Chapter Text
When the children wake him, it’s gone.
He feels it right away—Hydra’s whispers, the metal burrowed into his bones and skin, the last remnants of the drugs that blunted his empathy and his fear. Zola’s serum is still there, and always would be, but he could live with that. It had allowed him to survive long enough to escape.
His memory’s still shot, too—just a thin soup offering the flavor of a life, not the meat of it. What little he can grasp belongs more to the Asset than those of the beautiful smiling boy whose body he wears. He is disappointed but unsurprised. He, more than anyone, knows what Hydra had been able to do.
He winces a little as he rummages around his mind. How unashamed he’d been of the things he’d done. How satisfied, even, when he pulled off a particularly difficult kill cleanly. He’d been the best assassin in the world, and he’d known it. He still is.
He’d felt no shame then, but he feels it now, hot knives and choking panic—this must be Bucky, then, this gentle heart screaming no—and he closes his eyes tight for a minute and shoves it roughly away.
He’s free, at least, in some ways. The important ones, anyway. (He hopes.) He stands up carefully, searching out his new balance now that 40 pounds of steel and wire have been removed from his left side. He’d known how heavy it was, of course, had felt the tiny stress fractures that would spiderweb out from the pins and plates with every movement, and would heal every night as he slept. But it occurs to him, as he straightens up, that the weight he’d lost was more than just mass.
He doesn’t think any sensation will ever compare to the gentle rustle of soft fabric across skin that had not been touched in 73 years.
He is dressed in traditional Wakandan garments, not the white hospital clothes he’d worn to enter the cryostasis chamber. It feels unfamiliar to be dressed this way, but not uncomfortable. He had seen plenty of Wakandans wearing Western clothing in the market before he made his final trip to the lab, and he wonders why they’ve chosen to dress him like this instead—whether it means the Wakandans have accepted him as their own, or to remind him that he doesn’t belong.
The latter, he decides. The Wakandans are too smart to want him.
His hair is longer now, and someone has tied it back for him. For some reason this microscopic kindness, of all the grace and kindness he’s already been shown here, nearly moves him to tears. It has been so long since anyone cared whether the hair in his eyes bothered him. He reaches up to scratch his beard. It’s longer too.
He can’t understand what the children are saying, but he can tell from their body language that they’re not afraid of him, and that they seem to want to tell someone about him. He focuses on that as he follows the children out of the hut.
The air is fresh from a recent rain, the grass cool and springy beneath his bare feet. There is a second hut to his left nearby, and a group of women seem to be unpacking a few baskets while other children play nearby. A second pair of huts stand further on down the shore, maybe 50 yards away, seemingly empty.
The children who woke him have all run off toward the lake to his right, however, and he hears Shuri chiding them gently for disturbing him. She’s grown up, he thinks as he walks toward her.
The last time he’d seen her, she was still a teenager. A brilliant one, to be sure, but still just a kid, effervescent and unafraid of him, hardly ignorant of evil but still young enough to believe he was worth saving. Her father had been murdered by a terrorist for no other reason than to flush him out, and she’d had no obligation to feel compassion for him. No obligation to absolve his guilt over the role he’d played in King T’Chaka’s death. No obligation to trust him at all.
Yet she had let him turn off the lights in the examination room and sat alone in the dark with him so he wouldn’t have to see the look on her face as he explained how it felt to have ten simple words turn a man into a thing.
Her eyes had been red when the lights came back on, but she had smiled anyway. He wondered then, and now, if she’d known how much it mattered for him to see her care.
“Good morning, Sgt. Barnes,” she says.
“Bucky,” he says, though he immediately wishes he could take it back. The name feels like shoes on the wrong feet. He is not Bucky, any more than he is the Asset. He is both, and something altogether different.
“How are you feeling?”
He swallows. Now there’s a question without any answer he can possibly articulate. But he is feeling rested, is neither hungry or cold, and has no pain. Everything else—
“Good,” he says. And then, more sincerely: “Thank you.”
She smiles.
“What year is it?”
“2018,” she says. “February 23rd, to be exact.”
He nods. He wouldn’t say he’s untroubled by the idea of waking up to a world that’s moved on without him, but it’s familiar. “Is Steve—”
“He is well,” she says. “Still wanted by the authorities, I’m afraid, but he and the others are safe. He misses you.”
He nods again. “Does he know I’m awake?”
“No,” she says. “I thought you would want to tell him yourself.”
He doesn’t answer the implied question. “Is my sister still alive?”
“Yes,” she says.
He doesn’t ask whether she wants to see him. “I still don’t remember much,” he says instead.
“More memories may return in time,” Shuri says. “Sensory ones, especially, the ones that don’t just live in the hippocampus. But I’ve done everything I can neurologically. Without a scan of your brain from 1945, I had no way of reconstructing what was missing. I was able to extrapolate a little to repair the connections you still have, but any more than that—”
“And you’re rewriting my mind.” Alarm crackles through his nerves like lightning and his fist is already starting to curl, as though he could beat his own fear to death, right here on the shore of the lake.
“I did not think you would want that,” she says gently. “I would have refused, in any case.”
He nods. “You defused all the bombs, though, right?” he asks. “It feels—quieter in there.”
She doesn’t answer right away. She is so young, he thinks. She thinks she’s got a good poker face, but she hasn’t lived long enough to learn the hard way that she doesn’t. He hopes, for her sake, that she never has to.
“I was able to reverse all the anomalous neural sequences,” she says finally.
“But I could still snap at any time,” he says dryly.
She cracks a small smile that fades immediately. “What Hydra did to you cannot be healed through surgery alone. You have a great deal of conditioning to overcome as well,” she says. “I cannot guarantee that the words will no longer trigger an—unwanted response. It may be less severe now, but we won’t know until we try.”
He feels a freezing flush of terror steal across him and he shakes his head. “This is pointless,” he says.
“We can set you up with a therapist who specializes in trauma recovery. She’s very good.”
He feels his throat go tight and he hates it. “No,” he says, more forcefully than he intends. “No shrinks. No drugs. No needles, no shocks, no hypnosis, none of that. I don’t want anything or anyone in my head ever again, you understand?”
Shuri bites her lip and nods. “We cannot force you. When you are ready, the offer is there.”
He shakes his head and rubs his mouth. “I’m sorry. You’re just a kid. I shouldn’t have talked to you like that.”
“I’m 20,” Shuri says crisply—and a little defensively, too, which suddenly reminds him of someone. His little sister, maybe, or Steve, from when he was still small, always having to prove he really was an adult. It must be hard to be a prodigy, to be taken seriously when you’re so young, he knows, but he can’t help but feel a little fond, too.
“Yeah, practically over the hill.”
She laughs softly. “I think despite your memory loss, a great deal of you still remains.”
He nods and tries to echo her smile. It doesn’t entirely work. “Maybe so,” he says. “But I wouldn’t know.”
“I think we both know someone who will,” she says gently.
He shakes his head. “Not yet.”
It’s not that he doesn’t want to see Steve—in truth, he aches for him. But the problem—understatement of the year, pal—the problem is that if Shuri is correct, despite this wild, grabbing connection he feels, despite whatever personality he is still able to manifest, the Bucky Steve had been chasing since 2014 has been dead for more than 70 years, and nothing will ever bring him back.
He’s not ready for Steve to know this. He’s not ready to see Steve know this. He’s not ready to hear Steve swear up and down that it doesn’t matter, that he’ll remember enough for the both of them, that all that matters is what comes next. Steve will want so badly for it to be true, and he is not ready to find out if it actually is.
Hydra has burned so much out of his mind, but the need to protect Steven Grant Rogers will govern him till the day he dies.
“I would like to bring you to my lab for an exam soon,” Shuri says gently. “But it can wait till morning if you wish.”
He does wish. He’s not eager to be among people this afternoon, with his freshly flensed mind and a ceaseless newsreel of horrors perpetually flickering in his peripheral vision, just waiting for him to turn his head. For now, he is happy to sit in the sun—February is still hot here, this close to the equator—and feel it bake into his skin until he begins to sweat.
Behind him, he hears Shuri start the jeep and pull away. He doesn’t turn back to watch her go.
He welcomes the heat. Every time they pulled him out of cryo, once he stopped shivering, they used to inject him with something that made him flush with warmth and relax his clenching muscles so he could stand up and walk. He’d grown to love those shots, and the warmth that promised him air and movement and food and maybe sunlight if he was lucky. There were times when he would long for the icy silence of his tomb, but not often. No matter what they’d done to him, he’d never wanted to die.
He lies back in the sun, listening to the soft lap of the lake and the rustle of the breeze through the grass. There’s a small insect buzzing nearby, searching for pollen or sex or a place to build a nest. He can hear, distantly, birds in the trees somewhere off to his left, and the faint bleat of goats on the hillside behind him.
He sleeps for a little without realizing it. When he opens his eyes again, the sun is lower and the children have left. It’s still very hot, and his skin prickles with sunburn. He stands and begins to undress.
(It crosses his mind that he doesn’t know how he’ll put the wrapped garments back on with only one hand, but that’s a problem for later. Right now, all he wants to do is swim.)
He looks down at the left side of his chest, the thickly scarred halo where the support plates had once burrowed into his body to reach his bones, the skin beneath pale as wax from its 73-year sentence beneath a prison of steel. There may have been a joint once, and a stump early on, but if there had been, he can’t remember. If so, it was long gone now.
He reaches up to touch the site, feeling the strange hollow where his collarbone ends. It worries him in a way he doesn’t feel ready to examine. Instead, he steps into the water.
The water is cool and clear, with no algae or any other sign of stagnation. In the distance he sees a line of trees stretching across the fields to the west toward the white-capped mountain beyond. There’s a river there, he realizes. It’s 85 degrees in February and he is swimming in melted snow.
Paddling is strange with one arm, but he’s not worried. He’s a strong swimmer. He wonders whether this is Bucky’s skill or the Asset’s. He remembers swimming a number of times, scuba-diving to place a magnetic charge to the hull of a prince’s yacht or kicking his way out of a submerged car after ensuring that the scientist had drowned or violating his mission and dragging a dying enemy supersoldier out of a river before a helicarrier crashed into them from above.
Steve had never liked to swim. He knows this—there had been an asthma attack at the beach, once, in the ocean while the waves kept knocking him under before he could get enough purchase on the sand to stagger out. He remembers the panic on Steve’s face when he realized he couldn’t get out by himself, and the desperate gratitude when Bucky ran into the water to get him, and the rage when Bucky carried him, gasping and choking, all the way to their towels in front of a thousand people who’d stopped what they were doing to stare.
Steve had known his limits, but Christ, had he hated for anyone to see them. They never went to Coney Island again. After that, they took the train all the way out to Far Rockaway instead, and even though it took 45 minutes longer, it didn’t matter as long as Steve felt safe.
Maybe he remembers more than he thinks.
He feels his face do something ugly and he swallows hard and dunks his head into the water instead. It’s quiet down here, muffled and peaceful and dark and weightless. He feels his shoulders relax a little. Or shoulder? He wonders what to call this sloping piece of bone and flesh on his left side, now that the joint is gone.
It doesn’t matter, anyway, under the water. The strange off-balance feeling is gone now, and though he wouldn’t go so far as to say he feels right, he at least no longer feels wrong, either. Regardless, it feels good.
He doesn’t remember the last time his mind registered anything good. Sometimes in Romania, though, he would have these brief moments of peace, when he let himself forget for a moment that he was being hunted, when he could just taste his ice cream or a beer, or feel the sun on his face or the leaves crunch beneath his boots, or give in to the release of his hand when his body remembered what it felt like to desire.
Or studied the notes he’d hastily recorded in the back row of the little theater in the Smithsonian where Peggy’s interview looped every 15 minutes.
“Even after he died, Steve was still changing my life.”
You and me both, Peg.
He actually wrote that in his notebook, too. You and me both, Peg.
Director Carter had been on Hydra’s sanction list. The mission had been canceled at the last minute for reasons they had never deigned to explain to him, but in early 1967, he had crept up to the hotel in Paris where she was staying, had stood in her room and watched her sleep, had done everything but pull the trigger before his earpiece crackled with the order to abort.
He hadn’t recognized her at the time, any more than he’d recognized Howard. At the time he hadn’t understood why Howard had looked at him the way he had, why he had said, bizarrely, “Barnes?” before a metal fist crushed his face.
He understands now.
Hydra loved doing that, he remembers suddenly. Loved making people inform on their friends and family. Making them send the people they cared about most to their deaths. Loved breaking them like that.
They sure as hell had broken him.
On his way out of the museum, he’d stopped again by his own memorial panel to watch the newsreel footage of him and Steve together—never him alone, always with Steve, as though he might have been incapable of existing without him, the electron to Steve’s proton, a hydrogen atom that decimated the world when it was forced apart.
It had been so strange to see his face smile, to see his body so capable of easy laughter. He doesn’t remember what it feels like anymore. He’s not sure he could summon a laugh if he tried.
His mind suddenly registers a need for air, and he breaks the surface with a big gasp. It feels triumphant, to fill his lungs so greedily, to feel the exquisite pleasure of oxygen rushing into his body.
It’s enough.
He swims back to shore and climbs out onto the bank. He spreads the blue cloak across the grass in the sun and sits on it, letting the sun dry his hair.
He wishes he and Steve had talked more before he stepped into Shuri’s cryo chamber. They’d had four hours alone on the quinjet to Siberia, but he hadn’t allowed himself to talk about anything besides the mission. Steve had tried to ask him questions early on, but he’d just said, “I don’t remember,” and clammed up until Steve changed the subject.
Sometimes it was true and sometimes it wasn’t. Zemo had been right about one thing, the wily little fucker—he knew once he started talking, the horrors would never cease. He knew that he would tell Steve everything, every murder, every beating, every rape. Everything that he’d done and everything that had been done to him, and he knew if he did that, he’d leave Steve with nothing.
It wasn’t until they landed that he was able to pretend to summon up an innocuous memory from before—of summer at the beach, and a pretty redheaded girl—something to give Steve a little hope. False hope, maybe, but Steve needed the focus. He always fought better when he thought he had something to fight for.
He’d remembered that, too.
And then on the way to Wakanda, well, he’d been too wrapped up in his shame and his pain to say anything at all.
The pain’s gone, at least.
He dresses himself as best he can, finally coming up with something that looks more like a toga than what he’d worn before, but that at least covers everything that needs covering and stays put when he moves. A good thing, too: There is another jeep on the horizon, heading his way. The finer points of fashion would have to wait.
There are two women in the jeep—Dora Milaje—bringing him supplies for the evening. One is about his age, mid-thirties maybe, and the second is a deceptively slight young woman in her very early twenties—the elder’s trainee, perhaps.
There is, of course, food—enough to feed six, flatbreads and spicy stews and some kind of filled dumplings, little fried pastries redolent of coconut, a basket of fruit, and an insulated jar of hot herbal tea sweetened with honey. The scent of it all makes him realize that he’s starving.
The women help him build a fire and show him how to use the starter in case he lets it go out. It’s basically just a lighter, and the click of it makes him suddenly crave a cigarette.
That must be Bucky, too—the Asset’s only use for cigarettes had been to burn them on someone else’s skin.
“It gets cold at night this time of year,” the younger Dora informs him as she lifts a duffel bag that must weigh at least 75 pounds with one hand. “We’ve brought you blankets and more clothing. We will return in the morning to bring you into the city.”
He nods. She carries the large bundle as though it weighs no more than a small child, and not for the first time since arriving in this place, he’s glad none of his missions had never put him up against one of them. There aren’t many who could have taken him, back when he had his arm and his blood was flooded with amphetamines and steroids, but any one of the Dora Milaje alone would’ve given him a real run for his money.
He’s not sure he would have walked away from two.
The senior Dora reaches into the back of the jeep and brings him a familiar green bottle. “King T’Challa sends his compliments,” she says. “He says Captain Rogers told him you were partial to Laphroaig.”
He takes the scotch and attempts another smile. “Send him my thanks.”
“You may tell him yourself tomorrow,” she says. Then she holds out a small beaded bracelet. “If you need assistance during the night, just press the white kimoyo bead in the center.”
He nods and holds out his hand so she can fasten the bracelet around his wrist. He’ll have to figure out how to activate it without his left hand, he realizes, but that doesn’t bother him for some reason. Maybe it will later, but right now he’s just so relieved to be free of that damned weapon welded to his body that he’s grateful for the difficulties it presents. His body belongs to no one but him now. He will live in it however he can.
When she finishes, he lifts his gaze and accidentally meets hers. Her face is warm but neutral—she is a kind person, he thinks, but also a professional. She would not think twice about killing him if he tried to strike.
Like Natasha in some ways, maybe, but not in the important ones. This woman has chosen her life. Natasha never had.
“My name is Ayo,” she says.
He hesitates when he realizes she is waiting for him to respond. He doesn’t deserve the name Bucky anymore. He still answers to Soldat—the way a beaten dog answers to a jerked chain, but it sure as hell could get his attention in a hurry. But that’s no name for a person, and he is determined to become one.
He finally settles on an answer. It doesn’t really fit, any more than any of his dozens of other aliases had fit, but at least it doesn’t hurt the way Bucky does. It was his name at birth, after all. It might as well be the name he bears for his rebirth, too.
“James.”
*******
The sun is low and the temperature is already beginning to drop when they leave. He carries the blankets into the hut, and finds in the center of the bundle the promised extra clothing, mostly the casual Western styles he’d seen in the marketplace, a comb, a pair of slip-on sneakers that he can manage with one hand. There is also, in a leather envelope, a slim tablet that switches on when he touches it, and a solar powered charger. He swipes through it and finds that he’s been given an email account—though he doesn’t know what his password is—and a subscription to the National Library of Wakanda, which appears to have digitized versions of every possible piece of media he could wish for.
He finds a collection of Ella Fitzgerald songs—even now, he marvels that a record exists with 40 songs on it—and begins to play it. He remembers this music, suddenly, fiercely—remembers listening to the blues in a too-hot apartment, lying spreadeagled on the floor in his underwear with a salty, garbage-sweet breeze coming tickling over sweaty skin with the rattle of an electric fan. He knows Steve was there but doesn’t remember him—but he knows it, as surely as he knows this music.
He quickly switches the music off. It’s too much, too much, and he can’t—
His stomach growls.
He changes into a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie, and then, though he’s already warm enough, he slides on a soft pair of socks and wraps the blue cloak around his shoulders. It feels luxurious to have an excess of comfort.
Back outside, the fire is roaring nicely. He can see the glow of Birnin Zana on the horizon—perhaps an hour’s drive away, he judges. He wouldn’t be surprised if there was a detachment of Dora Milaje nearby, just out of sight, but his situation feels remote enough that he can relax.
He spreads out all the food before the fire, and begins by tasting everything. He eats everything he likes and sets aside the few things he doesn’t care for, because there’s more than enough. Because he can afford to waste.
He eats every bite of the coconut pastries, reveling in the sweetness. That sweet tooth must be Bucky’s, he thinks. The Asset had never been offered dessert.
He remembers how astonishing it had been to realize he could choose his food when he arrived in Bucharest, that he did not just have to accept whatever he was given or could manage to steal. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been allowed the luxury of an opinion. The first time he’d ever shopped for himself he bought so much candy he made his stomach hurt.
He’d gotten lucky in Bucharest in so many ways. When he arrived, he discovered that the rent on the old Hydra bolthole had been paid up through the year, there were still some canned goods in the cupboard, and there were a few clean, if dusty, changes of clothes in a cardboard box that fit reasonably well. And that was before he discovered the large cache of waterlogged but still-usable nonsequential 50- and 100-euro notes wrapped in plastic in the toilet tank.
Sometimes he wonders if the Widow had anything to do with that. He’d spotted her early on, in Baltimore, where he’d cleaned out an abandoned Hydra warehouse near the harbor. It hadn’t been burned yet, either, which meant either that the feds had already scooped those agents up, or they’d gone underground so fast they didn’t have time to clean up their mess. Whatever the reason, it had allowed him to score the address in Bucharest, a Turkish passport, and just enough cash to secure passenger fare and no questions asked on a Constanța-bound Chinese freighter leaving at midnight.
He’d just gotten to the top of the gangplank when he saw her, back turned but hair unmistakably red, talking to the captain of the Senegalese ship docked in the neighboring pier. He paused long enough to see the captain shake his head no and for her to turn and head back toward the main gate. As far as he knew, she’d never seen him.
It was just a close call, he thought at the time. When he found the money in Romania, he wasn’t so sure.
He had read the files she’d dumped on the internet during the journey to Romania, and though there wasn’t much in them about him, there was a lot about her. Her missions in Budapest and Osaka, the fire in the children’s hospital, her time at the Red Room—where, for a short time, she had been trained by the Winter Soldier. He had not recognized her in Odessa, though, any more than he had recognized Howard, but he did recall feeling an unusual—hesitation. A misgiving he didn’t usually feel. Nothing like he’d felt with Steve, but still something.
It wasn’t until he was trying to strangle the life out of her in Berlin, and she gasped, “You could at least try to remember me” that he knew for sure that she knew him. But the words had been roaring too loudly in his mind to hear her, and so he’d kept squeezing until T’Challa landed that roundhouse against his shoulder—
He wonders if she had been a friend, or something more.
He has memories of making love to both women and men before Siberia. In New York, London, Europe. Only vaguely—just the taste of a cunt, the pressure of a cock in his ass, but always with pleasure. With permission.
When he got to Siberia—
No.
And Steve—he remembers Steve best of anyone from before, he remembers that he’d felt closer to him than anyone else, but he cannot remember if they had actually been lovers, or if he’d simply longed for him from afar. Steve hadn’t mentioned it, but the way he looked at him, the way he’d hovered—
He wishes he’d asked.
He could still ask, he knows this. He could press the kimoyo bead with his—nose or his chin, maybe—and ask to be linked to the kimoyo bead Shuri had given Steve before he left. But he’s not sure he wants to know yet.
He’s not sure he wants Steve to know that he can’t remember that, either.
They’d gone for a walk in the Royal Gardens before his date with the cryostasis chamber. It was hot then, too, and he’d wanted to soak in as much sunlight as he could before he was put down until he could be made useful again. It wasn’t really much of a walk because he was still weak from the fight—mostly they just sat on a bench and breathed in the heady scent of spring flowers and filling their ears with the joyful chatter of birds tending to their hatchlings, and the distant sounds of the market bustling beyond the wall.
“I can’t pretend to understand what this is like for you,” Steve had said. “I know you’re afraid of yourself right now. But I just want you to know that I’m not. I never will be. I’m always going to be on your side. To the end of the line—I meant it then and I mean it now. No matter what comes next.”
He hadn’t replied to that—he’d just nodded and cracked the only smile he was capable of. It felt more like a wince, and maybe it was that, too. Steve had always been hopeful. He could remember that much.
No matter what comes next.
At the time, he’d thought Steve had been speaking tactically, that he’d been considering an eventuality where Wakanda would or could no longer continue to provide this refuge, where the authorities caught up with him, where the remainders of Hydra caught up with him, where Zemo or his agents caught up with him.
An eventuality where his mind could not be freed.
But now he realizes now that this wasn’t what Steve had meant at all. Or not only what he’d meant. That Steve had been speaking of friendship, of brotherhood, of love.
Or perhaps a different sort of love.
Even now, he shies away from the thought. Not because he is disgusted or cannot see himself with Steve in that way, but because he can. Because it feels true, even if he doesn’t know if it is.
But another thing is just as true: Even with the whispers gone, he can’t trust his own mind. Not yet.
He remembers the scotch and fetches the bottle out to drink by the fire. There is only the one cup, which he used for tea, so he drinks straight from the bottle. Unlike Steve, he could feel the alcohol a little, though he's never tried to drink enough to get truly drunk. But he could, with a few healthy swallows, achieve a soft, pleasant buzz. This scotch is too good to treat like cheap rum, though, so he sips it instead.
But it’s enough. The smoky bite of the alcohol triggers a kind of sense memory of passing around Dugan’s bourbon around a fire in Belgium, of sitting on a fire escape on a late August evening with a cigarette, trying to make a cheap bottle of rye last as long as he can. The memories are just glancing impressions through glasses smeared with rain, but they’re clear enough for him to know he’s real.
Shuri had been right. The scotch is doing something, unlocking things. The water had. The sun. He wonders what else will.
The night has become properly chilly, and the wind has changed, promising rain. He realizes that he’s tired, though he’s not ready to sleep. In Bucharest his sleep had been riddled with nightmares and hypervigilance, every tiny sound yanking him awake with a loaded pistol in his hand, searching for an intruder. He knows he doesn’t have to worry about that here, but he’s not certain his body’s caught up yet.
Still, the rain is coming, and it’s cold. He banks the fire and packs up the food, and goes inside his hut.
There’s a small electric brazier in the corner that he hadn’t noticed before, and when he turns it on, its heat quickly fills the hut. He wraps himself in a blanket and settles onto the cot.
He closes his eyes but doesn’t sleep. He listens to the rain come, the gentle rush of it over the reeds of the roof and the grass and the lake and the trees beyond. He thinks it ought to remind him of something, of somewhere—this is not the first time he’s heard the rain—but it doesn’t.
Instead it just blankets his hut with a soft hush like a mother stroking his brow, the quiet soothing breath before she sings. He doesn’t remember the lullabies his mother sang to him, can’t remember her voice at all. But the sound of the rain teases at something, something—
He sleeps.