Re: X-Men Medlab; Jean & Bucky
[The smile was kind, and he watched it for a moment, openly filing it away without returning the expression. Here was a strange woman, unlike anything he could still remember - the nurturing kind. She smiled sweetly and clucked and gave him water. This close, perhaps she would know the low, cool radiation of suspicion from him, uncontrolled. There had never been a time he could remember when kindness this overt hadn't been juxtaposed with some kind of punishment, building a manual kind of loyalty, the loyalty to the one bright spot in a dark place, to the people who brought the water and blankets and ice, the dressings for wounds. Salves in small pots that stung for the burns on the skin at his temples, when his muscles still twitched from long bouts under the helmet of the filthy Machine, clamped into his skull and the spine, and the buzzing and the humming.
He blinked, splitting from that thought as she was midway through asking him whether it hurt much. He had lost the moment while she was talking, dropped into one of the holes in his own head. It was the dizziness, and the sterile room, and the metal bed and chirping machines, and the kind, probing fingers. Combinations of familiar stimulus. That was the point. The fingers of his right hand were tight into his palm, and he released them one at a time as she peeled the ice pack away.
She winced when she saw him.] You do that enough and you're gonna give a guy a complex. [It was a full sentence, at least, surprisingly casual against the backdrop of short clipped sentences and dropped pronouns, and the humor helped clear the cobwebs a little.] No. Doesn't hurt.
[He didn't think much about his own face. He'd gone so many decades without looking at it that seeing it in the mirror now unnerved him. His hair still hung long, because it might make him easier to spot as the Soldier, but with it cut short he was a face from books and online encyclopedias and newsreels. And he didn't know that face, didn't know the person who owned it.
She smoothed his hair from his forehead, and the continuous, low-level suspicion abated slightly - it probably never really went away. The cold compress did feel pretty good, but it was the human touch that made him pause and take a breath.]
She didn't want me there. [A slow blink.] Thought I'd come to hurt her, I think. Blasted me a few times, pinned me to the floor with some...spell. Her energy, the thing she does. [His gaze focused a little.] She didn't seem all the way there. And not just because she made the room a greenhouse somewhere, either.