. If you're hurt or out cold, I'm--"

She pauses briefly, looking him over, and amends what she was going to say to, "I'm going to at least try to haul you somewhere safe, even if you're not able to ask. It shouldn't come up, but just so we're clear."

[worthallthis]

He blinks owlishly, then looks from her, down at himself, and actually quirks a small smile. "You can try," he agrees. "If I'm not conscious. If I am semi-conscious and don't know what's happening, and I will try to hurt you." He remembers now, clearly, hurling techs away from him in confusion. "In that case, just shout at me until I move myself."

[scarabwings]

Layla frowns at that, biting the inside of her lip as she turns it over and over in her head, before finally nodding her agreement. "All right," she says. "If that's what you need me to do, I've got some practice shouting at people."

Usually not people who are hurt and should, in any sane world, be helped instead of yelled at, but she'll make do with what she has.

After a moment, she asks, "What languages do you speak?"

[worthallthis]

Being yelled at is absolutely more familiar than being helped. "I don't know." He looks vaguely apologetic about this. "A lot. Usually if I need a language for a mission, I just start speaking it, but I don't remember how many I actually have." He pauses, then admits, "Sometimes my accent and slang is out of date. Like I learned it decades ago. But mostly I can blend in."

[scarabwings]

"Those tend to vary by region anyway," Layla says. Then, because she's curious, adds in Arabic, "The Arabic spoken in my home city and the Arabic spoken in Morocco are very different."

[worthallthis]

He switches languages smoothly, almost automatically upon hearing her do so: "I speak Arabic. Not sure which region. I might know a dialect or two." He can imagine, knowing what he knows of HYDRA and the world history since the 40s, that he'd been inserted into more than one Middle Eastern country, and so would need to know how to understand the local variations. Though his blue eyes would have stood out no matter how well he spoke.

His own accent does in fact sound closer to Tehran than Cairo.

[scarabwings]

"You almost sound Iranian," she says, switching back to English. "Or at least like you learned there, for long enough to gain fluency. You really don't remember the learning process for any of your languages?"

French, this time, with a heavy Parisian influence.

[worthallthis]

He hitches his right shoulder, half a shrug. "They mostly come from HYDRA. So I would rather not remember how they drilled me in them. HYDRA wiped my memories pretty regularly, anyway. That one, though. I think I knew that one before." He remembers a face. A hat. A manic smile. An accent. A sense of fond protectiveness. Nothing else.

The Unsnappening

[worthallthis]

It's been three weeks since the battle with Thanos. Since everyone came back from not existing for five years.

It's been six days days since Steve set things in motion to clear his name, and got him set up with an apartment in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, of all places, and impressed on him that he belongs at home, that this would help settle him in his absence.

It's been three days since Steve appeared on a bench outside the ruined Avengers complex, old and gray and having lived a life without him. Beyond the end of the line. He hasn't left that apartment since he got back to it, after walking away from... all that. It's fine. It's not like he has a job he's supposed to get to, and they have this great thing called delivery in the future, so he's not going to starve. His "court-mandated therapy session" isn't for another couple days. It's fine. He's go nowhere to be.

When somebody knocks on the door, he's got the tv on, at a low volume, watching news coverage of the recovery efforts. He almost doesn't answer it, but in the end he figures, it might be Avengers business or something, and if it isn't, he can just shut the door again. It's not like he's turned his phone on in days. It's a shiny new one, because his old one had been disconnected in the past five years, and nobody has tried calling his kimoyo beads.

Layla might take a second to recognize him, because sometime on the second day, he chopped off all his hair, leaving a haphazardly short cut, and he looks like he hasn't actually slept in a couple days.

[scarabwings]

It takes Layla nearly three weeks to track him down. It's not an unreasonable amount of time; the sudden return of approximately four billion people has thrown the entire world into chaos. It's still enough that she'd begun to worry that he'd returned to Wakanda, which may not be a closed country any more, but is still incredibly difficult to get a visitor's visa for, and even harder to pull intel out of.

For a second, when he opens the door, she wonders if her intel might have been wrong - but the face beneath that raggedly cropped hair is familiar.

For a second, she wonders if the death rolls had been wrong, because he looks like he's lived every second of the past five years, all of them punishing.

"James," she says, that one word heavy with equal parts warmth and sympathy. She doesn't ask 'are you okay', and she doesn't ask 'what's wrong', because the answers to both those questions seem screamingly obvious. She just opens her arms in offering, the rules he'd laid down the first night they'd met still ingrained enough that she doesn't hug him by force, despite the immediate impulse to do so.

[worthallthis]

He gapes at her for a second, somehow both amazed that she's here and amazed that he'd basically forgotten she might still be out there in the past few weeks. Honestly, he had a lot of other things on his mind... and he hasn't really wanted to look up those few people he knew and cared for before the snap, afraid to find out what might have happened to them.

But he only gapes for a second before he practically dives into the offered hug, wrapping his arms around her, back. "Layla. Oh my god."

[scarabwings]

"Hi," she says quietly, arms closing around him, warm and solid despite the disparity in their heights. She shifts one hand up to stroke his hair, touch gentle, like she can soothe some of the weariness and hurt away.

"Sorry I didn't come sooner. You're not an easy man to find."

[worthallthis]

"I didn't think anyone was looking or I might've been more easy," he says with a weak chuckle. He tucks his head into her shoulder, even if it means stooping a little. "Anyone who didn't know where they stashed me, already, anyway."

It feels a little like being stashed. Like Steve thought if he just put him into the city he'd bloom back into the person he used to be. Or he didn't even think about it and just did the easiest thing. The thing that soothed his conscience.

He gives a shuddering little breath and lets Layla go. "Come in, come in. There's, uh, not much in here, but you can at least sit down." Television, couch, side table, blankets on the floor. Piano in a far room, left over from the previous tenant or some crazy idea of Steve's, he doesn't know which. No decorations to speak of.

[scarabwings]

She steps inside, linking her arm with his like she's a little bit worried he'll evaporate again if she goes too far. She is. Everyone is. Half the world gone by magic, lost for five years, then returned by the same? It's going to take more than a few weeks for anyone to trust that the people who've been returned will stay that way.

She takes in the sparse furnishings, brow knitting in concern when she notes the blankets on the floor. It puts her in mind of a safehouse, one chosen in haste and used only out of necessity.

"Not sure if you're planning to stay yet?"

[worthallthis]

"Government provided," Bucky mutters, shoulders hunching up a little, not quite shrinking from her arm but giving the impression he wants to make himself smaller at the question. He knows what it looks like. He knows what he probably looks like, with the awkward haircut and the empty apartment. "Steve wanted me in Brooklyn. So he bullied them into giving me this."

Before he left.

He shakes himself a little. "You want tea? Or coffee?"

[scarabwings]

Steve wanted. She doesn't miss that. Doesn't miss, either, the way he seems to shrink in on himself, like he's trying to disappear. She squeezes his arm, and bites the inside of her cheek to keep her opinion of the choice of space from escaping.

"Coffee's good," she says. "I've been staying in London the past while, so tea's just about everywhere."

[worthallthis]

"Good choice." He gives her arm a little squeeze, then slips free to round the half-wall separating his kitchen from the rest of the living space. "Were you--"

He pauses, looks at her sidelong, uncertain if there's some kind of taboo against asking, before shoving his face into a cabinet to retrieve the coffee can and barrelling on with the question. He needs to know. "Were you snapped? Or whatever they're calling it out there?" He refuses to use the word Blipped. And dusted sounds too real, when he can still remember what it felt like to dissolve into ash.

[scarabwings]

She leans against the half-wall, giving him a little space, as much as she'd rather stick close.

"No," she says. "Neither was Marc. We were lucky, in that respect." A lot of people weren't. Everyone - or nearly everyone - had lost someone. Some people had lost everyone. Looking at the devastation, she can understand why so many people had believed it was punishment, was designed to maximize pain.

[worthallthis]

That's a relief. A huge relief, really: she wasn't alone. She didn't have to come back and rebuild. And apparently her marriage lasted through the whole thing. (He's not really surprised. Marc might be an ass, but he's at least devoted.)

So some of the worried tension goes out of him, making him look more like he's slumped than before. "Good. You-- you look good, you know." Not changed, like Steve was. He puts the kettle on the stove, and leans on the counter, watching her. "How much do you know about what happened?"

[scarabwings]

"You look exhausted," she says, not ungently. It makes her heart ache a little, the way he holds himself, like something fundamental has been torn out of him.

"I know the official story about how it started - Thanos, the battle in Wakanda to try to stop him, a magical artifact that obliterated...god, half of life in the universe."

She still can't get her head around that. The number's too big, too all-encompassing. The effects on Earth alone had been shocking, and there she could actually see the holes where half the population should have been.

"How it ended is a bit muddier - I know Thanos came back, and that there was another battle, and that the Avengers managed to reverse what he'd done somehow. I know it cost them. But the details have been sparse, at least on my side of the Atlantic." Not least because half the news time is eaten up with the direct effects of a sudden doubling of the population. "I'm guessing the reality isn't nearly that neat?"