Immediately, she searched his face for some betrayal of what he might be thinking. As ever, Wanda found Barnes impossibly difficult to read on the surface; she had never used her abilities to touch his mind for fear of what she might find. Some depths, like the cave pool of ocean water a few feet away, were best left unexplored. Maximoff stopped fidgeting with her clothes, and let her hands lower to her sides as she met Bucky’s eyes.
Barnes had a way of looking at people, it was like he seemed to see passed or through them, as though they weren’t even there. She’d met other men like that in Sokovia. Insurgents who’d been broken by army torture, the other rebels who’d subjected themselves to Hydra’s experiments before their enhancement procedures and their lives were terminated. They were people who didn’t quite live in this world anymore. Having seen, experienced, and done the kinds of horrible things that a person can’t come back from. They lived in a world of ghosts, detached from those who didn’t know what they knew. Perhaps that’s all that death was, anyway. The curse of enlightenment.
There was something unsettling in how he told her he couldn’t let her go. Something final and perhaps a touch more chilling than Bucky may have intended. Wanda made no attempt to argue, or ask his reasons. Perhaps because a part of her knew, and had known, since the moment she’d grabbed Rogue’s wrist and fled with her. But that didn’t mean she was willing or ready to admit it to herself, and so without a word, she turned her attention to the path behind Barnes and started towards it. She could go. She could.