July, 2014.

South of Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom.

"Stop wiggling, Buck," I scolded with a laugh. He straightened his back and tried not to move.

"I'm sorry. That sort of – well, it tickles," he told me. He acted as if it were embarrassing to admit. I carefully pulled my fingers out of the middle of Bucky's bicep and wiped off the layer of lithium grease that came with it. I made a mental note to ask Gerald to order some to replace what had come out while I'd been working. He was always willing to order whatever I asked him to, including a set of three 'collectible' Avengers notebooks to go with Bucky's latest book. He really only wanted the Captain America one, but I wanted the one with Bruce Banner hulking out. So we agreed to take one each and keep the third, featuring Thor, as a spare.

"That's so cool," I said excitedly.

"You're enjoying this too much," he muttered.

"There's a very small number of people who know what's on the inside of your arm, Buck. I want to get a better look at it," I reminded him. I took up my pen and began drawing the first most basic lines of a sketch of Bucky's arm. After a particularly strange conversation with Gerald, he had agreed to order a pad of tracing paper for me. I had the first bits and pieces of several layers and angles of Bucky's metal arm spread out across multiple pages. They laid on top of one another to form a very rough approximation of what I saw in front of me.

"What do you think?" he asked. He looked down at his bicep and tried to see for himself. "And don't say really cool."

"Damn, you took the words right out of my mouth," I said sarcastically. "It's incredible. This technology is decades ahead of what I'd expect to find. Let me put these dermal plates back into place, and I'll open up your forearm so you can see what I mean."

I did as I said and began fitting the exterior plates of his arm back into place. They went together like a puzzle, but I had done this same thing three times already. I was an expert now.

"I can't get this piece to fit," I grumbled. Maybe not an expert. "Extend your arm."

Bucky stretched his arm out, and the piece clicked into place. He laid his forearm down on the dining table and watched as I began unlocking another set of dermal plates. He left his sleeve pushed up on his shoulder.

"Tell me if anything hurts," I reminded him.

"I've told you twenty times already that it doesn't hurt, Gail," he laughed.

"You've told me fourteen times actually," I corrected good-naturedly.

"That gets a little annoying, you know?" Bucky joked.

"I know," I answered smugly.

I sat another row of plating on the dining table and moved my hands out of the way so Bucky could see inside his arm. I knew he had seen it before, but he had admitted to barely knowing what he was looking at. I took out the layer of circuitry immediately under the outer plates, and Bucky's fingers twitched as they lost part of the signal from his brain.

"God, that crap gets everywhere," Bucky groaned half-heartedly. He made a childlike face of disgust as he saw the layer of white grease. But he was smiling.

"Good ole lithium grease. It's better for metal on metal lubrication," I explained. "Just like your arm."

"I can't move my pinky," he followed up.

"I took out one of the circuit plates that acts as an artificial nervous system," I told him. "I guess that one controls your pinky entirely. There are others all up and down your arm, so I think they have built in redundancies."

I pushed a bundle of wiring out of the way and tapped on a lithium covered metal rod. With another moment of rearranging, I found another rod.

"And those, Sergeant Barnes, are your radius and ulna," I told him.

"Even with all of this, I still have bones," he mumbled.

"They aren't made of calcium and phosphate. But obviously they're resilient," I said.

"Why not just one of those fake bones? Why put in two?"

"The human body is a pretty well-designed machine. Some of the micro-hydraulics are attached to different places on both of the artificial bones, like muscles connected at different angles on a regular ole bone. It probably allows for a greater range of movement," I guessed. I couldn't help but grin.

"How do you know so much about this sort of stuff? I know you know about bones and muscles from being a medic, but what about the mechanical stuff?" he wondered.

"My dad liked to tinker. Kind of like you," I answered. "He'd always let me help him when he was working on his car or anything really. He'd babble while he worked, but he didn't think any of it would stick."

"He sounds like a good father," Bucky said.

"He was," I concurred. Bucky recognized I was using the past tense and gave me a sad look. He was realizing we had both been orphaned long before any son or daughter should.

"I'm sorry," he told me. "My father was a soldier."

I smiled at Bucky as he slowly caught on to his own words.

"My father was a soldier," he repeated, just a little slower.

"I told you stuff would come back on its own. I was right," I bragged. Bucky rolled his eyes and leaned back. The inner workings of his arm shifted slightly, even though he had barely moved. "God, this is awesome."

"Are you going to put me back together or keep playing with lithium grease?" he asked with a chuckle.

"You've gotten kind of sassy now that you're more comfortable around me," I pointed out. I cleaned off one of my hands and reconnected the circuit panel. "I bet I'm going to get sick of this really soon."

"If you aren't sick of me yet, I'm sure you'll be fine," he assumed. I picked up the first of the outer plates, but Bucky took it from me. "I want to do it."

"Go ahead then," I offered. I leaned back into my chair and finished cleaning my hands. I'd be scraping lithium out from under my nails for days. That stuff got everywhere.

I watched him put the pieces of his arm back in place. It was strange to see but also fascinating. Like a child putting together a jigsaw, he even stuck the very tip of his tongue through his lips as he concentrated. When the last piece had been placed, he examined his work and decided he had done pretty well.

"Everything feels like it's in the right place?" I checked. He nodded and grabbed the towel I had used to wipe off my hands. He ran it down his arm to erase the smudged fingerprints. "The fresh lithium should be in soon if you need it."

He ran his arm through a series of stretches I had seen him do almost every morning. Straight out to his side and around in a circle. Across his chest, folded behind his back. The metal moved fluidly, just like flesh.

"Feels fine. Shouldn't give me any problems at work," he decided. "Speaking of. Arty agreed to pay me in cash, starting on Friday."

"Was he hard to convince?"

"Well, he acknowledged that I look eerily similar to the Winter Soldier and understood why I would have wanted to lay low for so long," he began dramatically. "He was a little apprehensive about paying me under the table, but he came around when I mentioned you had a similar arrangement with Gerald. Apparently, you're very well known."

"Damn it," I muttered. That wasn't part of the plan. "When do you think we'll need to move, Buck?"

"I don't know."

"It's going to be hard to find something like this somewhere else," I told him, and I took in the room around us. There were little bits of Gail and Bucky scattered on the coffee table and tucked away in the kitchen cabinets. We were comfortable. "Secluded, trusting."

"Our best bet would be a city," he continued, reading my mind. We were both tactical people. We had both thought about the next step, as well as the three or four after it.

"Lots of faces, large transient populations, more opportunities for under the table work," I summarized.

"Would you be comfortable in a city that wasn't English speaking?" Bucky asked. I started to smile, and he looked confused.

"I speak about 25 languages, Bucky. Pretty much every language in Europe and most from South America and Africa. I can speak and read most Asiatic languages just fine, but I never practiced writing any of them very much to be comfortable with them. Same goes for Arabic and Hindi. Latin alphabets always came easier, but Cyrillic languages, like Russian, never gave me any trouble," I babbled. I shook my head to rid myself of the random letters and symbols falling through my mind. They settled back where they were meant to be. "Did you have a place in mind?"

"No, I was just checking," he said hesitantly.

"What is it?"

"I knew your memory was something special. But I didn't realize it was fluent in twenty-something different languages special," he admitted. He adjusted his sleeve after noticing the two were lopsided.

"What about you? Obviously you have a pretty good grasp on English," I joked.

"I think some of my old school teachers would disagree," he laughed. "I've got some vague memories of being smacked with a ruler. A lot."

I waited for him to come around to the original question. Any other languages he knew had probably been impressed upon him by Hydra. It was a sore spot and for good reason.

"I think I've written in a different language. A couple actually," he said. He stood up suddenly and left me at the table. He came back a moment later with the Captain America notebook and placed it in front of me, open to a page I could read easily.

"It's Russian," I announced.

Bucky leaned over behind me and placed his metal hand next to my arm while he flipped through the pages. There were more paragraphs written in another language, but even the English entries had varying handwriting. Some were wide and slow and looked carefree. Other paragraphs were cramped and sharp. He had used three different colors of ink on the two pages I saw, but I couldn't figure out the pattern if there was one.

"This looks like German," I told him. I looked over my shoulder at him, and he straightened up. "Can you read this?"

"Yeah. I was in some sort of stupor when I wrote it, but when I see it I hear English in my head," he answered.

"Sounds like you know the language, but you're a little rusty," I observed. Bucky smirked and flexed his metal hand.

"I figured all that lithium grease would have stopped that," he said with a grin. He walked away, still wiggling his fingers.

"Damn it, Barnes," I muttered. I smiled anyway.

*

Author's Note:

I'm back! And planning to binge update this story. Brace yourselves.