Running To You

11. Barter

Day 50. There's a memory in my head that I want more than anything, but I don't know how to get to it. It's a memory that started back in New York, when I was deep in my own personal pit of darkness, of Christmas Eve when I was eleven years old. That memory took me to the church, but now I want to go beyond that. I want to remember Christmas Day with my family. Hell, it doesn't even have to be that particular Christmas; I'd settle for any. I just want want one. Is that too much to ask for?

"Alex, are you nearly ready?"

Bucky quickly put away his notebook and grabbed his jacket from his bunk. When he opened the bedroom door, he found Carrie waiting outside, checking her watch with an air of impatience. When he stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind him, she flicked her long blonde ponytail over her shoulder.

"I was beginning to think you'd fallen asleep," she said in an accusatory Australian twang, though her brown eyes shone with humour. "C'mon, the museum guide says you need at least four hours to see everything."

"I'm actually okay with not seeing everything," he replied. "I don't know if I even like modern art. Isn't that just people throwing a load of garbage together and claiming it has some deeper socio-eco-political-whatever meaning?"

"Yeah, but some of it's nice to look at."

He didn't bother arguing. He wasn't expecting to enjoy the museum, but then, he'd already seen the best ones Zurich had to offer. He would have been quite happy to give this one a miss, but his temporary travelling companions had convivially pestered him into going along with most of their plans, which had left him little time for writing in his notebooks or researching his own past.

"Where's Kim?" he asked.

"Downstairs, uploading all those pics from the Rietberg to free up some space on her card." Carrie rolled her eyes. "You know she'll positively die if she can't take five hundred pictures in every museum."

Bucky nodded. Kim was particularly artsy; she would have gotten on well with Steve, circa 1935. She and Carrie were the only two of the six Aussies who wanted to spend their potentially last day in Zurich inside a museum, rather than inside a pub, and Carrie had wheedled Bucky into going with them.

Down in the hostel's communal living room, they found Kim waiting with arms folded across her chest, one foot tapping impatiently. "There you are!" she twanged in irritation. "Don't you know it takes five hours to see everything in the Haus Konstruktiv?"

"I thought it was four hours?" Bucky countered.

"Only if you're some sort of uncultured troglodyte with the attention span of a goldfish. Really, the guidebook recommends six, so we're already cutting it fine. C'mon, let's go."

Kim didn't wait for an objection; she was out the front door and halfway down the street in the blink of an eye. With a grin, Carrie looped her arm through Bucky's—he'd learnt that no matter how strong he was, he just couldn't seem to shake her off—and they followed the impatient woman as she set a swift march, dodging tourists and natives alike.

Zurich was like Geneva in the same way that New York was like Washington. The affluent city sprawled upward and outward, the buildings a fusion of classic and modern architecture hugging the shore of Lake Zurich, whilst in the distance the snow-capped Alps presided ominously over the landscape, silently promising a change in weather. Already there was a crispness in the October air which Bucky suspected would soon bring snow.

It hadn't been his own idea to come here, but when he'd mentioned to the Australians who shared the hostel in Geneva that he would be moving on, they'd told him of their plans to visit Zurich and invited him along. At the time, Bucky had been torn. Travelling with company was risky, because people tended to ask questions, and there was always the risk of somebody seeing his cybernetic arm, or glimpsing his notebooks of memories. Those were questions he could not answer.

On the other hand, travelling with company would be safer; anybody looking for the Winter Soldier would not be looking for a group, they would be looking for one man alone. In a group, he had greater anonymity, could blend in with his surroundings more easily, and anybody who saw him would likely take him for one of the rowdy Australians and promptly forget about him. In the end, he'd accepted their offer. If things became too complicated, or if questions started being asked, he could always leave.

It didn't take long to reach the Haus Konstruktiv, and as they arrived, Bucky took an immediate dislike to the museum. The building was a large, greyish-white concrete rectangle several storeys high, with small, regular rectangular windows that would not have looked out of place on a maximum security prison. An unpleasant feeling made his stomach churn, and his feet slowed of their own accord, causing Carrie to slow with him.

"Something wrong?" she asked.

"No," he lied, steeling himself as he looked again at the building. "It just doesn't look much like a museum, from the outside." Why couldn't it be a fancy, overly ornate building with gaudy gold foil, sweeping balconies, and other embellishments that didn't look like some dystopian nightmare?

"Kim says it used to be a power station." Carrie seemed to pick up on his reticence. "Y'know, if you wanna go somewhere else, I'm sure Kim won't mind. Once she starts looking at art, she'll barely even notice we're not with her anymore."

"No, it's fine," he said. Just a little anxiety. Maybe something left over from the Soldier… although he hadn't felt the Soldier stir since Geneva. Still, he could cope with one silly museum. He'd already done three or four. What was one more?

There was no queue outside the museum's front doors, and by the time they'd caught up with Kim, the young woman had already bought their entrance tickets and was bouncing on her heels, phone in hand, ready to start snapping.

"I think the best thing to do is start on the ground floor and work up," she said, pulling a glossy floor guide from her pocket. "Then on the way back down, we can take a second look at anything we think needs a bit longer."

Bucky didn't bother offering his opinion. Five minutes or five hours was all the same to him. The two women went on ahead and he followed them around the gallery, moving from installation to installation, passing through rooms decorated in colourful motifs, and rooms that contained seemingly randomly placed items which he didn't understand the point of even after he read the display notes. Some of it was okay to look at, but nothing made him feel anything as strongly as the outside of the building had done.

Then, he found himself in artistic hell.

On the third floor, he came to something that was a twisted jumble of steel and plastic, random shapes and structures incorporated into a grotesque sculpture covered in something white that was meant to mimic thick ice. The overall effect was a freezing, chaotic, industrial horror that twisted his gut and made something inside him scream at him to get away from the monstrosity.

Flash.

There wasn't a part of him that wasn't freezing, or burning, or aching. For hours at a time he shivered so violently that his muscles ached from constant activity, and just when he thought he couldn't take it anymore, that he was going to die from the cold, the burning came, and his skin screamed in agony as lashes of fire skipped over it, searing him right down to the bone.

Flash.

Pain brought delirium, enhanced by the drip that fed something into his right arm. In the delirium, his mind floundered, struggling to stay afloat in a haze of agony and nausea. Every time he looked down, to where his left arm should have been, he saw nothing. His mind laughed hysterically, because it knew this couldn't be real, that his arm couldn't just be gone. He could still feel it, and oh how it ached, burning even worse than his exhausted muscles.

Flash.

He lingered for an eternity in the hazy fog of agony, restrained in a cold, dark room. People came. They did things to him. He didn't know what they did, because he was too numb to feel anything but pain, his mind too delirious to understand anything that was happening. He tried talking to the people, telling them his name, who he was, but when they replied, it was in a language he didn't understand.

Flash.

The freezing and burning had ceased. His body had fought off the infection. Now, there was just the perpetual haze of whatever sedative was constantly in his system. Now, when he looked down, he knew his arm was gone. There was just a stump, roughly bandaged but no longer bleeding. His mind no longer laughed hysterically. Instead, it was numb. Reality had set in. He didn't know where he was, or what had happened to him, but this wasn't a nice place. There was more than one drip in him, now. Machines pumped things into his body and then took them away. Restraints around his arm, legs and neck held him immobile. The people who came either didn't listen to his requests for help, for mercy, or they didn't understand what he was saying. He didn't understand why they just wouldn't let him die.

Flash.

He was taken somewhere. There was light, terrible light that burnt his eyes after so long in the dark. Fresh air roused him, and he tried talking again, tried to ask where he was, who his captors were, what had happened to him… but answers were not forthcoming. There was a truck, and his stretcher was taken into it, bringing a more comforting darkness, relief to his burning eyes. Rough voices shouted around him, still in a language he couldn't comprehend. He clung to one tiny hope; that maybe this was it. Maybe he was going home. Or maybe they would finally let him die.

Flash.

More darkness, even deeper than the darkness of his room. Above him were metal pipes, running along the ceiling, twisting here and there like the bones of a concrete monster. Again, he shivered, and this time it had nothing to do with the cold. He was inside the belly of a monster, and it was going to swallow him whole.

A voice. Familiar, somehow. It spoke to one of his captors.

"How long ago did you find him?"

"Almost six months," his captor replied in English even more heavily accented than the voice.

"Six months?! Why did you not send word sooner?"

"We had to purge all records of his existence. It is not easy to erase people the KGB are interested in. It took time."

"Well, let me take a look at him."

The face appeared, small, bespectacled. It peered at him like a lepidopterist examining a particularly interesting specimen. "Hello, Sergeant Barnes," the face said. "Do you recognise me?"

Bucky shook his head, the denial coming for his own sake, rather than the face's. He did recognise the man. It was the doctor who had caused him so much pain in Austria… pain that he had only just gotten over. Pain he thought he had finally left behind.

He tried to thrash, to free himself from his restraints, but he was too weak, and there was still something being fed into his arm by the drip, something which made his limbs feel heavy and his mind feel sluggish. He couldn't even open his mouth to scream.

"It seems you do recognise me," the ugly face smiled. "I'd thought you lost forever, Sergeant. We have much work to continue, you and I."

No, no, no! he screamed inside his mind. But the face didn't hear him. Couldn't hear him.

"First, there is the matter of payment," his captor said.

"Yes, yes, I have your list," the doctor agreed. "In exchange for keeping the subject here, safe from the prying eyes of S.H.I.E.L.D., I will see to it that you receive the weapons and materials you have requested. I will send a couple of my colleagues to oversee the project, and I will come to check on the progress whenever I am able. It will be some time before S.H.I.E.L.D. believes me tamed; until then, I must cover my activities carefully."

"And the prisoner?"

"Like I said, my colleagues will handle him. Keep him as he is, whilst work begins on a suitable prosthesis. Tomorrow, I must return to Washington with my 'guard'. I will be back here in six months, to see what I can do about the subject's memory." The doctor rubbed his hands together, a gleeful grin on his pudgy face. "How wonderful, how fulfilling, to continue work on this important project!"

Flash.

Bucky reached out his hand, clutching at a rail as the world heaved around him. His heart raced inside his chest, his skin breaking out in a cold sweat as a tidal wave of nausea rose up from his stomach and made him gag at the memory of the pain and delirium and the sight of a bloody, tattered stump where his arm should have been.

Oh god. The face… Zola… he traded my life like it was nothing. He didn't care how much pain I was in, how much I suffered. He saw a broken thing and knew he could fix it. What did pain matter? That was the plan from the start… wipe my mind. Make me into a machine. The only thing he cared about was the success of the project. I was never more than a means to an end.

"Alex, are you okay?"

He opened his eyes. Carrie's concerned face swam in front of him… in front of the horrible construction that had triggered his memory. Swallowing bile, he nodded.

"Must've eaten something that disagrees with me. I need some fresh air. I'll catch up with you later."

He shrugged off her concern and her attempts to assist him, and made his way outside. There he took a seat on a bench and drank in the fresh air, letting it wash away the memory of the smell of disinfectant, of dampness, of sickness, of his own infected flesh. The Russians had got themselves a POW, and they hadn't expected him to survive. Left him to die from his injuries in some cold, dark cell even though the Soviets and the U.S. had technically been allies in the war. Who knew how long it had taken them to realise what they had? How long until they'd made the effort to save his life, only to sell it to Hydra in exchange for weapons? He'd been traded from owner to owner like a piece of merchandise, no care or thought given to the person he was. All they saw was opportunity. A means to further their own goals.

When he heard a squeal of metal, he looked down and saw his left hand clenched into a tight first, his glove-covered fingers straining with the pressure. It took a moment for him to relax enough to release his grip, and as he watched his hand, he felt a conflicted measure of hatred and gratitude. Hatred over what Hydra had done to him, turned him into… and gratitude that they'd at least given him an arm to replace the one he lost, even if it was simply so he could be a more effective weapon for them, even if he didn't feel like he was always fully in control of it. At least he looked like a whole person on the outside, no matter how broken he felt within.

o - o - o - o - o

Day 78. Today I saw snow for the first time in seventy years. And yet, I remember one winter in Siberia in which the snow came so deep that it was days before a plane could make it through the storm. I don't remember what mission it had come to take me to, just that my handlers at the time did not like the delay. When I woke up this morning, the city was transformed. It was like something out of a fairytale. Children were playing in the street outside the cheap hotel where I have my own room for once. Their laughter brought back… not memories, exactly, but echoes. A sense of familiarity without the jarring visuals. Kinda like the echoes I got in New York, of how I thought the street had looked when I was young. I think as a child, I must have enjoyed the snow.

It's been a long time since I properly spoke to anyone. I don't understand the language here, but I get by. Some of the shopkeepers understand enough English, and from time to time I come across groups of tourists. It's nice to just sit and listen to them. They don't know me, they don't know that I understand what they say, but it's nice to hear familiar words. To hear them talk about their impressions of the city, where they want to eat dinner, what they want to do tomorrow, generic, unimportant stuff like that… I guess it's easy, being a tourist. You go somewhere with a set amount of money and time, and cram as much into it as you possibly can. I wish I was a tourist. I wish I had a set amount of money and time, instead of having to infrequently break into ATM machines, instead of having so much time that it seems almost a burden. At least I'm getting a lot of research done. The books in the libraries here don't really help me, but thank God for the internet.

Bucky stopped writing when a member of the bar staff brought over a dish of broth and a bread roll.

"Enjoy," the man said, his English marred by a strong Hungarian accent.

"Thank you."

As he tucked into his early dinner, he turned to the back of his Me notebook and reviewed his progress on the map he'd folded there. A series of small crosses marked his journey so far, starting in Calais and travelling down just beyond Lyon, where he'd done a couple of weeks' worth of grape picking. Geneva was the next cross, followed by Zurich. After leaving the Australians—they'd opted to go up to Germany for Oktoberfest, and he gave them the excuse that he'd already been to Germany before now, which was technically true—he'd travelled the length of Austria, stopping in various small towns along the way, trying to find somewhere he felt comfortable enough to stay for more than a few days.

Austria seemed a nice country, full of beautiful landscapes, breathtaking views, and some very attractive inhabitants, but he still didn't feel comfortable enough to settle down there. As well, the towns that he stopped in were all rather insular; polite enough to visitors, though somewhat mistrustful of outsiders. Finding work would have been difficult, if not impossible, and he needed to work so that he could give up on petty crime. Austria was the country he most regretted leaving behind, but when he'd finally made the decision to move on into Hungary, he hadn't looked back.

When he finished his broth, he ordered another beer and turned back to the front of his book. The beer didn't affect him, but he liked the taste, and like the snow it evoked echoes of past times. Perhaps, one day, those echoes would manifest as fully-fledged memories. For now, it was a good excuse to stay a little longer in Café Gerbeaud.

I feel like I've been travelling forever, he resumed. The fear of being recognised is pretty much gone. Out here, America's so far away that it only gets an infrequent mention on the TV. But now, I have another problem to think about. Eventually, I'm gonna run out of Europe. If I keep going east, I'll eventually hit Russia, and I don't think it's a good idea for me to go there. The Soviet Union may have fallen, but I still have a red star on my arm that no amount of scrubbing will get off. What does that leave? Go south? To what? Africa? Heat? Lions? A huge dessert? Even if I got down to Jo-berg, that place is a dump.

Maybe I shouldn't have left America. Maybe I should have gone down through Mexico, lost myself in some South American rainforest. But… no libraries, in a rainforest. No supermarkets, no computers, no pens. Besides, that sounds kinda like hell, too. I've gotta figure out where I belong in the world, not run away from it entirely.

Budapest is nice. Maybe I'll stay here a while. The city just goes on forever, and there's so much to see, even if I don't understand half of what I hear. There are worse places to get lost in. Soon, the hotel manager tells me, the Christmas markets will start. Something worth seeing, apparently. Do I look like the kinda guy who'd be interested in Christmas markets? Then again, do I look like the kinda guy who'd be interested in marching in a gay pride parade? Maybe people see a different me to the me I see from inside myself. I remember New York during the Depression, I remember Europe when it was war-torn and broken, I remember two dozen winters whenever they woke me from cryo… did I leave me behind? Did I leave me in New York? Did I leave me at Azzano? Did I leave me in cryo one time, and not even realise it?

I have these memories, but I dunno… I don't feel like I have enough to put the whole picture together yet. I want to be the me I was, but what if I can't go back that far? What if I really did leave a part of me in New York? What if a part of me died at Azzano, with those who weren't captured? What if there's a part of me still in some Soviet cryo chamber? What if I can't get all those parts of me back? What if they're lost forever?

I wish I had someone to talk to. I don't think I had that much, in the past. I don't think I could have talked to my dad like this. Maybe to Mary-Ann. Maybe to Steve. I guess that's why I brought Bingo back. Thoughts tumbling in, programming tumbling out, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, why I'd been left alone, where my handlers were… guess my mind just needed something, anything, to ramble these things at. Something to make me feel a little less alone.

Jeez, listen to me. I sound like I should be setting up a fake account and logging onto therapists anonymous dot com. I wonder if that's actually a thing. Would rambling these things at a faceless entity be any more productive than rambling them at an imaginary dog, or into a notebook? Doubtful. Besides, at least these books serve a purpose. If Hydra ever get their hands on me, they'll try to turn me back into the Winter Soldier. If they do that, I'll be gone again. At least with these books, something is left behind. At least there's a chance that they'll fall into the right hands. The hands of someone who will read this and know what I was going through, and understand that I was trying to change. To redeem myself for what they made me do. To be a better person. To be any sort of person at all.

His scribblings raised a valid point. These books were his memories. The total sum of who he was so far. He had to make sure the hands they fell into were the right hands. If the wrong hands got hold of them, there was no telling what they would do to them. The thought of someone like Zola, or Pierce, with their hands on these memories… no, it wouldn't do at all. So, he pulled out all of his notebooks, and on the inside cover of every single book, he wrote:

Memories of J. B. Barnes. If found, please return to: Steve Rogers, Captain America, USA.

To be doubly certain his memories would get safely back to Steve if he ever lost them, he slipped a 5-Euro note, currency left over from Austria that he hadn't been bothered to change into Hungarian forints, between the middle pages of each book, to help cover the cost of postage.

After giving himself a mental pat on the back, he downed the last of his beer, packed up his notebooks and left the café, stepping out into a Budapest that had gladly welcomed an icing-sugar coating of fresh snow. It was amazing the impact snow could have on a population. In Siberia, snow had been an annoying but unavoidable part of life. Here in Budapest, like back in New York, the first snow of winter made everybody a kid again, at least for a couple of hours before traffic chaos set in.

He walked aimlessly for a while, letting the sights and the sounds of the city wash over him, looking without really paying attention. People no longer bothered him. Only a handful of S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel, at most, had ever seen him, and even within Hydra his existence was a closely guarded secret. His handlers in America had died in the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. along with Pierce, which meant that in the whole of the world, there couldn't be more than dozen or so people left who knew what he looked like, even if the name 'Winter Soldier' meant anything to them.

Security cameras, on the other hand… they paid closer attention than people, and they didn't forget what they saw. He made sure that whenever he passed by a security camera, his stolen baseball cap was firmly down and obscuring his face. Caution cost him nothing, and might one day save his life.

Halfway across the Chain Bridge, which linked the Buda and Pest halves of the city, he stopped and turned to lean over the side of the bridge, looking down into the water below. The Danube was more like a lake than a river at this point, so wide that it dwarfed the Hudson, its waters so deep and fast that the late-autumn frost had made no impact on its shallowest edges.

Watching the water from above brought him a sense of uneasiness not unlike the museum in Zurich, so he made it a daily ritual. Forced himself to endure it after dinner each evening. Forced himself to stand still and listen to his own cry as he fell from a great height, forced himself to endure his heart racing and his skin prickling with sweat at the thought of anticipated agony. Made himself watch the swirling currents as the Soldier stirred momentarily before settling back down, each day a test of his own resolve, each day pushing each minute a little longer, until he could stand there for two, for three, for ten…

Flash.

His breath came slowly, loud to his ears, echoing inside the mask fastened across the lower half of his face. His eyes, covered by lenses to dull harsh streetlight and preserve his night-vision, tracked his quarry without blinking. Silently, he ghosted across the rooftops, taking advantage of the ornate architecture, using crenellations as hand-holds, gargoyles as jumping points, moving with such ease, such stealth, that by the time the pigeons roosting around chimneys were frightened and took to the wing, he was already gone.

As he followed his target, he heard his handler's words repeated in his mind.

"This is your mission." A photograph had been held up. He studied it closely. A man wearing a black hat, a monocle covering his left eye, a thin black moustache curling down over his top lip. "This is the weapon you will use. There are to be no witnesses."

He'd been handed a weapon and had recognised it immediately. M1C Garand, U.S. design. Telescopic sight for aiming, flash suppressor for secrecy. He'd been given training on it. Was proficient enough to hit a running target. By all accounts, his target would not be running.

His Mission was a creature of habit. Keen eyes had watched him travel to and from work at the Kremlin every day for two weeks. The Soldier himself had been to scout out the area, and chosen an isolated place to carry out his task. As his target took his usual shortcut through Red Square, the Soldier went on ahead, racing ahead of the man now that he was sure the routine would be adhered to.

The night was dark, but the Soldier's eyes made use of every scrap of light. The goggles covering his eyes helped to disperse the streetlight, creating a soft glow to allow him to better see movement. At the place he'd already selected, he picked up the gun he'd previously stored there, and settled down between the roofs of two neighbouring buildings. He resumed his previous breathing pattern. Slowly in, slowly out. There was no concern about being seen; the street was empty. No worry about missing his shot; he had trained extensively for this. No guilt over a life snuffed out; he served a greater purpose.

His target stepped into the street, taking his usual route along the Moskva river. The Soldier lifted his rifle, took aim, followed his target down his sight, and fired just ahead of him, aiming for the empty space into which his Mission stepped.

A loud crack echoed down the street. Several geese resting on the river took to the air, honking in fright. The Soldier waited only long enough to see a spray of red erupt cleanly from the man's head, which split like a melon. Was already turning as he heard the body drop into the river, where the water slowly claimed it.

Perhaps the body would be fished from the river. Perhaps not. But if it was ever found, and the bullet recovered from the skull, at least they would know where to place the blame.

Back at the building which served as a temporary base in Moscow, the Soldier gave a report. "Mission successful."

"Very good," his handler said, and the Soldier felt himself relax when no further commands were forthcoming. His handler turned to one of the doctors. "Prepare a report for Doctor Zola. Tell him that the Winter Soldier's programming held up under the stress of a mission, and that the mission was completed without incident and without witness. He has spent so long working on this project, he is certain to be pleased to see it finally coming to fruition."

Flash.

Bucky kept his eyes closed as the memory faded, kept his mind focused on the moment, on the sound of traffic and the river below. He managed to keep the world from spinning this time, managed to keep himself from feeling nauseous at the memory. I'll find you next, he thought silently to the memory of the man he had killed. Maybe I should have tried to find you before now, but… you were the first. I guess I've been afraid that if I found you, it'd open a floodgate. That all the others would just come rushing in. I'm sorry. I promise, I'll find out who you were.

Finally, he opened his eyes, letting reality return. As far as he could tell, no time had passed. The boat he had been watching crawl up the Danube was almost no further away than it had been before the vision.

There were times when he wished the Winter Soldier were an actual person, another voice inside his head that he could talk to… another soul to take on some of the burden of guilt and shame. But the Soldier was nothing except a desire to obey and fight. An entity inside his head that lacked a soul, that had no voice of its own, no ability to feel sadness or regret… couldn't even feel elation at his own past successes, and had no pride in his work because pride required ego, and the Soldier hadn't even been allowed to have that.

The Soldier had taken countless lives, and left Bucky to clean up his mess. "Thanks for that," he grumbled quietly under his breath. "First they make me their weapon, now they make me their weapon's janitor. Those Hydra scientists must be laughing their asses off right now."

I wish I'd been stronger.

The thought came unbidden, making his breath catch in his throat. Immediately, he recognised the inherent rightness of it. If he had been stronger, this would never have happened. If he'd fought harder, Hydra wouldn't have been able to erase his memories. He'd been too weak to resist, and not strong enough to take back control once the Soldier was handed the reins, and because of his weakness, people had died.

He deserved every bit of punishment the dead could throw at him. But for his weakness, they would have lived. Or, at least been murdered by somebody else. Somebody not him. Somebody who could have handled it all better. Somebody who didn't almost kill his best friend for trying to reach out to him.

With the thought weighing on his mind, he left the bridge and made his way back towards the hotel. He had homework to do, and it was time to put Budapest behind him.

Author's Note: If you want to see the sculpture which triggered Bucky's nightmare of being in Siberia, just do a Google image search for "Haus Konstruktiv Esposizion" — it should come up as one of the first pictures. Personally, I think it's interesting, but from a tortured Winter Soldier POV, it's pretty gruesome.

Thanks once again to everyone who's given feedback on the last chapter, and to guest 'Barton' reviewer for your comment on the supporting characters. One of my favourite parts of writing is creating/discovering empathetic OCs and fleshing out minor characters to give them a greater role to play in the immersion of the setting. Thank you very much for enjoying something that many fanfic readers (and writers) do not seem to like to invest time in.