Chapter Text
"I can remember being nothing but fearless and young,
we've become echoes, but echoes, they fade away."
silhouette // aquilo
There’s an alarm going off somewhere near you, a loud wailing sigh that ebbs and flows to drown out the rest of the noise. There’s smoke clouding what’s left of your hazy vision and try as you might, you can’t keep your head from slumping to one side. The cuffs around your wrists and ankles that keep you pinned upright chafe at your skin from previous fights but now you lie still; exhausted and broken. Forgotten in the chaos and so far from your own mind, you can do nothing but skate the edges of consciousness and hope – but for what? Rescue? Death? It all feels the same to you.
The siren still cuts into your mind but you’re drifting now…
Voices scatter about your brain, distant and close, commands and screams, and you’ve lost track of what’s real and what’s delusion. Keeping your eyes open is impossible and so you let yourself go.
The voices… the siren… the restraints holding you upright… an arm around your waist hoisting you up…
Then nothing at all.
*
It’s twenty past two in the morning and the Avengers tower is quiet. It’s not impossible to believe that somebody somewhere inside this place is awake, hell, probably several somebodies given the emotional state of half the occupants but the common room is dark and empty which is what you’d been hoping for. The lights flicker the moment you toe the room threshold, another startling reminder of the reality you’re living in now.
“Thanks,” you murmur, politeness far outweighing how odd it feels to speak to a building.
Pausing in the doorway, you sweep the room. Only once you’re certain it’s as empty as it appears, you move across the length of the room to dump the textbooks and laptop that had been stacked precariously against your chest down on the long glass table.
The table is fixed alongside the large stretch of floor to ceiling glass windows that pinned an entire picture of Manhattan behind it. Regardless of the hour, cars still snaked around the sprawling streets and the city was still lit up with flashing lights. Your eye catches on a group of three staggering down the street, linked clumsily to one another. They’re tiny from your vantage point but you can make out one figure raising their arm, their head held back and their mouth open around a large smile to let out a yell that’s soundless to your ears. The common room was far too high up in the tower to grant you any of the sounds that would accompany the scene of an early morning trek home, one that felt faintly familiar but now somehow foreign. Turning away with the slightly bitter taste of nostalgia in your mouth, you pull out a seat and power up your laptop; building a fortress around you out of your textbooks as you wait.
Early morning isn’t exactly your time for productivity but over the last month, you’d learned to adapt. It’s been one month and two days since you’d moved into the Avengers tower and a month and twelve days since all this madness had started. You still tiptoe around this ridiculous mansion of a home, trying to keep to the shadows and yourself as much as you can. It’s not like you’re afraid of the people you now share a residence with – how could you be when they’ve been sold to you as protectors and heroes since you were young? It’s hard to believe that the man you’d watched declare himself as Iron Man on the news, who’s superhero alter ego graced the shirts, walls, and lunchboxes of every kid in your neighbourhood, is the same man who found you distraught and terrified and without a lot of options.
An uncomfortable feeling settles in your stomach as you think about Tony Stark. How is this meant to work? You suppose he’s your handler now, in some strange way. A guardian or a baby sitter, bound by his duty to protect and what better way than to keep you close and controlled? Maybe it’s guilt that motivated his actions. It’s only been a month but already you knew it didn’t pay to try figure out Tony Stark; he seemed to be an enigma even to himself.
The Tower couldn’t feel less like a home. It feels too weird, too strange, to see the Avengers doing anything other than save the world and to consider yourself a part of all this is absurd. To see Natasha Romanoff, who can kill a man with her thighs alone, rumpled and bleary eyed brewing herself a coffee or Bruce Banner who is occasionally large and green, asleep with his face planted in a book in the library or even seeing Captain America and The Falcon play fight over the remote feels wrong. A behind the scenes look you don’t feel you deserve or even asked for when it comes down to it.
It’s easier to stay away. To remain in your room, sleeping through the waking hours and then roaming around the tower on your own time during the early morning quiet. Your new living space, which easily puts your dingy one bedroom flat to shame in both size and amenities, offers plenty in the way of comfort and entertainment. Yet after long hours of being kept inside and isolated, it still feels like a prison. You can’t help but acknowledge the tiny voice in your head that whispers you should be trying to become more amicable with your new company, to learn more about the people behind their superhero status but it’s too much, too fast.
You’ll adjust, you know you will. You have to because this is your life now for the foreseeable future and as much as you’d rather it isn’t, you haven’t been given a say in the matter.
A yawn sneaks up on you, one that you press into the back of your hand and blink as the blaring light from the laptop screen makes your eyes sting. Reaching for the closest textbook, you flick to the back to start searching through the index only to freeze when there’s a shuffling sound from behind you. Turning with enough force to drop the textbook from your hands, it clatters to the ground and has both yourself and the intruder flinching at the noise.
He’s a shadow in the well-lit room, every muscle in his body coiled and ready to fight or flee depending on your next move. He has to be the one person more of a ghost than you – you’d seen him exactly once during your time here, leaving the gym flanked by Steve Rogers himself. Of course, you know about him. Who doesn’t know about the Winter Solider?
You’d read about him during high school, girls swooning over the black and white photo of the war hero Sargent James Barnes in their history textbooks, and then again in the news when he returned as a weapon wielded by Hydra, the media branding him a monster sporting a bionic arm and missing memories spanning decades. His return to the compound is fresh, having been in Wakanda where he’d returned to cryo-freeze in the hopes they could figure out how to re-wire his brain. All you really know outside of all this is that he’s quiet and that even the cryo-freeze couldn’t resolve him of all the demons that seem to follow him without fail.
You clear your throat, noticing he’s staying completely still in the doorway and watching you with a calculating expression. It occurs to you that the noise made to alert you to his presence had been for your own benefit, that he could’ve haunted the room without your knowing if he’d wanted to go unnoticed.
“Sorry about that,” you say as you lean forward to pick up your textbook, not taking your eyes off him. He does the same, his eyes flicking only momentarily down to your hand then back to your face. You hold your textbook to yourself and try on what you know is a poor impression of a smile. “I wasn’t expecting to see anyone at this time of night,” you explain.
He stays silent and unmoving, leaving too much dead space that you feel yourself grow desperate to fill with conversation.
“Am I, uh, in the way? I was just going to work on an essay but I can do that upstairs if you need the table or the room or whatever.”
“No.”
The word is rough, choked out, and the first thing you’ve ever heard him say. His forehead furrows a little and then he shakes his head, eyes steady on you when he speaks again.
“I can go.”
It feels almost like a fever dream; to be face-to-face with this man who seems built more from fiction than reality, with you blinking back sleep and him dressed down in sweatpants and a hoodie. The glint of his metal fingertips peeking out under the cuff of his sleeve are immediately hidden by the angle of his body the moment your eyes drift in that direction. He looks nothing like a threat, if anything, he looks uncertain and you struggle to believe that the information you have swirling around your brain could be about the man in front of you. His eyes are the saddest part of him, you think suddenly, and then you’re speaking again.
“You know, it’s a pretty big room. Insanely big, actually. Absurd and extravagant but I suppose that’s Tony Stark.” You pause, quirking one side of your mouth before giving a slight shrug. “What I’m saying is, there’s definitely enough room for the both of us. We could share.”
There’s another beat of silence stretching between you both but he doesn’t leave. You decide to take that as an indication to continue, anything to break the quiet.
“So is sleep not a happening thing for you, then?”
His lips press into a line before he gives a slight shake of his head. “It hasn’t been for a long time,” he murmurs, more to himself than to you but it’s conversation at the least. “If I don’t leave our floor, Steve senses it and then neither of us sleep.”
“Is that a super solider thing?”
There’s a flicker of something in his face, the ghost of what may have once been a smile. “It’s a Steve thing.”
“Ah,” you nod. “Well, welcome to the straight through crew. Party of one, now a party of two, err…” You stop, worrying at your bottom lip. “…James?” You’d heard him referred to with many different names by different people. Everything but the Winter Solider, which seems to be avoided when he’s in earshot as much as possible.
“Bucky,” he breathes.
“Right. Yes of course. It’s nice to meet you, Bucky, I’m…” Your throat closes around the one piece of information you’ve kept to yourself, tucked neatly among the scraps of what’s left of your life now. You clear your throat, ignoring the small line that’s appeared between Bucky’s eyebrows at your abrupt silence. “Noni,” you offer. “I’m Noni, if you didn’t know.”
Your stomach tightens as he looks at you for a beat longer, that line between his eyes deeper now, but you refuse to feel guilt at the proffered name. When you’d offered it to Tony Stark, you didn’t know if he’d taken it as gospel either but it didn’t matter. There’s power in a name, even if it’s just a way to ground yourself to a life that’s no longer yours. You would gladly take on this new name, this anonymous persona, if it meant you could pretend your old life is still in reach.
Bucky tilted his head with a slight incline to his mouth, a seize fire that has you breathing normally again, and then he nods once in the direction of your laptop. “You’re writing an essay.”
The question in his voice is clear even if it isn’t phrased as such and you can understand why. Aside from Peter Parker, you have to be the only Avenger recruit that still has homework.
“Yeah, well, before I was graced with the ability to make people feel as though their hearts have been ripped from their chests among other things, I was a college student majoring in English. I figured I’m already in the process of selling my soul for a college degree so I may as well… stick with it.” You drop your gaze from Bucky, flinching at your own words and forcing your focus on your fingers curling in and out of fists rather than the acidic burn at the back of your throat. You don't mention you've had to re-enrol as a distance student because you don't trust yourself to be on a campus full of people.
When you look back at Bucky, his eyes remain steady on you as he nods. If he notices the change in your demeanour, he doesn’t show it and you’re grateful to him for that. There’s another silence settling but it’s different than before.
“I won’t be… disturbing you?” Bucky asks finally, still standing steadfast in the doorway.
It’s a loaded question and you see through it immediately.
“Not at all. It’ll actually be kind of nice to have some company. Feels a little less lonely.”
It’s strange because you’re being honest despite having spent most of your time avoiding everyone else in the tower. But it’s nearing three o’clock and the city is still moving beneath you soundlessly and having a body in the room to deflect the quiet is a comfort you didn’t know you wanted until now.
Silently, he drifts across the room and lies down on the couch. You wait to hear the sound of the television turning on but there’s nothing outside of the steady draw and release of his breathing so you settle back into your essay, compiling resources and working on an outline. Try as you might, you can’t stop your gaze from drifting over to Bucky’s still form every so often to check if he’s still there. He’s unmoving.
When it hits ten past five, you can’t starve off the yawns or the burn of sleep in your eyes any longer. The lines of text in the word document in front of you refuse to stay in straight lines which is a clear sign to call it a night. You’re careful as you gather up your things, desperate not to disturb Bucky who you’re certain has to be asleep by now.
Casting a glance in his direction to confirm this, however, you find him exactly as he’d been for the last couple of hours. He’s lying on his back, arms heavy at his sides, with his eyes still open and staring up at the ceiling with the determination of someone running from sleep rather than toward it. You almost feel guilty packing up and leaving him alone but your body is threatening to give out.
You pad towards the door before pausing and looking back at his large frame, all muscle and tight sinew wound up in restless energy that radiates from him, before whispering, “Goodnight, Bucky.”
You don’t expect much in the way of a response but as you turn to leave, a quiet voice follows you out.
“Sleep well.”