The Coming of Spring

by KiraTellsTales

Summary:

He’s ice. She’s fire. Neither are ready for what happens when the two collide.
Even the coldest winters give way to spring.

“With the coming of Spring, I am calm again” - Gustav Mahler.

Chapter 1: Prologue

Summary:

God, I hated being right. That dropping, rolling, nauseating feeling of certainty. The sting of my hairs standing on end and the useless rush of adrenaline into my veins.

The annual charity gala always fell on the last day of summer, and what a glorious day it had been. We had chosen to make the most of the warm sunshine and hosted the day event in the lovely gardens of the hotel, surrounded by flowers and trees and shrubs. There was just the slightest touch of autumn to the leaves; a hint of gold, a smudge of warm orange, the barest flicker of red, hidden among the verdantly lush green.

I had been a lot more comfortable there, in the sunshine, surrounded by nature and the gentle ease of polite conversation. The warm golden glow had felt strangely restorative as it had filled me up with something bright and vibrant.

Now that night had fallen, the temperature with it, I was distinctly uncomfortable, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what was making me feel that way.

It could’ve been that I’d swapped my comfortable sundress for a flouncy velvet-and-chiffon black-tie number. It could have been that my social battery was running dangerously low, or perhaps I was just tired, running on empty after the exceptionally early morning I’d had. I had, after all, had to make the four-hour train journey from my home in the depths of the countryside into the city and then worked all day and evening on top of that.

It was well past midnight when, at last, the guests had retired to their rooms or had left.

Suffice to say, I was shattered.

“Do you think there’ll be any taxis running?” I asked, scrolling through my phone trying to find a number.

Laughter trickled around me, and the hairs on my arms stood up.

“It’s a ten-minute walk, hun,” My boss said, her face somewhere between sympathetic and scathing. “You’ll be fine.”

It went against my better judgement, went against every bit of street smart my mother had instilled in me, went against my very instincts. But for some stupid reason, because I wanted to seem grateful and polite, I listened.

Which was how I found myself walking though the city streets, with keys clenched in a curled fist, trying to keep my footsteps sure and steady and confident despite the heels I wore and was not used to.

My legs ached, my feet were screaming at me, and I was fairly certain there would be a bruise on my palm come morning from the death grip I had on my keys. I couldn’t help but think, as I glance sideways at every dark alley I passed, as I flinched slightly at the slightest of sounds, that a fist full of keys was unlikely to do me any good at all.

It was a precaution, I reassured myself. How many times had I walked alone at night and been safe? Countless.

How many times had I done that in a city I’d never been to? A little voice in the back of my head piped up, and I tried not to think about it.

That was a different question, with an answer I didn’t want to hear right now. I had much more pressing things to be worrying about.

Like how the hell I was supposed to find my hotel, when I’d made what I thought was a sensible decision not to have my phone out in front of me on Maps the entire walk back.

I thought I’d known where I was going, was so sure I’d memorised the route, the ten-minute walk my colleagues had assured me was ‘easy’. I'm just just tired, I tried to reassure myself, my mental voice even sounding unsure. It had been an extraordinarily long day and I had given so much of myself away this evening. Time, energy, expertise. Hours spent on a train and then seemingly endless introductions and networking and remembering. Names, faces, people I had never met that I had to remember. Twenty different people mumbling names and job titles and organisations in my ear as I tried my best to look effortless as I introduced the CEO to these names and job titles and organisations.

Somehow, I’d pulled it off.

‘Remarkable’ they’d said at the end of the evening as they had marvelled at my ability to retain information. I’d shrugged it off as nothing, had blushed modestly, smiled politely, and praised my colleagues for being the real stars of the show.

As remarkable as I had supposedly been, there was no way I should have forgotten the map I’d studied before I’d left. No way I shouldn’t remember the relatively easy route from event venue to hotel.

But, I had.

I’d well and truly forgotten, and I was lost.

At the very moment it had mattered most, I had not been cautious or careful enough, had ignored every bit of advice and guidance that had been passed down to me, had pushed down those vital, life-saving instincts. It was too dark to see street names or landmarks. I had no frame of reference, and I was lost. Lost, and scared, and aching all over.

I had two choices, as I saw it.

Keep walking, try my best to figure out where I was and which direction I needed to go in. Risk wandering aimlessly around the city streets in my fancy dress and my heels looking the very image of vulnerability.

Or expose myself as vulnerable in a different way, by stopping to fumble around in my bag for my phone, hold it in front of my tired eyes and follow the arrows back. Risk showing anyone who might be looking that I was lost. Risk having my phone stolen and being well and truly buggered.

After ten minutes of dithering, walking in what I was almost sure was the wrong direction, it felt like the second option two was the only one. I could feel that blisters had bubbled up on my toes and heels, and I wasn’t sure if the numbness that had settled into my feet was a welcome or disturbing change from the burning pain.

I uncurled my fingers from the keys in my coat pocket, flexing and wiggling them as I tried to get the blood flowing again, and opened my silly little clutch bag with a resigned sigh.

I supposed I should have expected it.

Perhaps I had been expecting it, in some small way, or I would not have tucked those keys in between my fingers in the first place. My fight or flight response had kicked in the moment I had stepped foot outside.

I had known that letting go of the only thing that could be considered a weapon was a bad idea, that by reaching for my phone, making myself look even slightly vulnerable, I was inviting all sorts of trouble. But I’d run out of options, and this was the logical thing to do, the sensible thing to do, and so I had ignored that illogical instinct, and now I knew that I would regret it.

God, I hated being right.

That dropping, rolling, nauseating feeling of certainty. The sting of my hairs standing on end and the useless rush of adrenaline into my veins.

Too little, too late. 

Tired as I was, in pain as I was, bleeding into my high heeled shoes in a dress of velvet and tulle in the dull, unnatural light of the city at witching hour, I had absolutely seen it coming.

The adrenaline coursing through me was not enough to stop my body feeling like lead trying to move through treacle, but rather enough to make me acutely aware of exactly what was happening. To feel every frisson of fear and anticipation and certainty that what was to come was awful and terrible, to feel it all in stereo. The before and the during.

I could hear the near-imperceptible whisper of fabric; denim, worn down and soft from age, brushing against itself with slow, practiced, careful steps.

I could smell him, the deep musky scent of sweat overpowering cheap aftershave, tinged with the cloying scent of cheap vodka.

When I turned my head ever so slightly to the side, I could see him. A menacing silhouette, shadowed behind me; stalking, predatory.

I kept walking, making a Herculean effort not to flinch or limp as I wondered how far I could if I ran in these shoes on blistered toes.

Not far enough.

There was no way that I could get away to safety quicker than he could get to me.

It was all about the chase with men like this. The chase and the fight and the winning. The power it gave them, the satisfaction of being bigger, stronger, faster. Running would only make this more fun for him, and more of a nightmare for me.

Still walking on bleeding, blistered toes, my fists clenched in my pocket, sadly without the keys. I allowed myself one moment to raise my face to the sky, to plead with any god who might be listening to give me strength.

The surprise on his face almost made me smile, as I turned and threw my fist at his face with all of my might.

Too little.

Too late.

Hands grabbing at my flimsy coat, tearing at the tulle. Stumbling onto a cold pavement, ankles twisting painfully. Dirty skin ripping under my nails. Feeling each and every bit of grit of gravel tearing through fabric and nylon and skin. The salty, ferrous tang of blood between my teeth. Hands, grabbing, pawing at me, ripping into me. Tulle and velvet and stupid shoes where they shouldn’t be. The taste of the cold almost-autumn air tearing down my throat as I gasped and tried to shout and scream. The emptiness where my voice should be. Too much, too little, too late.

I caught a smile, spreading across his face.

The fight was more thrilling than the chase, and oh what a fight this was.

Fingers digging into my flesh, smearing the already smudged lipstick across my cheeks. Fingers stained with shimmer from the carefully applied highlighter on my cheeks. The smell of my perfume, tainted with adrenaline and fear and rage. Too much. Too much. Too much!

The smell of testosterone and sweat and the thrill heating his blood. Tangy and almost bitter, stinging my nose. Blurs of light and brief smudges of colour as I tried to tussle for freedom. Using a waning strength to bite and claw and rip, hit and kick.

Something burning.

Something deep inside me, burning from the inside out. Something that had been soft and gentle, now hardened and forged into something furious.

Something like fear, something like rage, something like sheer unadulterated fury. Too much. Too much. Too much.

Something I was losing my grip on. Something that sat much too close to my sanity for me to feel comfortable about letting go but something that was slipping, boiling, exploding. Something I could feel and smell and taste and hear. Hot and acrid and smoky and crackling.

Screaming.

Roaring.

Burning.

Notes:

And so it begins! I hope you stick around to see what happens next! ❤️‍🔥

Chapter 2: Cause for Concern

Summary:

I clenched my hands in my lap in an attempt to keep myself from shaking. Tried to keep my face as neutral as theirs as I chose my words carefully. “It’s a cause for concern that I survived?”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say.” My eyes flickered between the three emotionless faces in front of me.  “I don’t know what happened, I didn’t see anything, and you and I both know that there is no way I could have been responsible for it.”

Someone exhaled softly, almost a sigh. The officer in the crumpled uniform shifted in his seat, the blank mask slipping into a look of discomfort. Awkwardness.

The man in the sharp, crisp, boring grey suit leaned forward slightly. “We know that you had no weapons on you. No accelerants or anything even remotely flammable.” The hint of a smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Not including the tulle, of course.”

I lifted an eyebrow, waiting.

“The extent of your... responsibility remains to be seen.” The woman added, hands folded neatly on top of her crossed legs.

I blinked, my mouth opening and closing rapidly as I tried to make sense of what she was insinuating. "Let me get this right. You think that I, without the means or equipment to do so, somehow set fire to a man with... what? Sheer force of will? Magic?”

They stared at me. Let the silence hang awkwardly in the room for long enough for me to realise that yes, they did think that.

I laughed; a bitter sound devoid of humour.

“The thing is, miss, that it’s not as improbable as it sounds.” The man in the suit explained. “We were saved from an alien invasion by people who could literally do magic.”

The woman uncrossed her legs. “We do not doubt that you did not intend to hurt anyone or cause any damage. But the fact of the matter is that we have absolute proof of the fire, and we have proof that you were present at the exact moment the fire started. We also have a casualty, who sustained injuries consistent with those caused by burning.”

I tried not to squirm, tried not to listen to the quiet voice in the back of my head that wanted to argue with her, to contradict her. To scream and shout and swear that I had meant every moment of my anger. But still that voice whispered that a small but not insignificant part of me had been glad when the man had screamed. Relieved that his hands were no longer on me, grateful to be free, and more than a little bit glad that he was burning.

They watched me, closely. Carefully.

I couldn’t afford to slip up. Not now, when I had been doing so well.

I did not remember the immediate moments after. My memory was a blur of extreme light, followed by a soft, complete darkness and nothing more. Nothing, until I could remember screaming at a woman who had appeared all of a sudden in front of me, her face as scared as it was concerned.

I had already been questioned once, still clad in my once-fancy dress. The heels were nowhere to be found. Before they had let me shower and dress some stiff grey tracksuit, they had photographed every bruise, each individual scratch and scrape, the three fingerprints of lipstick on the edge of my jaw.

I hadn’t spoken until they had mentioned a rape kit. My first words “That won’t be necessary, thank you,” had been spoken in a voice that was surprisingly calm. Cold and collected and concerning enough that they’d brought in the big guns.

No, I could not afford to slip up now.

“He’s in hospital,” the man in the suit added casually. “Third degree burns covering a substantial percentage of his body. In a medically induced coma. Remains to be seen if he’ll make it through the week.”  

I swallowed my retort. Why should I care if he lived or died? He hadn’t afforded me the same courtesy.

 “And yet you’re here.” His eyes briefly flickered over my body, and I wrapped my arms around myself. “Not so much as a singed eyelash.” 

“If you weren’t directly responsible for what happened, that you survived such an... incident... is a cause for concern in itself.” The woman’s eyes had not left my face.

I clenched my hands in my lap in an attempt to keep myself from shaking. Tried to keep my face as neutral as theirs as I chose my words carefully. “It’s a cause for concern that I survived?”

A brief pause, a moment of tense silence. The woman’s eyes dropped to her lap.

My composure slipped, and the anger rose. “Is that correct? You are concerned, not that I was violently assaulted, not for my wellbeing, but that I survived a fire without, what was it? So much as a singed eyelash. Am I supposed to be remorseful? It wasn’t. Even. My. Fault.” The last words came out through teeth gritted so tightly that it was a wonder they didn’t crack.

The silence continued. The woman and the man in the suit looked at one another. The man in the crumpled uniform, at least, had the sense to look guilty.

“It’s not like that,” he offered. “We were so pleased to find you alive.” The others gave him a sharp look, and he stopped.

The woman cleared her throat. “Your survival is not a cause for concern,” she corrected, keeping her voice professional. “But it is something that needs to be investigated. As pleased as we are that you are alive and... if not well, then... relatively unharmed, we are surprised by it.”

My jaw clenched so hard that my back teeth seemed to groan in protest.

The heavy tension sat between us as I glared at each of them in turn.

The suited man shifted in his seat, avoiding my gaze as he continued. “Miss, the way we see it, we’ve got two options. We could do nothing. Believe your word that this incident was a freak accident, spontaneous combustion, divine intervention, whatever. We take you on your word and we let you go about your business and hope that nothing like this happens again.”

 My hands were clammy and clenched so tightly that I worried I might dislocate something. 

 “Or, we trust our instincts and do something. Send you to the specialists in the States, see if they can figure out whatever it is you’ve got going on. If it’s nothing, great, you’ll be home soon enough and free to go about your business as you were before. But if it’s something, we won’t have a walking, talking, bomb on our hands.” 

My blood ran cold as something heavy and uncomfortable settled in my stomach.

“’Specialists in the States?’” I repeated, my voice shaky. “What kind of specialists? The States? The United States?!” The words fell out of my in a panicked rush and for the first time since she had entered the room, the woman’s expression softened just slightly.

“We simply don’t have the resources to keep an eye on you here.” Her voice had softened slightly too. “We have calculated the risks and after much discussion we feel it’s more prudent, safer for all involved, to send you to our colleagues in New York.” She watched me for a moment before adding, “I know you wouldn’t want your family to get hurt.”

At that, I crumbled. The angry tension in my body fizzled away leaving me limp and sad.

She had a point.

Before my thoughts could spiral into a dark, anxious place, something distracted me. They had told me where but I was going but not who I was going to.

“What colleagues?” I asked.

The man’s eyes glittered with humour as he looked at me. “We’d send you to Xavier’s, but you’re a little old for a School for Gifted Youngsters.”  There was warmth in his voice, the little joke was an olive branch, some small attempt at reassurance. Part of me wanted to crack a smile, even if just to be polite, but I couldn’t muster the strength for it.

I simply blinked at him, watching as the slight upturn to his mouth wilted, waited for him to continue.

“Director de Fontaine at the CIA is very experienced at working with,” A pause as the right words were searched for. “Cases like yours.”

 I blinked again. “You’re sending me to the Director of the CIA?” My voice was full of only disbelief. This was some kind of bizarre joke, surely.

“We are.” Said the woman, twisting her folded hands to peer at her watch. “And we need to get this paperwork sorted sooner rather than later.”

The blood turned to ice in my veins, I could hear that they were speaking but the words were muffled. There was no fight in me now, no energy even to beg.

I was in trouble. Big, big trouble.

Cross country secret services kind of trouble.

I could not find my voice as they placed page upon page of uninterrupted text in front of me. My vision blurred and I blinked furiously, trying to make some semblance of sense of what I was supposed to be signing.

There were only a few words I could see. Voluntary detainment. Grievous bodily harm. Conditional release.

What the fuck was I going to do?

I sat there, blinking, my mouth opening and closing with unspoken questions and pleas until I watched my hand scrawl my signature on the paper, in glossy black ink. It was like watching something on television, like it was happening to someone else.

What the fuck was I going to do?

I was only vaguely aware of the movement, the changing scenery around me as I was gently led out of a city police station and into a car. A man dressed in olive green was sat next to me, watching me with a frown as I dissolved into panic. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear what he said. Knew not if it was comfort or threat or, most likely, something that was somewhere between the two.

I didn’t care. There was nothing he could say to pull me from the depths of desperate fear that I was falling.

What the fuck was I going to do?! I had a job, a family, a life. 

I could only watch in horror, with damp and blurry eyes, as the city outside the windows turned to countryside.

After a while, the static buzzing in my ears dulled. The man had stopped speaking, the only sound now present was the rapid thunder of my own heartbeat and the soft purr of the engine.

The countryside slipped inconspicuously into a military airfield and I briefly considered what would happen if I tried to run. Were the car doors unlocked? How far would I get before they caught me, could I make it into the trees? Would they put a bullet in my back for daring to defy them?

Probably.

But the closer we came to the sole plane on the tarmac, the more I considered if a bullet in the back would be a better fate than what waited for me on the other side of the Atlantic.

“What the fuck am I going to do?”

The man in the olive green offered nothing more than a sad smile.

Notes:

Thank you so much for reading! ❤️‍🔥

I really hope you'll stick around, I promise I'll try to make it worth your while! 😏💕

Chapter 3: A Winter Sky before a Storm

Summary:

No flicker of curiosity. No warmth. No surprise. Just a cold, clear, empty stillness, like staring into a winter sky before a storm.

This man’s secrets weren’t just locked up tight; they were buried under concrete, wrapped in chains, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

It was a house.

An ordinary-looking house.

Absolutely massive, modern with lots of glass and metal and concrete and not at all homely, but still very much a house.

The man, who had introduced himself again on the plane as William, laughed softly. “What were you expecting?”

I cleared my throat, shrugging. “I’m not sure,” I admitted, my voice crackling from a combination of lack of use and the dry, plane air, “not this.”

He was smiling as I turned to him. “Me neither,” his voice was soft, almost conspiratorial. “The gates, the fences, the seclusion, that I expected. But this?” He gestured casually to the front door. “Not this.”

Something about that was oddly comforting. Knowing that I wasn’t the only person here who had no idea what was going on, having someone else to share my confusion and, possibly, apprehension with.

He led the way up the stairs that led to the opaque glass door, the grey bag that apparently contained provisions for me was still slung over one shoulder.

My handler was, at least, a gentleman. When I had begun to shiver on the plane, he had given me his jacket and had made no move to ask for it back. In an effort to gain my trust, he had spent nearly the entire eight-hour journey talking. For the first couple of hours, I had still been lost in the deep depths of my panic, and I hadn’t heard a thing he’d said. After the panic had calmed, and there was nothing but black outside the windows, I’d started to listen. He chatted about everything and nothing, told me stories about the places he’d been and the things he’d seen. And, when the plane started to drop low enough for me to see the mass of land on the other side of the Atlantic, I had realised that I didn’t need to be scared of William.

And if I didn’t need to be scared of him, perhaps I didn’t need to be scared at all. I repeated that mantra over and over, as the ground grew closer and closer, the grey smudge of cities getting larger before disappearing entirely.

When we’d touched down in another well-hidden military airfield, I realised that I was numb. Not scared, not relieved, not anything, really.

I reluctantly shrugged off the army-issue jacket as William pressed a button I assumed belonged to one of those fancy camera doorbells.

“Swap?” I asked, nodding towards the hand he had wrapped around the bag’s strap as I held his jacket out to him.

He frowned, briefly hesitating before he slid the bag from his shoulder and traded it for his jacket. “I told them to give you something warmer. Fall in New York is no warmer than autumn in London.”

His concern warmed something in me, the ice that had settled in my veins in the small city police station had not thawed through the hours I had spent crossing the Atlantic, but that someone gave a shit about me was nice.

Less reassuring was the weight of the bag I now settled on my shoulder. Or rather, the lack thereof.

It was lighter than the jacket.

I shifted awkwardly.

“I’ll be okay,” I told him, trying for a smile that felt all wrong on my face.

“You will,” he agreed, still frowning as he turned back towards the door.

The woman who answered the door was dressed plainly, a skirt suit in a grey so dull it almost matched the concrete that looked more suited to an office job in the city than a secret government house. Her expression was a mask of politeness, not warm enough to be friendly, but not cold enough to be hostile either.

“Agent Marshall?” she greeted with a slight tilt of her head, surprise colouring her tone and bringing life to her carefully positioned features.

Clearly, William had not been expecting her either. His face was an expressive mess of shock and familiarity and a hint of pink to his cheeks that told me all I needed to know.

Who knew each other. In the Biblical sense.

Secret Service they may be, but their faces screamed with honesty.

“Olivia,” he nodded back before stepping in, and I did not miss the flash of heat that flickered in her eyes as he passed.

When Olivia turned to me, addressing me by my surname and gesturing with an arm for me to follow, her expression had turned to one of curiosity.

For all their perfectly schooled neutrality, for the perfection of the polite smiles that had no doubt been drilled into them through years of rigorous training, none of the government officials I had met had yet mastered the ability to keep their emotions out of their eyes.

I kept my thoughts to myself, mumbling my thanks as I stepped inside, grateful that it was at least marginally warmer in here than it was outside.

My mind was racing, thoughts all competing for dominance as Olivia led us through the sparsely furnished hallways.

I wondered at Olivia and William’s relationship. Had they known each other for long? Had they been familiar before or after they had been recruited by their respected governments to sworn secrecy. Was their familiarity a secret of its own?

Why was everything so grey? The tracksuit bottoms and long-sleeved shirt I had been given to wear, the bag that held what I assumed was more grey shirts and trousers, the floors, the blinds on the windows, the glimpse I got of the sofa in the living space. Even Olivia’s skirt suit. All the most boring shade of grey.

Whose house was this? Who else was here? There were no signs of life, but I knew there had to be someone else here, to act as jailer, surely.

The only sound was that of our footsteps; the click-clack of Olivia’s sensible heels, the soft measured sound of Agent Marshall’s shiny boots and the fumbled stumbling of my borrowed white trainers.

When we came to the last door in another long, grey hallway, Olivia knocked twice before leading us in.

In any other house, I might think this a dining room. The space was dominated by a large, shiny, black table around which were eight black, leather chairs. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on immaculately cut grass and, further back, the mass of trees that gave the house an inconspicuous blanket of security.

Sat at the head of the table, dressed all in black in an air of effortless elegance that contrasted strangely with her almost aggressively casual posture, was a woman scrolling through a tablet. The flash of purple through her hair was the first real colour I had seen in the house, and it was not reassuring.

“Director,” Olivia said by way of greeting.

This was the Director of the CIA? Not for the first time that morning, I wasn’t sure exactly what I had been expecting.

But this certainly wasn’t it.

“Thanks, Olivia, "she smiled, briefly looking up to address the woman, “you can show William back out.” She turned her eyes on Agent Marshall. “Thanks for coming all this way, hun. Make sure you take some time to enjoy yourself before going home.” She winked, and I felt my mouth drop open.

Perhaps no secrets could be kept from the Director of the CIA.

I tried to recover myself quickly, school my shock into a copy of that practiced politeness I had seen everyone else wearing.

Well, everyone except this woman.

Agent Marshall, William grinned at her, bowing his head. “A pleasure as always, Director.”

I felt my eyebrows lift. I was clearly the only one not in on the joke.

At last, taking her time, the Director’s eyes fell on me. “British men are so charming, don’t you think?”

What the fuck?

She smiled at me, as if waiting for my answer.

“Uh,” I cleared my throat again, fighting against the hoarseness that seemed determined to cling to my vocal cords as I tried to find words for a reply. “I guess I’m immune to it?”

I could feel their eyes on me. My chest felt tight, my grip on the bag strap far tighter than it needed to be.

“Or maybe,” I carried on, both voice and words coming easier, “I just haven’t been lucky enough to meet many charming men.”

The Director gave a hearty laugh, completely unabashed. Olivia was politely smiling, eyes fixed on William as he chucked gently.

“Definitely the latter,” he confirmed as he turned towards me, placing a hand softly on my shoulder. I flinched away from his touch, and he gave me that sad smile again. “All the best, miss. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

On familiar terms with the Director of the CIA, but not with me, apparently.

“Thanks,” my answering smile was more than a little bitter, “Have a safe trip back.”

Olivia was all but ushering him out of the door. “You’ll be just fine,” he reminded me over his shoulder before disappearing entirely as the door was pulled nearly shut, leaving a small crack open.

“You wanna sit?” The Director asked, looking at the seven unoccupied seats around the table.

I supposed I had little choice.

I took an awkward perch on the seat closest to me, not really sure what I was supposed to do with myself. I didn’t want to sit too close, assuming some kind of friendliness, but not wanting to sit so far away as to seem rude, even if every instinct screamed at me to put distance between us.

She leaned forward, out of that unnervingly casual slouch, and placed the tablet on the table in front of her, the screen now black. She assessed me for one long moment before giving a caution smile. 

“I’m Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine,” she said, stretching across the table to offer me her hand. 

I felt an eyebrow raise as I wiped my clammy hand on my thigh before placing it in hers and giving her my name.

“Oh, I know,” The caution smile stretched into a grin, and she withdrew her hand to tap her fingers against the tablet. “I know everything.”

“I would expect you to,” I mumbled softly. As much as I would really rather she didn’t know everything about me, it was quite literally her job to do so.

“And how much do you know?” She asked.

“About what?”

“Why you think you’re here, what you’ve been told, about this whole situation.” She was still smiling.

I settled a little further back into the chair. “Not much,” I admitted, “everyone has been really rather vague about the whole situation.” She nodded at me, waiting patiently. “I was told I was being sent to you because my own country didn’t have the ‘resources’ to ‘handle such an interesting case as me’.” I used my fingers to make quotation marks in the air.

She grinned at the resentment in my voice. “And you’re angry about it.”

I shrugged.

She waited.

With a huff, I spoke. “I wasn’t given a choice, had no chance to tell my family where I was going or why. I was told that surviving an assault was a cause for concern.”

At that, the Director let out a single laugh, sharp and shrill. “They actually said that?!”

“I believe the exact words were ‘That you survived such an incident is a cause for concern’.”

“Oh my god,” She muttered, leaning towards me. “Even I wouldn’t have said that.” She shook her head.

“For what it’s worth, I was horrified to hear about what happened to you.” Surprisingly, she looked like she meant it. “That asshole deserved what he got, regardless of how it happened.”

Now I could see why she was Director. She was good. An easy-going nature, a lack of any stiff formality. I wanted to trust her, my body wanted to relax in her presence.

Her face turned thoughtful. “Anyways, yes you are here because you’re interesting, and because those charming Brits don’t know what to do with you.  But more specifically, you are here because I think you’re interesting.”

I blinked. “You do?”

“Very much so.”

For a moment, my brain reeled as it tried to make sense of the new information and came up blank. Had I heard her correctly?

And then I did something that surprised me as much as it did the Director of the CIA. I snorted, dissolving into giggles.

Valentina looked at me like I’d gone mad. Maybe I had, perhaps the stress of work and the incident and flying halfway across the world all in such a short space of time had shattered my sanity.

“Sorry,” I tried to stifle the urge to giggle again, “it’s just that I’ve heard a whole lot of absurd things in the last forty-eight hours but that take the absolute biscuit.”

She was still staring at me.

“You’re the Director of the CIA,” I said, stating the obvious. “You’ve seen aliens and robots and wizards for heaven’s sake. And you think I’m interesting?” She nodded and I made another sound of amusement. “Forgive my bluntness, but, why?”

She looked away from me, playing with a sparkling ring on her middle finger. “Why’d you think?”

I thought it was clear that I had no idea. My good humour disappeared as quickly as it had come on. “Because I supposedly set a man on fire despite not having any means to do so?”

She shrugged. “That’s one reason.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, a strange sense of alertness bringing my senses to attention.

“There are... multiple reasons?” I asked in a small voice.

She was staring at me now, watching closely for something. “The spontaneous combustion was the perfect opportunity for me to finally get my hands on you. At last, something that I could justify as fly-you-across-the-Atlantic-to-observe-you interesting.”

My brows furrowed.

“What?” I asked, thoroughly confused.

She picked up the tablet in front of her, scrolling through with a secret smile stretched across her face. “I make it my job to know all about interesting characters.” She told me, briefly looking up from whatever it was she was reading. “Had you been born on this side of the Atlantic, someone might’ve spotted it sooner. Professor Xavier would have jumped at the chance to welcome someone like you to his school. But you Brits are so… old-fashioned. An usual child isn’t such a spectacle for you as it is for us. Your parents didn’t so much as blink when you so proudly presented them with a six-headed dandelion. When the mushroom circle appeared in the garden the morning after you joined the Girl Scouts it was put down to some magical coincidence. England is a land where magic and myths still exist.” She shook her head, laughing.

I wanted to correct her, that it was Brownies, not Girl Scouts. 

“Nobody questions the little girl with an uncanny ability to find four-leaf clover or rare flowers. They embrace all your little quirks without wondering if there’s something more behind them.” She tilted her head as she spoke, looking at me like I was some four-leafed clover, some rare flower. “And then that little girl grows up and bursts into flames and expects everyone to think that a coincidence too.”

We stared at each other for a moment.

How did she know all of that?

The Brownie guides, the fairy circle. The six-headed dandelion that my mother still had, preserved in a flower press we kept on a bookshelf filled with books about plants and fungi and flora and fauna of the British Isles.

The Director smiled like we shared a secret. I kept my face set somewhere between frustration and disbelief. It was a battle of wills, an unspoken test to see who would give first.

I gave first.

Footsteps echoed down the hallway, soft at first, barely audible but growing closer. The sound was deliberate, unhurried. My head turned toward the noise just as the door creaked open.

I gasped.

Standing in the doorway was a man. A very tall, very broad, very attractive man. The kind of man who would look perfectly at home on a magazine cover, but seemed more like he’d just walked out of a war zone. The frantic beat of my heart stuttered before racing off again at double speed.

Blue eyes met mine. For a second, just a second, our gazes locked.

And in that second, I saw nothing.

No flicker of curiosity. No warmth. No surprise. Just a cold, clear, empty stillness, like staring into a winter sky before a storm.

This man’s secrets weren’t just locked up tight; they were buried under concrete, wrapped in chains, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

I blinked, and it was over. His gaze slid off me, bored, moving instead to glare at Valentina.

It wasn't until she cleared her throat that I realised that I was staring. Slightly horrified, I dragged my eyes off the man and back to her. She took her time before speaking, letting the tension grow taut. Then, with a sudden burst of excited energy, she rose from her chair and gestured to him like she was unveiling a priceless work of art.

“This,” she said, her voice saccharine, “is James Barnes.”

James Barnes.

The name echoed in my head, ripples reaching into the depth of my memory, tugging there, like it should have been familiar.

James stepped further into the room, slow, purposeful. His boots were silent on the carpeted floor, each step the calculated precision of someone who knew how to own every inch of space he walked on.

He didn’t need to announce himself. His presence was an announcement all on its own.

He stood there, arms crossed over his chest, his expression somehow managing to look bored and angry. His eyes were icy, a muscle in his jaw twitched with what I could only assume was annoyance.

James Barnes was terrifying.

Not in the classic sense, not the primal flight-or-fight terror that makes you bolt for the door. Something colder. A sharp, icy edge at the back of my mind, the certainty that I was in the presence of something profoundly dangerous.

What was terrifying, was that I wasn't scared at all.

Slowly but surely, heat climbed up my neck, spread across my cheeks, and settled there with all the subtlety of a bonfire. His eyes flicked back to me, like he’d noticed the shift in temperature, and his gaze sharpened with interest. His brow quirked, just slightly, his lips tugging up at one corner.

Oh, no.

“Hi,” I muttered, praying the ground would swallow me whole.

His gaze didn’t waver. The cold blankness in his eyes had melted, just a little, giving way to something far more dangerous.

Amusement.

“Hi,” he said back, his voice deep and smooth with an edge to it that sounded as deadly as he looked.

I clenched my hands at my sides, nails digging into my palms, trying to ground myself. Trying not to think about how that one tiny, simple word had made goosebumps rise along my arms.

Valentina was watching me. Watching us. Smiling.

“Well then!” Valentina clasped her hands together, looking strangely delighted as she retrieved her things and moved around James Barnes to the door. “Now that you two are... acquainted, I’ll leave you to show her around and get settled in.”

My mouth opened and closed in a dozen wordless questions.

“I’ll be back in a week,” she promised me, it almost sounding like a threat before she turned to James and lowered her voice. “I’ll be in touch. Be nice.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, his lips curving up in a scathing smile as he called in mock cheerfulness, “Bye Val!”

You could’ve cut the tension with a knife.

The room felt like it was filled with the sound of my heart, pounding against my chest, amplified by the awkwardness of the silence that has settled following Valentina’s exit. My hands were clammy again.

James was looking down the hallway, watching the Director leave, I assumed. His stubbled jaw clenched, set in a way that I would have described as angry if it weren’t for the complete and utter void of emotion in his eyes.

There was something almost familiar about him. Like I had seen his face before, or a face that looked very much like his.

He turned to me, and any attempt at figuring out why he was so familiar quickly faded from my mind.

I’d been caught staring, a fresh wave of heat flooded into my face.

 “Grand tour?” James asked in a flat voice, gesturing towards the hallway with his free hand.

I swallowed, trying to find my tongue. “Yes please.”

He tilted his head in the direction of the hallway, an urge for me to hurry up that had me fumbling with my bag, getting stuck on the chair and tripping over my own feet. When I dared to look up, the glimmer of amusement had returned to his eyes.

Was it hot in here?

I had to all but jog to keep up with James and I wondered if it was because he was at least a foot taller than me, or because he was in such a hurry to get the grand tour over and done with. Probably both.

“Living space,” he said as we walked past the sofas and the TV, pointing in the direction of the open-plan kitchen, “kitchen.”

I bit my tongue against the urge to tell him that I had functioning eyes and did not need him to state the obvious.

Though the house was large, James’ grand tour took, at most, a couple of minutes. He took the stairs two at a time, leaving me gasping for air as we reached the top.

“Bedrooms,” he explained with a nod in the direction of the doors. “Yours is the first on the right.”

“Is there anyone else here?” I dared to ask, my eyes darting from grey door to grey door as I counted. Three on either side.

“Just us,” He exhaled, eyebrows lifting as he took a too-wide step around me to open the door to what would now be my bedroom. “They’ve all got bathrooms.” He added as an afterthought.

“Cool,” I say lamely, stepping slowly across the threshold of the door.

The fingers of his right-hand scraped across the stubble on his cheeks. Though his face was still blank, his eyes still iced over, I caught just a hint of awkwardness from him.  

“Thank you,” I blurted, “for showing me... stuff...” I cringed at my sudden bout of social ineptitude.

He said nothing in return, staring at me with that frozen, neutral expression. I would have rather he looked at me with hatred than this absolute nothingness and-

Oh, god. I was staring again.

“I’m sorry.” I apologised, not entirely sure what I was apologising for.

His brows knit together.

“For you being here?” I explained, grateful to have come up with something reasonable even if it did come out as a question. “I imagine you have better places to be and would rather not have to uh, babysit some random woman who may or may not burst into flames at any given moment.” I was rambling. What a fantastic first impression.

“Sorry,” I mumbled again, dropping my eyes from that all too distracting face.

“’S okay,” His voice was softer, and I could hear the amusement I saw in his eyes earlier. Just a hint. “Though maybe try to keep the flames to a minimum.”

For the first time in goodness knows how many hours, I felt the edges of my lips pull upwards with the threat of a smile. “I’ll try,” I said, trying to ignore the heat that still hadn’t left my face.

“There’s food in the kitchen and feel free to watch whatever you want on TV or... whatever. I’ll… leave you to get settled in.”

“Thank you,” I told him again. He nodded, pulling his expression into something like a polite smile that dropped as soon as it’d formed.

He really was familiar. Not in an immediate way, more like I was seeing someone I’d dreamt of. Like seeing a face from a story.

He nodded once before striding quickly past the stairs into the opposite hallway, where I assumed his room was. I didn’t watch to see which one was his, though some part of me was alarmingly curious.

I shut my door, faced the stark greys and whites of the room in front of me, and sighed.

Notes:

I couldn't start the story without our main main showing up! More coming very soon, I really hope you'll stick with me. Thank you so much for reading! I promise it'll get better (...I hope!).

And if you'd like a hint on where this story is going, there's a playlist!
🎶 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5fpTzAfqFMKzTy5u2csPh4?si=_7RquK6HTHmS7t3TSnR6dQ

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Chapter 4: Cartoons and Cooking Shows

Summary:

“Cooking shows, cartoons and sleeping. You sure know how to have a good time.”

I didn’t see James Barnes for the rest of that day. 

I didn’t really move. I had dropped the bag next to the bed, and laid there, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. I watched as, slowly but surely, the room grew darker and darker as night fell.

I crawled under the covers, kicking off my shoes, and despite the exhaustion, I did not sleep.

There were moment, when I had started to drift off, but memories mingled with dreams, placing me right back in the alley, and I had startled awake, unable to settle into anything more than a cycle of fitful napping.

I could barely remember the last time I had slept properly.

The blinds of my room were open, and as the first rays of dawn appeared over the tops of the trees outside, I gave up with sleeping and instead busied myself with unpacking my meagre provisions.

Three of everything; three shirts, three pairs of tracksuit bottoms, three bras, and three pairs of underwear. All grey, stiff and slightly scratchy. Brand new and made for convenience rather than comfort.

The en-suite bathroom was surprisingly spacious and stocked with the basics; soap, shower gel, shampoo and conditioner (neither of which did my hair any more good than getting it clean, which I supposed would have to do).

I changed into an identical grey outfit and cringed at the thought of having to figure out the washing machine is so soon. I dragged a cheap hairbrush through my tangled hair, and left it dripping down my back, the damp quickly leeching into the shirt and chilling me so much that I contemplated going back to bed, if only to warm up.

Instead, I made my way downstairs to the large open-plan living space and settled into the corner of one of the plush grey sofas. I wasted at least fifteen minutes trying to work the remote control and another twenty searching through what felt like a million different stations before finally I found something familiar.

I watched episode after episode of The Simpsons, the jokes that would usually make me smile or laugh leaving me feeling oddly empty. My wet hair dried to damp, and slowly, so slowly, time passed. The sun had risen high in the sky, but the darkness was coming for me, creeping in slowly from the edges of the room.

The low rumble of his voice jolted me awake. 

“Are you watching cartoons?”

One-by-one, my senses woke. The smell of coffee tickled my nose, the familiar theme tune shaking the sleep from my ears. My tongue felt like a desert.

He was staring at me. His face surprisingly animated, with one raised eyebrow, tension around his mouth that looked like he was trying to suppress a smile, his eyes almost seeming to glitter.

“It’s The Simpsons,” I argued in a sleep-soft voice, “it’s for grown-ups.”

His laugh was soft, quiet, little more than a scoff. It sparked something in me, making my blood hot and setting my teeth on edge.

“'Grown ups’?” he asked accusingly, smirking at me between sips of coffee. His eyes travelled over my face, smirk growing as he took in the indignant pink shade I’d turned.

I turned away from him, fixing my eyes on the TV, refusing to dignify him with a response.

For a moment, it was quiet. The tension from yesterday still very much present, but changed. Charged, almost, with his disapproval and my embarrassed anger.

I was painfully aware of his presence, though he must have been a good two metres away. Could see the practiced stillness of his stance in my peripheral vision. “You have a perfectly good bed, y’know.”

“So that’s what that big squishy thing in the middle of my room is,” I snapped, narrowing my eyes at him and willing the blush to fade.

It did not.

He rolled his eyes at me before strolling off into the depths of the house. “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit!” He called, before disappearing out of sight.

“But the highest form on intelligence,” I said back, not bothering to raise my voice. He wouldn’t hear me anyway.

I had slept for a couple of hours and was still groggy as I explored more of the millions of channels. The news channels were even worse than those I was used to, and I found myself quickly skipping to something else. It was all the same anyway; war, politics, celebrities. Same shit, different continent.

I snooped around the kitchen, trying to convince myself that it was not snooping and this was my kitchen now, and failed. I made myself a sandwich if only to quiet the echoing growl of my stomach. I perched on one of the high stools at the edge of the massive kitchen island, feeling overwhelmingly awkward as I marvelled at the sheer shininess of everything.

It was like a show home, or one of those kitchens the TV chefs use on the cooking shows. Stocked like one too, the cupboards and fridge filled to the brim with such an assortment of food that I doubted James and I would be able to eat it all before it went bad.

When I got bored of trawling through the wonder of the television, I explored the house as much as I dared, creeping on my grey-socked feet and praying that I wouldn’t bump into James.

There was a small, but surprisingly loud, part of me that did want to see him, which surprised me. He had not been warm, or welcoming, or even very polite. He was a stranger, a man I didn’t know and one who looked so very much like trouble that I knew I shouldn’t want to see him.

But… I did. Which was dangerous and scary and so god damn stupid.

I tried to rationalise it; maybe it was the trauma, maybe I was latching onto the perceived strength of him, perhaps my psyche was grabbing onto the illusion of protection that James could offer me and was holding on tight to that ideal with both hands.

If I kept telling myself all of that, I might believe it eventually.

In an effort to distract myself, I found the utility room with the washing machine, stocked to the brim with more cleaning products than most supermarkets. I familiarised myself with most of them, figured out which would do what until the arguing voices in my head quietened.

The more I wandered, the better I got at spotting the cameras.

They weren’t hidden, but were tucked away in conspicuous corners. Tucked away in most of the corners, actually. In every hallway, in every room, except the bedroom.

A constant presence. Watching, and waiting.

I shivered.

I spent far too long staring out through the glass of the back door at the garden, and trees beyond. There was a large patio, furnished with utilitarian grey garden chairs, and a trio of large, concrete pots, the plants within long since dead, but beyond that were bursts of colour. The lush green grass seemed darker here than it was at home. The trees an explosion of greens with the same hints of autumn that had kissed the trees in England too; little pecks of yellow, a caress of orange, and when I squinted, I was sure I could see the first red leaf waving proudly from the top of a tree.

The door was locked, and there was no sign of a key. I could only assume that my going outside was forbidden.

That thought clenched strangely at my chest, and the air grew too heavy, too hot, too close.

I distracted myself with more TV, flicking through seemingly endless channels until I settled on cooking shows, watching chef after chef work until my blinks got so heavy I could no longer keep my eyes open.

It was dark when I woke up, the only light coming from the television.

With a press of a button, the TV shut off and the house fell eerily silent. Not so much as a stir from anywhere else in the building as I crept up to my room.

I wondered if James was here at all.

I felt especially alone as I curled into bed that night, watching the dark mirror of the window until the sun crept over the horizon.

I finally fell asleep, just as the first light of dawn had turned black sky to inky blue.

And woke, screaming from some quickly forgotten nightmare barely an hour later.

When my pulse had slowed and my breathing calmed enough for me to worry that I’d woken James, I crept to press my ear against the door.

Silence.

I stood there for a long while, listening. Waiting. Nothing but silence.

I sat on the floor of the shower for a ridiculously long time, lamenting my fucked-up sleep pattern. It could be the jet lag. Or the unfamiliarity. Or that I was notoriously dreadful at sleeping.

Or the events leading up to my being here that I was doing a sterling job at not thinking about.

I finally dragged myself out of the shower and took far longer than necessary trying to towel-dry my hair, dressing in yet another monochromatic mass of grey, and slinking down the stairs to rummage through the kitchen again.

American Pop Tarts were a revelation, and if only for the ten minutes it took to eat them, I decided that things weren’t so bad after all.

James didn’t appear that morning, leaving me to watch my cartoons free from judgement, and I told myself that I was glad of it.

I wasn’t.

I gathered the scant armful of clothes I had, having already worn two thirds of my existing wardrobe, and carried them nervously to the utility room, not noticing a missing pair of boring grey undies until I’d chucked everything into the washing mashing, and had to run back through the house to retrieve them from the stairs before he found them.

I nearly fell flat on my face when my feet slipped on the shiny tiled floor of the hallway, a pair of underwear clenched in my hands and in that moment, I was genuinely glad that there was no sign of James Barnes and that scrutinising stare he wore so well.

I mastered using the washing machine, and the dryer too, but still didn’t dare to use more than the toaster in the kitchen.

My eyes grew heavier and heavier as I watched my new favourite chef preparing the richest-looking macaroni cheese I had ever seen, and I fell asleep again in front of the TV.

“Why is she called the Barefoot Contessa,” his voice was raised louder than necessary, pulling me from sleep as quickly as I had fallen into it. “When she’s clearly wearing shoes?” 

I made a sound that was both a groan and a growl as I opened my eyes.

James was sat on the opposite side of the L shaped sofa, arms crossed, his lips curved into that infuriating smirk.

On his right wrist, peeking out from his sleeves, was a fancy-looking, old-fashioned watch. I could hear it ticking over the quiet murmur of the TV.

"Why can’t you just let me sleep?” I grumbled.

He watched me for a moment before answering. “I couldn’t hear the TV over your snoring.”

“I don’t snore.” I told him. He just kept staring at me, his eyebrows lifting in disagreement. “I don’t!”

Wisely, he didn’t argue. He inclined his head towards the TV. “Cooking shows, cartoons and sleeping. You sure know how to have a good time.” He was almost scathing.

I sat up straighter, wincing at the pain in my neck. “If you have any better suggestions for how I’m supposed to spend my time I am all ears.”

He watched me as I shifted, his smirk slowly disappearing, his face turning thoughtful.  

“Do you read?” he asked.

I was insulted by that and perhaps, if I’d been little less weary and a lot more ballsy, I’d have seethed at him. Instead, I just nodded, watching as that look of thoughtfulness turned into something else. Heavier, as if weighted down.

A weight that settled uncomfortably between us.

The silence and awkward tension dragged on for a few more minutes before I could no longer bear it.

“I’m going to go to bed,” I announced, cringing when I realised that he absolutely could not care less what I did. I stood on wobbly legs, stumbling slightly as I placed the remote control on the arm of the sofa he was sat on.

“So, you do know what it’s for.” He was smirking again. “And now I can watch the Definitely-Not-Barefoot Contessa with her excessive amounts of butter in peace.”

I glared at him. “I do not snore.”

He raised one eyebrow, still smirking the smirk that I so badly wanted to wipe off his face.

With a tut, I stomped off to my room.

I was far too awake to sleep.

I sat on the foot of the bed, staring out of the large windows that overlooked the garden. I watched the colour fade from the world as the sun dipped lower and lower beyond the horizon. I watched as twilight turned to dusk, and dusk to night. I watched as, one-by-one, the stars twinkled into existence in the sky above me.

There was no moon that night, and I wasn’t sure I had ever felt more lonely.

Through this whole ordeal, I had held myself together so tightly that I’d forgotten how it was to feel.

I’d closed myself off from the fear that night, and not dared to open up as they’d carted me across the Atlantic, locked me in this massive house with a man that probably hated me. There had been brief moments of emotions, too complicated or concerning for me to ponder at before I’d swiftly shut them down.

As I stared into the vast, dark sky, the strength with which I’d been holding myself together started to crumble. Like a crack in a dam, it wasn’t long before all of the emotion I’d been holding back came flooding out.

The slow trickle of tears turned into a torrent, and I crawled into the shower in some attempt to disguise the sound of my sobbing. I must have sat there for hours and still the tears did not stop as I wrapped myself in a large grey towel and shuffled out to sit next to the window.

I cried and cried, holding a pillow to my chest in an attempt to fill the rapidly growing hole in my chest. I buried my face in the plush fabric to muffle the sobs that threatened to tear me apart.

I ran out of tears somewhere after two in the morning.

I wasn’t sure if the rooms were soundproofed or if I’d been crying too loudly to hear James go to bed, but it seemed as if there was nothing here except me and my loneliness.

I stayed, shivering and naked, wrapped only in a towel and a pillow and my own despair, until dawn appeared, staining the sky a blushing pink.

I pulled myself back together enough to wash my face, brush my hair, and dress in desolate grey to start the cycle all over again.

I supposed I had done things enough now to call it a routine: eat junk food for breakfast, watch cartoons, watch the sun cross the sky outside the window.

But this day was different for two reasons.

The first was that I learned that James Barnes wrote entirely in capital letters. His handwriting was a lot like him; precise and neat and distinctly masculine.

How I discovered that James Barnes wrote in Caps Lock, was the second reason the day was different: a bright yellow sticky-note, still attached to the rest of the pad had been placed neatly on the kitchen island next to a well-read copy of The Hobbit.

BETTER THAN CARTOONS AND COOKING SHOWS

I would not have thought myself capable of it, but I felt a smile pull at my face as I picked the book up gingerly, as if were some precious, breakable thing.

For reasons I couldn’t explain even to myself, I took the note too, peeling it carefully from the pad and folding it neatly into my pocket.

By the time the sun had started to set, I’d finished reading.

And hadn’t seen James at all.

Aside from the sound of pages turning, and the quiet mumble of the TV, the big house was silent. No sign that anyone else was here, except from the book and the note and a faint static-like sensation in the air.

The loneliness should have been threatening to consume me again, but somehow I didn’t feel nearly as alone as I had.

I left the copy of The Hobbit where I found it, James’ note still in my pocket as I wrote one of my own.

Definitely better, thank you.  But please don’t make me read the rest of the Lord of the Rings again. I might genuinely lose my mind.

I took myself back to bed, unfolded the note in my pocket and stuck it to the bedside table and I stared at it until I fell slowly into sleep.

It smelled like sunshine. Like warmth and honey and bright like citrus.

It smelled like the calm before the storm.

And the storm would smell like sweat and vodka and desperation.

The storm was all fumbling, grabbing hands that grasped at me and tore me, limb from limb and thought from thought until there was nothing left of me but that sad little bundle of despair I had seen reflected in the window.

I woke up crying and gasping for air, the pillow damp from tears and the white bedding smudged with little spots of red. My arms and legs were littered with scratches, shallow grazes from my still-ragged nails that overlapped the fading bruises. The tearing I’d felt in the dream must have come from my own hands.

It mostly washed away in the shower, and at least washing the bedding would give me some kind of purpose with which to fill a small part of my day.

There was another book waiting for me in the kitchen, and I dropped the bedding in a big fluffy pile on the floor in my anticipation.

Another note, shining on sunshine yellow.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH LORD OF THE RINGS?

The Metal Monster was another old fantasy novel, and I finished it in even less time than The Hobbit, reading between transferring the bedding from washer to dryer, marking my place with a blank post-it when I had to pause to re-make the bed or scrouge myself something to eat.

I left the book neatly where I found it again, with another note of my own:

I don’t say this often, but the films were better.

I had no energy to cry that night, and mercifully there were no nightmares. I was sure I could have slept for days, maybe even weeks, but I considered myself lucky to get a few broken hours.

I watched the sun come up again. Counted four more red leaves on the trees outside as the sky broke into autumnal colours all of its own.

That morning, as I let the warm water wash the long night from my skin and my soul, I realised something. For the first time since I’d arrived in America, since the incident that had sent me here, even, I found that I was looking forward to getting up. That there was this tiny little flicker, a miniscule bloom of something like excitement. Anticipation.

And I wasn’t disappointed that morning, either.

I found myself smiling, really genuinely smiling, at the little yellow pad of notes.

BOLD CLAIM. COULDN’T COMMENT – HAVEN'T SEEN THEM.

The notes were short, but they were more than he’d actually spoken to me.

They gave me something to look forward to, something to motivate me to actually get out of bed in the morning. The notes and the books had become a sort of anchor for me, the neon yellow rectangles like a lighthouse in the dark foggy despair I’d found myself.

The next book left for me was once again, an old fantasy novel, and I wondered at the connection. Was this some kind of weird education in pre-war literature? Did James just have a really specific taste in books?

There was a film of this book too, but The Sword in the Stone was much better as a book than a film. Disney had not done it justice.

HOW have you not seen the LotR films?! They’re classics!

James’ third note joined the others in the drawer of the little side table that sat next to my bed. Little reminders that there was lightness in the dark, there was hope, there was something to look forward to. Hope that perhaps James Barnes did not hate me, after all.

I wondered, briefly as I started to drift off to sleep, what he did with the notes I left him. Probably binned them. Sent them off to Val as evidence that I was really nothing special at all.

Reading was helping in more ways than one.

With the books keeping my mind engaged during the day, with something to actually hold my attention rather than sending me off into naps on the sofa, I was starting, slowly but surely, to actually sleep at night.

It wasn’t a good night’s sleep by any stretch of the imagination, and I spent a couple of hours between three and five in the morning watching the thin sliver of moon disappear behind the trees, but I had actually slept.

There was still no James the next morning. I couldn’t quite remember how long I had been here, when I had last seen him, when I had last used my voice.

There was no book waiting for me either, and I tried to stifle the sinking feeling of disappointment that weighed heavily in my stomach. The little yellow note did little to help.

MEETING WITH VAL. SAME PLACE AS BEFORE. 11:00

I didn’t keep that one.

Notes:

Thank you for being on this journey with me! More coming soon ❤️‍🔥

Chapter 5: Soap, Cedar and Cinnamon

Summary:

He smelled like soap. Soap, cedar and cinnamon. It made me think of black and white films, and old books.

I had to clear my throat three times before I could speak in more than a hoarse croak.

Valentina had asked me how I was, how I was settling in, how I was finding it.

If someone had told me a week ago that I’d be lying straight to the face of the Director of the CIA, I would’ve laughed them out of the room. But here I was, smiling politely, telling pretty little lies right to the face of the Director of the CIA who was very clearly not buying it.

“So things have been... quiet.” It was not a question. Val was staring at both James and I in turn, her face the picture of frustration.

She had taken the same seat as before, at the head of the table, her black leather bag slung on the table as she leaned back in the chair. I too had chosen the same seat as before; close enough to not seem rude, far enough away to keep a comfortable distance.

James did not sit.

He had arrived two minutes later than me and had chosen the very point furthest away from me to lean against the wall his hands stuffed in his pockets. He wasn’t looking at me, his ice-cold stare was fixed on Valentina, his sharp jaw set in a way that suggested his patience stretched thin.

He looked like he’d been carved from something cold and hard, all sharp edges and unyielding lines.

Unbothered. Unmoving. Unimpressed.

I thought with the books that maybe we were getting somewhere. Not anywhere very far, or very quicky, he’d said a scant few sentences to me for heaven’s sake, but somewhere.

Apparently, I’d thought wrong.

He avoided looking at me with a precision that felt deliberate. Not a glance. Not a flicker of acknowledgement. Like I was an empty chair instead of a person. I knew it was silly, I knew I was being ridiculous, but it stung and made the prickle behind my eyes harder to ignore than usual.

 “I’m really surprised by this,” she gestured towards us, “weirdness. You’ve been here, together, for a week and I can still feel the awkward tension between you.”

She turned to frown at James. “You really should try a little harder, Barnes. Get her talking and I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised.” Valentina threw me a wink and I tried for another polite smile. I could feel it mangle on my face.

James didn’t react. Not a twitch of his brow, not a shift in his weight. His expression was a perfectly bored mask of nothingness, the same he had worn the last time we were here.

With a sigh, the Director reached into the black leather bag on the table next to her, rooting around for something. “Maybe,” she said, still rummaging, “you two just need to get out a bit.”

I sat up a little straighter.

She clocked my change in posture immediately. “Only so you can get some actual clothes,” she eyed the grey shirt with a look of disgust, “no offense but grey really isn’t your colour.”

I blinked, and before I could stop it, a smile tugged at my lips. A real one this time

From the bag, Valentina produced a shiny black credit card and slid it across the table to me, her face still serious. “Would’ve let you out sooner had you not looked like you’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.” I cringed at that. I hadn’t looked that bad, most of the bruises were hidden by my clothes, still there, now fading to a disgusting green colour.

“Jeez, you two!” She huffed loudly, her hands thrown up in disbelief. “I truly do not know how you’ve managed to make things so... tense.”

I was grateful when Valentina turned her attention to James, rambling casually about reports, analytics, and a string of words that all merged into white noise until, “Have you considered my offer, Sergeant?”

James and I seemed to tense in tandem.

He pushed off from the wall, the hard tension to his body seemed to be annoyed now. He narrowed his eyes at her. “Yes, I have, Director. I haven’t got an answer yet.”

Valentina simply shrugged. “Let me know if that changes.”

James’ tense posture did not relax, even as the Director packed her things into her shiny leather bag and swung it over one shoulder, even as she left the room without so much as a glance in my direction - which, frankly, was probably for the best. I hadn’t quite figured out how to scrape the intrigue off my face just yet.

Her voice floated back from down the hall, cheerful and easy as ever. “See you in a week!”

James didn’t follow her. Not right away. Only once we heard the soft, distant thump of the door closing, did he look at me.

His gaze was sharp, assessing, like he was cataloguing every detail with quiet precision. I felt it settle on me, weighty and unyielding, and it took everything in me not to fidget under the scrutiny.

His eyes lingered, just a moment too long, on the junction of my neck and my shoulder, where I knew the yellowing edges of a bruise peeked out from the neckline of my sweatshirt.

Something crossed his face. The tiniest flicker of emotion that was so brief, so subtle, that I couldn’t discern what it was.

And then, he was gone. Slipping from the room so quickly and quietly that I’d blinked and missed it.

My mind was a mess. A tangled jumble of excitement and apprehension and a more-than-healthy dose of curiosity. I stayed sat at the shiny black table for far longer than I should have, toying with the equally shiny black card in my hand.

I supposed I should’ve known James would have a military background. That was the only way one ended up working for any kind of government secret service. Covert ops, secret agencies, shadowy government things. Agent Marshall had definitely been military; the shiny shoes and the olive-green jacket had been a dead giveaway.

But what had the CIA offered James? What the table for him? And more importantly, what did he have that gave him the power to keep them waiting on an answer?

With no books to distract me this time, I had too much space in my head to fill. Too much time to think. To wonder. To pick at every tiny inconsistency like a loose thread.

Who was James Barnes?

Why did his face tug at my memory?

Why did he leave me books and notes but would barely speak to me?

What was he doing here? Was this a choice or an order?

I had approximately zero explanations and two hundred more questions by the time I went to bed.

 

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚─── ┘

 

Tuesday morning saw a return of books and notes, and I grinned as I all but ran across the shiny wood floors, my socks sliding slightly as I stumbled into the kitchen island.

A CLASSIC.

Was all James had written on the note next to All Quiet on the Western Front, and I added another dozen questions to the ever-growing list in my mind.

I spent the rest of that day reading, and wondering about Sargeant James Barnes and his old books. Though I was sore tempted, I chose not to ask about it when I left the note with the book that evening.

Instead, I asked another question I was curious about. Perhaps the one I was most curious about, hoping it would give me at last one answer.

What’s your favourite book?

That night I tossed and turned well into the early hours of the morning until I drifted, eventually, into an uneasy unconsciousness where it wasn’t my own torment waiting for me.

It’s not Paul Bäumer watching his friends fall to enemy fire. Not German troops fighting and dying and losing.

They’re American, they’re allies.

And greeting death with a strange look of contentment, the dog tags dangling from his bloodied shirt telling me what I already knew from the moment I had seen his blue eyes and his dark hair.

Sergeant James Barnes.

I woke in a cold sweat to the sound of rain lashing against the window.

It took a long while for my heart to slow, my breathing to calm. It took longer for me to realise that I had finally slept past dawn. 

There were no books or notes waiting for me in the kitchen that morning.

There wasn’t even time to feel disappointed about that, because standing with a bundle of black fabric over one arm, looking impatient, was James himself.

“Good morning,” I rasped softly, voice still a little rough and unfamiliar after the days of silence.

“It’s pretty cold out there and you don’t have a jacket.” He said by way of greeting. He offered me the lump of black fabric. “Wouldn’t want you to get hypothermia,” his eyes noted the dampness of my hair, and there was an edge to his tone that I couldn’t quite identify.

I frowned at him, taking what I then realised was a large black hoodie.

The fabric was soft, well-worn and smelled like cedar and cinnamon. Too big on the shoulders for me and, tight fitting on my hips, the sleeves falling well past my hands and bunching as I pushed them up my forearms. A man’s hoodie, I realised, cut for broad shoulders and bulging biceps and not for the soft squidges of my femininity.

“I’m not nearly that delicate,” I want to be annoyed at the implication, at the insinuation of weakness, but I was too grateful for the extra warmth. “But thank you.”

I couldn’t tell if the look on his face was one of agreement or argument and I tried not to notice how his blue shirt made his eyes shine, or that the leather jacket he wore was gleaming as it hugged the firm shapes of his body.

Or how the stubble emphasised the little cleft in his chin, right under the plushness of his lips. I tried extra hard not to notice that.

I was gratefully distracted by James’ gruff, “Come on then,” as he led the way towards the front door. He seemed to be in a hurry to be outside, and I struggled to keep up with his long, powerful strides.

When the cool, wet air hit my face, I stopped trying altogether.

The sensations hit me like a brick wall.

The sharp, cool kiss of the spitting rain, the petrichor-scented breeze that made me shiver.  The flow of the pure, clean air into my lungs, so nice that I could almost taste the trees. The distinctive sound of raindrops on leaves, the disgruntled cries of damp-feathered birds, the complete serenity of nature was all I could focus on, and in that moment, I was sure nothing had ever felt so nice as fresh air and raindrops.

“What the hell are you doing?” James’ voice was distant, despairing, and when I opened my eyes, his hands were held out in a gesture that plainly asked, ‘what the fuck?’.

Too delighted with being outside to feel embarrassed, I simply shrugged and noted with interest that this was the first time I’d seen both of his hands.

He was wearing gloves, leather gloves, despite it not quite being glove weather.

Maybe he had Reynaud's or something. ‘What the fuck?’ indeed.

I hurried to catch up, following the small path around to the side of the house where he waited with a spectacular frown.

“Well?” He asked as we walked towards a well-hidden garage that I hadn’t noticed on my arrival, waiting for an explanation for my odd behaviour.

“I’ve been stuck inside for goodness knows how long,” I replied, slightly breathless from having to match each his giant strides with three of my own. “It’s nice to be outside.”

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind, his tone making me feel like an idiot. “It’s only been a week. And you can go outside, y’know. You’re not actually under house arrest.”

I raised an eyebrow at him as he pressed a button on a key fob he produced from his pocket, and the electric door began to open.

“It may have escaped your notice,” I made an effort to keep my voice polite, “that the doors are locked, and I don’t have a key.”

A glimmer of realisation flickered in his eyes. “Right,” he rubbed the back of his neck with a gloved hand. “I’ll leave the back door unlocked in the mornings,” he promised, looking awkward.

“I’d be most grateful,” I gave him one of my professional smiles, the corners of my eyes pinching slightly, “thank you.”

There was a soft clang as the garage door opened fully to reveal the most boring black car I had ever seen. Or rather the most inconspicuous car I’d ever seen, especially when compared with the gleaming black motorbike that could not have been more different; bold and sexy and attention-grabbing.

Who did that belong to?

I fought the urge to run a finger along the glossy paint, wishing that I could ever be cool enough to sit on it and not look like a complete dickhead, instead schooling my expression into a poor imitation of James’ bored face and walked to the car.

I could feel his eyes on me, the effort

I tugged at the handle, once, twice, and then when I realised it was still locked, I did turn to frown at him. “Is this a very unfunny joke or did you neglect to notice that these doors are locked too?” There was no hint of my practiced politeness now, just a frustrated annoyance.

His answering grin was disarming, his eyes sparking with laughter which made my frown deeper even though I wanted to smile right along with him.

“Are you driving?” He asked, sounding more serious than he looked.

What a weird question.

I huffed, turning back to the car door as if it would offer me the answers James was clearly not going to give, watching my own confused face in the reflection of the dark glass.

Watching my cheeks flood with pink as I realised my mistake.

“Oh,” I said slowly, “Left-hand drive.”

He was still grinning as I walked past him to get to the passenger’s side, and I kept my head held high, pretending as if the raging pink in my cheeks wasn’t there. The grin settled into a smug little smile as he slid smoothly into the driver’s seat.

There were mere inches between us, and all of a sudden, the air felt electric.

It was as if his presence had charged the very particles around me, waking up my nerves and my senses and making me so painfully aware of how close he was sat.

“This feels strange,” I grumbled as I clicked the seatbelt into place, not just speaking about sitting on the wrong side of the car. He rolled his eyes at me as he turned the keys in the ignition and the car purred into life, the radio turning on to some generic talk radio station.

We drove out of the garage, away from the house and down the long driveway I knew would lead to security gates.

When we’d turned onto an actual road, curiosity had overridden my annoyance and I asked, as casually as I could manage, “So... where are we going?”

“Target,” he replied quickly. Was he always a man of such few words or was it me. There was a long pause and a side glance from him before he added, “It’s about a fifteen-minute drive.”

We spent the rest of those minutes in awkward silence, nothing but the quiet mumble of the radio to stop things from being unbearable.

I could’ve sworn those were the longest fifteen minutes of my life.

I tried to take noticed of my new surroundings, tried to enjoy how alien it all felt.

Despite my efforts, I struggled to pay attention to anything other than the subtle shift of the muscles in James’ arms as he drove.

Even through the layers of clothing I see that he was strong, the leather of his jacket stretched taught over his upper arms and-

For fuck’s sake, I was staring again.

I kept my eyes firmly forward for the few remaining minutes of the drive, and letting out a quiet “woah!” as we pulled into the car park.

Target was massive.

I gawped at the building in front of us for a moment before the strange static sensation in the car intensified, goosebumps prickled on every part of my body, and then James was suddenly very, very close.

I froze.

He turned to lean behind my seat, the movement bringing him so close that I could feel the heat radiating off that broad chest, could count the individual strands of stubble on that chiselled jaw.

He was reaching for something on the back seat, and I was completely and utterly frozen. Transfixed.  The electricity in the air sank into my skin, stealing my breath and setting my heartbeat into a racing gallop.

He smelled like soap. Soap, cedar and cinnamon. It made me think of black and white films, and old books. As I sat there, hyper-aware of him next to me, there was only one clear thought in my mind.

The hoodie I was wearing, was his.

As he pulled back, his eyes met mine, taking in my wide-eyed stare, my parted lips, the growing flush in my cheeks and for the brief moment I could see his face, he looked mortified.

The heat had dissipated, the distance between us grew, and James was out of the car, carefully adjusting a navy-blue baseball cap.

What the fuck?

I was as relieved as I was surprised, as grateful for the distance between us as much as I missed his closeness.

Before I could question him on it, he was rushing off towards the store, leaving me yet again trailing after him.

“Nice hat,” I teased when I finally caught up to him, missing the responding look on his face because I was too busy gawping at the sheer vastness of the inside of a Target.

“Bloody hell.” My voice was soft, awed.

James laughed, a real, genuine laugh, as he watched me.

If I hadn’t been so flabbergasted by the behemoth of a shop before me, I would have enjoyed that sound. Would have blushed at it. Would have done all in my power to hear it again. As it was, I wasn’t sure my eyebrows would ever return to their usual position with how high they had raised.

“How about you go and find everything you need, and when you’re all sorted, I’ll meet you by the books?” His expression was softer than anything I had seen so far, eyes almost sparkling with humour.

“You’re trusting me not to escape?” The disbelief in my voice was clear.

 “Yeah,” he agreed, his smile turning mocking. “You’ve had plenty of opportunity to try, and all it took stop you was a locked door and anyway,” he held the car keys up to me, jangling them from a crooked finger, “I’ve got the keys.”

I frowned at him. “Don’t underestimate me, James Barnes.”

He was still smiling, his eyes burning into mine. “Wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

A frisson of something cold and urgent slinked through my veins.

“What if I get lost?” I was suddenly breathless again. “What if I can’t find you?”

A shrug as he looked away from me, adjusting his cap before he tucked his hands into his pockets. “Then I’ll have to come and find you,” he said simply, the words somehow as much a threat as they were a promise.  “Two hours,” he called over his shoulder as he strolled away, the perfect image of nonchalance.

I didn’t have a moment to be overwhelmed.

I’d thought two hours was an excessive amount of time, until it had taken me twenty minutes to find even where the clothes were let alone find something appropriate. It took another fifty minutes to choose a modest selection of outfits, and with the time it took for me to locate the toiletries, the check-outs and then the books, I had used up nearly all of the two hours James gave me.

Despite my earlier fear, he wasn’t hard to find at all.

Tall and broad and brooding, the rest of the shoppers gave him a wide berth and I was drawn to him like a god damn magnet. His baseball capped head was bowed over a book, his eyes scanning through the blurb.

I nearly dropped my bags.

Held in his right hand, loosely, casually, ready to be dropped at a second’s notice, was a book I recognised easily. The unusual colouring, the familiarity of the font. Before I could voice my approval, he stiffened, shoved the book back on the shelf and turned to me, his eyes hard, mouth pressed into a thin line.

“Done?” He asked, way more harshly than was necessary, stomping his way out of the store, not bothering to wait for my confirmation.

He didn’t so much as look back as I literally ran to keep up with him, and even then, he was out of sight before I could even make it outside.

The rain was pouring, quickly soaking through the porous layers of the hoodie and the thin grey shirt as I struggled to remember where he’d parked the car. Like trying to find a needle in a haystack, if the one needle you were trying to find was purposely designed to blend in. Made even harder by the heavy rain blurring everything.

I was well and truly drenched by the time I finally spotted him, frowning at me through the windscreen, a torrent of water cascading like a wet curtain between us.

I frowned right on back, standing in front of the car and glaring at him, letting the rain soak me for a moment longer if only so I could express my displeasure. If I’d had my hands free, I would have placed them on my hips. Stood there until he apologised.

I may have been imagining it, or the rain was playing tricks on me, but he almost looked a little surprised.

I threw the few bags I had procured on the back seat next to his damp hat and fell into the passenger seat with all of the grace of a drowned rat, my cheap off-brand white trainers squeaking against each other as I did.

“Thanks for waiting, James.” I told him in a tone of sarcastic delight, my hair dripping audibly on to the leather upholstery. “It was really kind of you to help me find my way back to this unfamiliar car, in a car park the size of Wembley bloody Stadium, in a country I have never visited, in the middle of a gosh darn downpour.”

Only when I had finished my rant did he turn to look at me. No apology at all, bar the faintest hint of pink I caught colouring his cheek beneath the stubble. The tiniest flush of shame.

Good.

He took in my dripping hair, the trail of raindrops from forehead to chin, my clenched jaw, and his eyebrow rose a little.

“Feisty,” he said, so quietly that I wondered if he’d said it at all, turning his attention back out of the windscreen and pulled out of the car park.

I glared at him until the smudge of colour on his face faded, until the heat of my anger faded too, and the chill of early autumn rain made me shiver.

His staunch silence remained, and I turned to look out of the window.

From the corner of my eye, I could see James’ hand move to fiddle with something on the console, and a moment later warm air was fluttering against my face.

Once I was no longer distracted by his frowning or my ire, I noticed that the buzzing, tingling electric sensation in the car has not faded.

Not even a little bit.

It was much, much worse, and was all I could think about for the rest of the drive. If I thought fifteen minutes had dragged on the way out, I’d been wrong.

It seemed to be stretching on into eternity, now.

When, eventually, we did make it back through the security gates and the long driveway and back into the garage, James turned to me, the sudden silence now there was no engine purring only amplified the strange sensation that sparkled between us.

His eyes fixed on mine, looking somewhere between determined, and strangely sad.

“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly, letting the silence drag on for a short while longer. “I’m not used to,” he gestured between us, “this sort of thing.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “By this sort of thing do you mean having to babysit random people to make sure they don’t spontaneously combust or...”

“Meeting new people. And uh,” he continued, rushing through the words like this would be his only opportunity to speak them, “I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable. Y’know, after…” His voice trailed off and the furrow between his brow deepened.

I understood, now. James was being, or at the very least was trying to be, considerate.

Being around a man you’ve never met before was something to be wary of at the best of times, and after being assaulted by a stranger… He thought that by keeping his distance, he was making me feel more comfortable.

But, rightly or wrongly, James didn’t scare me.

On the contrary, his presence, as infuriating as it was proving to be, felt oddly comforting. The height, the muscles that were obvious even through layers of clothing, the terrifying stare. Everything about James seemed to radiate intimidation, but rather than find it intimidating I found it reassuring. Protective. Nobody would dare to fuck with James, and by allying myself with him perhaps I felt that nobody would fuck with me either.

I cleared my throat. “Well then, let’s not be strangers,” I held my right hand out to him, pushing up the long, soggy sleeve so my hand was free. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, James Barnes.”

He placed a leather-covered hand in mine and static shot straight up my arm. “Bucky,” he corrected, and when my brows pulled together, “Call me Bucky.”

I didn’t question it, just shook our joined hands and murmured in agreement, “Bucky.”

“And the pleasure is all mine,” he added, a glint sparkling in his eyes as he gave my hand an almost imperceptible squeeze before letting go and getting out of the car.

I took a moment longer to gather my wits about me. To forget the static sparkle still zinging in my fingers, to forget the glimmer of something almost mischievous in his eyes.

At least I could blame my blushing on the warm air that had been blasting into my face for the last ten minutes.

When I had, eventually, extracted myself from the car, he already had my shopping bags gathered in one hand and was waiting for me at the door.

“So you do have manners,” I teased.

He shrugged. “They’re resurfacing, had to dig a bit deeper than I thought.” He gestured for me to lead the way, and I frowned into the rain.

 I expected him to stride off, moving in that effortlessly swift way only he seemed capable of, but he didn’t. He matched his pace to my stumbling half-jog as we crossed the path back into the house.

“Do you always talk like that?” He asked as he shut the door behind us.

“Like what?” I asked, peeling the still dripping hoodie off and realising the grey top beneath was just as sodden. Ugh.

His head tilted to one side as he stared at me. “All prim and polite and proper. Is that a British thing or a you thing?”

I laughed softly. “Depends who you ask.”

We walked slowly through the house, my bags still dangling from Bucky’s arm as if they weighed nothing, me leaving a wet trail of droplets on the shiny tiles.

“I think it’s more a British thing than a me thing,” I answered after a long moment of thought. “Though a lot of the time it’s less actual politeness and more, passive aggression. Some people have made an art out of weaponising good manners.”

“You being one of those people. I’ve never seen someone wield the words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ so sharply before and believe me, I’ve seen some of the best.” He gave me a playful little sideways glance.

I could feel the smile growing on my face. At first, just a tiny upwards quirk on the corners of my lips. My cheeks were starting to ache with it.

“Passive aggressive politeness is but one of many weapons in my arsenal,” I said proudly.

“Oh yeah? What else you got?” His tone was teasing now. 

“A steel-reinforced stiff upper lip,” at that, he let out another one of his warm, hearty laughs and I found my smile transforming into a grin. “Almost endless patience from all the queueing, and a really rather remarkable tolerance for the rain.”

We had just started to climb the stairs, before he stopped, turning to look down at me, appraisingly.

I could feel a strange tingling heat rising up my neck, ticking with faint frisson of the same static I’d felt in the car.

“Are you sure about that?”

I tutted, walking past him up the stairs if only to get away from the feeling of his eyes on me. Like he could see through the bullshit and that made me feel naked.

“You had a coat on,” I pointed out. “I…”

Shit. The realisation hit me like a tonne of bricks.

“Forgot to buy a coat?” He finished for me, recognising the sudden dropping of my face and peering into one of the bags.

I quickly snatched it from him. Heaven forbid it be the one with the underwear in. “I knew there was something else I meant to get.”

He laughed again, long and loud at my expense, and I stormed off upstairs, leaving him behind for once.

He had stopped laughing by the time he caught up.

He looked strangely nervous, rubbing absentmindedly at his neck again.

“I really am sorry,” he said again, avoiding my eyes. “I’m barely more used to being in a place like that than you are, but I shouldn’t have made you do all of that alone.” 

I could only imagine the already awkward task of trying to figure out US bra sizes with an insanely attractive man lurking over my shoulder.

“No, really, it’s fine.” I insisted, blushing furiously and holding my hands out for the rest of the bags.  He carefully hooked them, one-by-one, over my hands, not touching me.

“Thank you,” I whispered softly, all hints of amusement and teasing gone and instead replaced with something that felt strange and sad and full of longing.

Blue eyes locked onto mine. Full of... something I couldn’t name. Something I couldn’t understand.

The moment stretched on long enough for the weight of the bags to register in my muscles.

“I’ll… see you later?” He said like he wasn’t at all certain, and then he was gone. Disappearing down the stairs before I could even think of a reply.

I did not see him later.

Not as I watched cooking shows and cartoons, not as I made another sandwich for myself in lieu of dinner. I was still too intimidated to actually cook, though I was in desperate need of a proper meal.

He was all I could think of, as afternoon became evening and evenly slowly faded into night.

All I could think of, as I laid in bed, staring at the ceiling and seeing only that strange sadness on his face.

All I could think of, the moment I woke, still in a start, still in surroundings that were unfamiliar enough for me to panic and wonder where I was for the second it took for me to remember the days that had passed.

All I could think of as I found a yellow note, laid carefully on the kitchen counter, and my heart swelled at the sight of what had been left for me.

It took me far too long to remember the question he had answered in his sweeping script. I had asked him his favourite book.

THE HOBBIT. WHAT’S YOURS?

 

 

Notes:

If you've made it this far, I am so very grateful that you're here. More coming soon, thank you for reading! 🌷❤️‍🔥

Chapter 6: Deadliest of Sins

Summary:

I had broken some fundamental rule of nature. For all of my coveting and lusting, I had still considered myself to be a good person. But now? I’d committed the deadliest of sins.

Bucky had noticed that I had not taken Valentina’s advice to buy a book, and had taken the matter of my boredom into his own hands.

Waiting on the kitchen counter for me, laid out with almost mathematical precision, were two neat piles of books. Ten in total, a varied collection of genres and lengths and ages.  The Fellowship of the Ring sat on the top of one of the piles, and I let out a quiet little laugh to myself.

I was almost as delighted by my second discovery of the morning; the glass door to the patio was unlocked.

I took my breakfast of cereal outside, sat on the still-damp, cool, concrete of the patio and watched the varying shapes and shades of grey smudge in the sky, listening to the sound of the birds, feeling the kiss of wind on my face.

I lingered outside, reluctant to return to the bland grey of the inside of the house. Not that the patio was much better, with all the concrete, but out here felt oddly hopeful.

There was so much more to see, to smell, to hear, to feel.

I found myself kneeling in front of the trio of grey pots, their texture almost pumice-like beneath my fingers, setting my teeth on edge. I poked and pulled at the spindly branches of whatever had once lived and grown here. Something small, I deduced from the dainty stems. Something pretty and delicate and ornamental rather than something useful.

I could imagine that not much thought had been given on what to put in the pots. Some bored civil servant, feeling out of place in a garden centre, had probably grabbed the first three plants that had come to hand, with no regard for what conditions they preferred, how much light they needed, what season they would bloom in.

I didn’t know why, but it made me feel rather sad.

Something with a purpose to do nothing more than sit around and look pretty, asking very little in exchange for bringing a modicum of joy to the dullness, had been left to die. Forgotten and ignored, deemed too needy, not worth the time or effort or care.

Perhaps I was humanising the dead plants a little too much. Projecting my own, similar feelings; slowly wilting, colour fading.

Maybe that was why I spent all that time, crouched on the cold, hard patio, pulling tiny weeds from the pots and treating dead plants with greater care than I could imagine had ever been given to them in life.

I adjusted the damp soil, re-covered exposed roots, wished I had secateurs to trim the dead ends to at least some semblance of neatness.

I had dirt under my nails when I walked back into the house, and though I was suddenly and inexplicably tired, I felt all the better for it.

The third surprise of the day came late into the afternoon, when I’d curled back up on the sofa, cosy in my new jumper and jeans and fluffy socks, drifting in and out of sleep between reading pages of the book.

“What do you think?” A low voice asked.

I looked up, blinking slowly, into a pair of curious blue eyes.

I considered my opinion for a moment, trying desperately to get my brain to speed up as I looked down at the book in my hands. Stranger in a Strange Land. “I’m struggling to get past the casual misogyny,” I admitted in a sleepy voice. “But it’s interesting enough to make the effort.”

There was a subtle twitch at the corner of his mouth, a tiny tug of his brows before his eyes shifted to the coffee table in front of me, where I’d placed the well-loved copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

“That deserves its status as a classic.” I smiled at him as I answered his unspoken question, and his answering smile was so lovely that my breath caught in my throat.

“How has your day been?” I asked cautiously, wondering if I was allowed to know how he spent his time out of my company, “Or is that classified?”

He chucked quietly, walking to the kitchen. “I don’t think I’m breaching national security by saying my day was slow.”

I smiled at that.

“Is it you who has to watch the cameras?” I asked, my voice overly casual.

A pause. “You noticed the cameras.” His voice was not unfriendly, but there was a hint of reservation in his words.

“Of course I noticed. They aren’t particularly well hidden.”

"Nobody watches them,” he answered after a moment. “Not yet, anyway.”

I decided not to ask when the footage would be watched. I was sure I knew anyway, the moment I did anything noteworthy.

“So what do you do?” I asked instead.

I heard the clink of ice against glass.

“Well now if I told you that, I’d have to kill you.” He said as he sat on the sofa adjacent to mine, taking a sip of what I guessed was whiskey.

I lifted a brow at him, marking my place in the book with a blank sticky note.

“As long as you make it quick and painless I’d consider it a fair deal,” I gave a smile, could feel that it didn’t quite reach the rest of my face.

Bucky didn’t return my smile, instead taking another sip, his face contemplative as he started at me.

Just as I was about to reopen my book, he spoke. “Val’s got me looking through referrals for anything that may be of interest.”

“’Referrals’?”

“Classified.” He said with an apologetic shrug.

“Was I a ‘referral’?” I dared to ask, and he froze. “Surely I’m allowed to know about my own classified information?”

I could almost see the cogs in his brain turning. “I suppose that’s fair enough,” he said almost reluctantly. “Just don’t tell Val I told you or I might actually have to kill you.”

“My previous statement stands. Quick and painless, fair enough.” I agreed.

“Yeah.” He answered slowly. “You were a referral. Normally cases of interest are deal with by lesser mortals but yours went straight to the Director.”

Interesting.

“Do you know why?”

Another sip. “I do.”

“Will you tell me why?”

A pause. “I can’t.”

My questions were coming thick and fast. I couldn’t have stopped them if I wanted to, my desperation overtaking any other thoughts or feelings.

“Is it because I killed someone?”

The thought had nagged at me for days, weeks now, I supposed.

They’d told me it was unsure if he would make it through the week.

That week had since passed. And another. We were now into the third.

He nearly dropped the glass, it slipped slightly through the leather of the gloves he was still, strangely, wearing.

His throat bobbed as he swallowed.

“No.” He answered much too quickly.

I did not want to know the answer to my next question.

I’d been avoiding thinking about it with all of my might, had simply turned my mind’s eye to something else any time I slipped and found myself thinking about it.

No, I didn’t want to know the answer, but that didn’t stop me asking.

“Did I kill someone?” The question was barely more than a whisper.

His silence spoke volumes, seemed to drag and drag and drag before he finally answered.

“That’s classified.”

My blood ran cold.

I couldn’t bear the look on his face. The grey-blue of his eyes, the sympathy in them, the pity.

The awkwardness that filled the silence.

All of a sudden it was too much and I had to go, to get out, to get away from the pity in his eyes that answered my question more honestly than any words could.

I used the last remaining ounce of compose to excuse myself before I ran from the room, not noticing that I’d brought Stranger in a Strange Land with me until it fell with a soft thud to my bedroom floor.

I was breathing too hard, too fast, too much, my head swimming as I fell to the floor too.

In the back of my mind, I was aware that I was losing control of myself, and I knew that losing control was the last thing I could afford to do in this house.

I crawled across the soft carpet to the window, pressing my too-hot face against the cold glass and gulping down air like I was drowning.

It was dark outside. The sun not long set, the moon not yet risen.

By the time I had gotten my breathing under control, the stars had come out and were winking down at me in what felt like judgement.

I had killed a man.

And what was worse was that in that burning, boiling moment, I’d felt glad.

The memory had me running to the toilet, vomiting up what had lingered in my stomach after my small lunch.

I crawled into the shower, fully clothed, and let the water run cold until every part of me was numb. My nose, my fingers, my toes.

My mind.

Numb. All sensations, all feeling, all thought, dulled. Quietened. Numbed.

I stayed there until I fell asleep, waking a short while later to the water still flowing and my body shivering so hard my teeth chattered. I stood clumsily, turned off the water with shaking hands and left my wet clothes in the bathtub.

I got into bed stark naked, still too numb to think of things like pyjamas and comfort and modesty and wanting nothing more than soft and warmth.

I was still shuddering violently as I fell asleep the second time, not entirely certain I hadn’t slipped into unconsciousness rather than sleep.

It didn’t matter regardless. All that mattered was there were no thoughts, no memories, no nightmares.

There was nothing but blissful blackness.

 

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚─── ┘

 

It was, ridiculously, the best night’s sleep I’d had in God knows how long.

I was still uncomfortably cold when I woke, the sun alarmingly high in the sky. I dressed in the grey tracksuit bottoms, one of my new jumpers with Bucky’s hoodie over the top for added warmth.

Though it had been through a wash and dry cycle, it still smelled like him. Soap, cedar and cinnamon. Warm and strangely comforting.

I didn’t eat. I curled on the sofa and lost myself in book after book.

I finished The Catcher in the Rye. I started Misery before deciding that was definitely not what I needed at that moment and instead picked up The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Bucky’s entry to the room was suspiciously obvious.

He normally moved with such stealth and preternatural grace that I rarely noticed him moving about, relying on him talking to get my attention. Now, his footsteps were almost comically loud, and I watched him cross the room with none of his usual swagger.

He crouched down in front of me, far enough away that he wasn’t in my personal space. His eyes searched my face, his brows furrowed deeply with concern.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, not sure if it was true or not.

He stared at me for a long moment, before coming to sit next to me, keeping a healthy distance between us. “Is this okay?” He inclined his head towards the gap.

I nodded.

“How was the book?” He asked, holding a manilla folder awkwardly in his gloved hands.

“It was good.”

He rubbed a hand across his jaw, I could hear his stubble scratch against the leather. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, as if the words were getting stuck.

And then, he sighed. His eyes darting between the folder in his lap, and my face.

“Look, this really is classified information, and I told Val that they should’ve told you, but they didn’t want it getting out or in the news for the sake of protecting the asset.” His jaw clenched. “More like protecting their goddamn asses.” His voice was angry for a moment before his eyes softened, fixed on mine.

“The man you... put in hospital,” his words were careful, chosen, as if he’d rehearsed this, “was a rapist and a murderer. His victims were all innocent women. No similarities except that they were women.”

My stomach flipped. My palms were damp.

“If you hadn’t stopped him, you would’ve been his seventh victim. They would have found your body at the bottom of the canal days, maybe weeks, after you left that hotel. That pretty dress you wore would’ve been found in the trash not long after that.” His face was hard, but not cruel. Determined. “He would not have stopped with you. Or the woman after you, or the one after her. Who knows if he’d be caught after body number nine was found. Or nineteen. Or ever.”

I shivered, my blood cold, my heart somewhere near my feet, my eyes prickling with too-hot tears.

“You stopped that. You stopped him. You did the world a favour.”

I was frozen in place.

“If you need proof,” He placed the manilla folder between us, “It’s all in there.”

I shook my head slowly. “I think I already knew.” I said very quietly.

“He was smiling,” The venom in my voice was blatant. “He liked it. The fight, the chase, the thrill of it. I knew he wanted me to run, wanted me to fight him. It was all just some game to him.  I wasn’t even a player, I was the prize.”

My voice dropped to a whisper, I leaned closer, and confessed everything. “I knew what I was holding on to. And I let it go. I knew what would happen if I let go... and I still did it anyway.” I was not talking about the keys, and I knew that he knew that. “There was a little part of me, less little than I should be comfortable with, that was glad I did.”

Bucky held my gaze, and did not look away.

He did not flinch, did not recoil, did not look at me with pity or disgust. He looked almost proud, and I could not understand it.

I wondered at what he saw.

Could he see it, in my face, that I was a killer? Something inside me had changed, on some profound level that I couldn’t quite understand. I had broken some fundamental rule of nature. For all of my coveting and lusting, I had still considered myself to be a good person. But now? I’d committed the deadliest of sins.

And that wasn’t the most disturbing part of it. It wasn’t that my hands would be forever spotted with a man’s blood, It was how little I cared that disturbed me.

Did it make me a monster? Did it make me irredeemable?

Bucky did not look like he saw a monster in my eyes.

He offered no platitudes, gave me no sympathy. He just stared into my soul and did not baulk at what he saw.

We stayed like that for a long while, until the tears that had leaked out of my eyes had dried on my cheeks, until my heart had slowed its frantic beating.

Bucky spoke at last, with words so unexpected that I could have laughed at them.

“Shall we watch a movie?”

I blinked.

“You made me curious,” He said, “About the Lord of the Rings movies. I asked Sam about them, and he was as surprised as you that I hadn’t seen them. Not as surprised as he was when I told him I’d read The Hobbit. Not sure why,” He gave a small, wary smile, “Do I not look capable of reading?”

He did not wait for me to answer.

“Anyway, I figured if the books were that good and you think the films are better, then I had to watch them to make my own mind up.”

I could only blink at him again. He had spoken more in the last half an hour than he had in what… two weeks?

“What is it that makes the movies better?” He asked me, and I struggled to find my voice.

Bucky waited, patiently, without pressing, for me to find it.

“Tom Bombadil,” I said after a while.

“What about Tom Bombadil?” He asked, the flicker of that amusement I had come to find so charming flaring in his eyes, visible beyond the blatant confusion.

“He’s really fucking annoying,” I said honestly, and Bucky laughed. The corners of his eyes crinkled and he instantly looked ten years younger.

Bucky had secrets too, I realised.

Ones that were as classified as mine were, but that I didn’t have access to.

He had been privy to the monsters that had been in my closet. He had known the entire time I was here that I had killed a man.

I was realising that it wasn’t my monsters that had kept him away from me.

It was his own.

“Please swear again,” He asked, still grinning.

I felt something lift from me, felt the darkness recede from my soul just a little bit. I had been lost in the sea of my own despair, and here was James Bucky Barnes, a light in the dark. A lighthouse, guiding me back to shore.

I felt my lips pull upwards, slowly, into a small smile. “Fuck off,” I told him, not meaning it at all.

“Sounds so much better when you say it.” He said and I raised an eyebrow.

“Do people often tell you to fuck off then?”

“All the time, doll, but never as nicely as that.”

I must have been well and truly distracted, not just from my own wallowing, but it took me a good, long moment to realise that Bucky had called me ‘doll’.

I blushed all the way to Lothlórien.

Notes:

Thanks for sticking with me, I hope to see you soon! ❤️‍🔥🥰

Chapter 7: Takes One to Know One

Summary:

“Pft,” He snorted. “Takes one to know one.”

“Well?” I asked, as the credits rolled.

“I don’t want to give you the satisfaction of hearing it.” He said, arms folded.

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

“It feels wrong.”

“Doesn’t make it any less true though,” I said, smiling.

Somewhere between The Shire and Mirkwood, something like friendship had begun to bloom between Bucky and I. The despair in my soul had eased, the distance between us on the sofa had lessened just slightly, and things didn’t seem quite so bleak.

He turned to fix me with a look of worn-out patience before he begrudgingly admitted, “Alright. You’re right. Fuck Tom Bombadil.”

I laughed, a giggle that was small and quiet, but laughter nonetheless. “I’d really rather not.”

“I dunno,” He said, looking much too thoughtful, “I imagine he’d be a generous lover.”

“Imagine that a lot, do you?” I teased; one brow raised.

He was looking at me with something like delighted surprise, but any answer he was going to give was cut off by a me giving a surprisingly large yawn as the tiredness caught up with me.

My eyes felt gritty as I rubbed them with the sides of my hands. I hadn't realised how late it had gotten. I’d been distracted, very effectively. From the time, from the darkness that had settled outside, and from the darkness inside my soul.

"You should go to bed," Bucky said softly. "I truly mean this with nothing but respect, but you look like shit."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Such a jerk,” I mumbled through another yawn.

He chucked, something nostalgic settling on his face. "And you're a tired little punk who can barely keep her eyes open."

I fought the urge to stick my tongue out at him, feeling suddenly like I was a teenager again.

"Come on," he cajoled "if you go to bed I'll watch the next movie with you tomorrow."

"Deal," I said, moving sluggishly off the sofa. "Next time we get snacks." I’d been waiting for an excuse to explore the ridiculously overstocked snack drawer.

"You can have only snacks if you eat a proper dinner first!" He called after me. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you only eating Pop Tarts and sandwiches.”

I was tempted to give him the middle, but chose instead to turned around and honour his title with a mock salute. "Goodnight, Sarge" I teased.

I could practically hear his eyes rolling. "You can keep the hoodie, by the way!"

"Chivalry is alive and kicking," I mumbled as I dragged myself up the stairs. A low laugh followed me, though there was no way he could've heard me.

I practically fell into bed, once I'd changed into my new pyjamas. Lilac and covered in cat faces. Just wearing them made me feel more cheerful. Or maybe that was something else that I refused to put a name, or a handsome blue-eyed, stubbled face, to.

I slept.

Properly. Solidly. Soundly.

I woke, at a reasonable time, and I could not recall when I'd last felt this rested. Or so... light. Unburdened.

I found myself staring out of the window. The sun was shining, fluffy white clouds danced across a blue sky, birds were singing in the trees. The world seemed somehow more colourful, touched by a vibrance that hadn’t been there before.

I turned away, shifting my attention from trying to put my finger on whether the outside really was more colourful, or if I was just seeing it through different eyes and focusing instead on the blissful luxury of choosing an outfit.

I tried not to think of why I was so concerned about that too. -Certainly not because I care about anyone else’s opinion on how I looked. Certainly not because the only other person around for goodness knows how far had told me that I’d looked like shit last night, and most certainly not because I found a certain someone attractive and wanted him to think I looked not like shit.

That started me off down a whole other path.

Did Bucky have a girlfriend? Or a boyfriend, maybe? With those boyish good looks, that dry humour, the kindness and thoughtfulness I was starting to see now that he was letting himself feel more comfortable. James Barnes was a catch.

I was flirting with dangerous thoughts now.

I should not, could not, let myself fall for Bucky.

To me, he was a lighthouse in the dark, a light that grew brighter each day. To him, I was an anchor, a dragging, pulling weight that kept him tethered to a job he didn’t seem to like all that much.

No, I should not think about Bucky Barnes and his handsome face and his tall, broad body. Or the mystery of those damn leather gloves he wore.

I gave up with trying to make my hair look nice, slamming the hairbrush down with a little more force than necessary and getting away from the scrutinising frown of my own reflection.

Rummaging in the kitchen proved to be a surprisingly effective distraction.

I found scales and spoons, mixing bowls and baking tins. I perched on the end of the kitchen counter closest to the living space with Barefoot Contessa chatting away on the television as I scribbled down ingredients and instructions onto a handful of sticky notes.

I even found a white apron in the draw with the dish cloths, and tied it around the dress I’d allowed myself the luxury of spending the CIA’s money on. I scavenged for ingredients, and I was pleasantly surprised to find everything I needed. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised, when the kitchen was better stocked than most corner shops. I’d been right, about it being impossible for two people to get through so much food before it started to go bad.

Morning turned to afternoon, the time for breakfast or brunch or even a reasonable lunch long passed before the muffins had been pulled from the over and were set with care on a cooling rack on the middle of the island.

I watched the steam curl into the air, feeling a little annoyed that it was too late to try one now. I’d ruin my dinner, and now that Bucky seemed to have taken an interest in my eating habits, I was ridiculously eager to make a good impression.

I’d even written down one of Ina’s pasta recipes.

“And here I was thinking you were finally starting to get the hang of the new time zones.” Bucky strolled in, hands in pockets, a smug little smile on his face and eyes sparkling. “Are these for breakfast, lunch or dinner?” He looked at the collection of muffins on the counter.

I wiped my hands on my apron. “I underestimated how hard it would be to find anything in this ridiculous kitchen,” I admitted. “You think you want the fancy kitchen with the massive fridge freezer until you actually try one.”

He leaned against the counter, sniffing at the steam, “Yeah my kitchen is about a tenth of the size of this and I’m surprised to find that I miss it.” He offered me a tiny smile, a little piece of the puzzle that I was so desperately trying to piece together. “These smell incredible. What are they, blueberry?”

“And raspberry,” I corrected, flushing at the praise. “There were some that needed using in the fridge.”

I did not mention that I’d been sure the raspberries were half-rotted when I’d pulled them from the fridge, ready to chuck in the bin, but the next time I’d looked they were plump and firm and pink and to waste them would’ve been criminal.

It made no sense, but I was not in the mood to try and make it make sense, so I had simply used the berries before they could shift into a slimy goop again.

He picked one from the rack, “Want not waste not.” He said in a sing-song voice before taking a bite nearly the size of half the muffin, chewing with an appreciative sound.

“You’ll spoil your dinner!” My scold was half-hearted, I was far too delighted at his enjoyment of my baking efforts to be annoyed.

“I’m a growing boy!” He argued back in the same tone I’d used, taking another big bite.

I deliberately let my eyes drag from his feet all the way up the six foot something of him to the top of his head, letting the scathing look on my face say it for me.

“Not my fault you’re a little hobbit,” he teased.

“What does that make you? Gandalf?” 

“Aragorn, duh.” He looked at me like that was obvious. “What is for dinner anyway? I honestly thought your culinary skills extended only to sandwiches.”

“I am a perfectly capable cook, thank you very much,” He gave me a look of disbelief and I wanted to smack his stupid sculpted arms. “Pesto and pea pasta, Ina’s recipe.”

“Of course,” He nodded. “Though I am surprised it isn’t chicken.”

I felt my mouth fall open. “You watched her?!”

He lifted one shoulder. “Maybe.” He smirked at me.

“I’ll get you on the cooking shows and cartoons soon enough,” I promised. “I’ve got excellent taste.”

“How ‘bout we prove that?” His smug little smirk was as infuriating as it was impossibly gorgeous and it riled all sorts of things in me. “I’ll help make dinner and then we’ll see how good your taste is.”

I leaned over the kitchen counter to peer at the watch peeking out of his right sleeve, just above the line of the glove. Bucky flinched, tucking his left hand into his pocket, his brows furrowing.

I pulled back immediately, as startled at his sudden movement as he was at mine. “Isn’t it a little early?” I asked.

“Oh!” He said strangely, as if in sudden understanding. He took a moment to appraise the watch himself. “Not if you haven’t eaten all day,” he said, accusatory.

I gestured to the muffins with wide eyes “I had every intention of eating breakfast… It just took longer than I expected!”

He stared at me.

I frowned at him, popping a hip and crossing my arms over my chest.

We stared at one another for long enough for my eyes to start to sting before I turned on the offense. “You’re one to talk. You’ve just eaten your breakfast at like, 4pm.”

“You’ve been up longer than I have,” He countered. “And haven’t eaten anything, so stop glaring at me and start cooking.”

I touched the sides of two fingers to my forehead, another mock salute, before flipping him off.

Faster than I could follow his movements, his hand wrapped around my wrist. His grip was tight but not uncomfortable, full not of anger but of tantalising, playful, promises. The static in the air seemed to fizzle, the heat from his fingers seeping through my skin and setting my nerves on fire.

He looked as surprised as I felt. My heart stuttered and took off at a gallop.

He had moved so silently, so swiftly, that I’d blinked and missed it.

There was barely a foot of humming, electric air between us now. He towered over me, looking down at me with a look that was equal parts challenge and threat. I found myself surprised by how much I liked that look.

His eyes searched in mine, looking perhaps for any sign of fear or pain or discomfort.

I knew that he would find none, because there wasn’t a single scrap of any of those in me. Surprise, yes. Many other things too, but not fear or pain or discomfort. Entirely on the contrary.

His eyes drifted over my face, catching on my lips, lingering there for just a beat too long.

For just a moment, a wonderful, warm, sparking moment, all I could think about was how much I wanted him to kiss me.

For that moment, I imagined that’s what he was thinking of too.

We blinked almost in sync, and the moment shattered.

“You’re such a brat,” he murmured in a low, gruff voice, dropping my wrist like it’d burned him.

“And you’re so bossy,” I groaned, turning away before I found myself too tempted by how close those plush lips were. “Are we making pasta or not? I’m hungry.”

It turned out that making Ina’s pesto and pea pasta was not, in fact, a two-person job and so instead of actually helping, Bucky instead spent his time leaned against one of the counters, watching me with his arms crossed, keeping an overly respectable distance between us.

It made me nervous. Not that I felt scared, but in a I have something to prove kind of way, and the nerves made my coordination even more exceptionally shit than they usually were.

So much so, that I dropped the big pot on the floor when getting it out of the cupboard, the loud banging clatter making my ears hurt.

Then I dropped a spoon on the floor, flinging a pea against the cupboard next to Bucky’s head.

And I would’ve knocked the jar of pesto to smithereens had he not caught it with alarmingly impressive reflexes.

I watched the pot of water, waiting for it to boil, avoiding the scrutinising gaze I could feel burning into my back.

“Have you always been so clumsy?” He asked, a hint of amusement in his voice.

Of course he found it funny.

“So, I’m clumsy and I can’t cook?” I said still not looking. “Is that what you think of me?” It did not paint a very flattering picture.

“Definitely clumsy,” I dared to glance up at his face, and saw a smile stretching across his cheeks. “The cooking remains to be seen. The proof, as they say, will be in the pudding.”

“This is most certainly not pudding.” I deadpanned and he laughed quietly.

I sighed, looking back at the now boiling water (I supposed that saying was at least true, for it had started boiling precisely the moment I had stopped watching it) and adding the pasta.

I turned around to face him. “I’ve always been clumsy. Ever since I was a kid. I attended precisely one ballet lesson before I, four years old, embarrassed myself so much that I refused ever to go back. Sports classes were an absolute nightmare, but I was fortunate enough to have teachers who, for the most part, took mercy on me. I broke my arm at school once and my teacher would gently point out to me, in front of the other students, that I was still not healed enough to take part in the really embarrassing stuff, even years later when said arm was very much healed.” I smiled at the memory, the way my teacher had smiled that secret smile at me, that he knew I knew it was all bullshit to save me from making a fool of myself.

I had expected Bucky to laugh, but his brows were pulled together slightly, enough to furrow. “How’d you break your arm?”

“We went on a school trip to a castle and I uh,” I took a deep breath, preparing myself for the inevitable mocking I always got when I told this story, “Fell into the moat.” I watched his eyebrows shoot up. “There wasn’t any water in there. Just grass. I put my arm out to break my fall. Broke my arm in three places instead. Classic clumsy me.”

Everyone laughed at that. Everyone.

Not Bucky.

The line between his brows deepened, his eyes were sad, the muscles in his jaw were tight and tense as he watched me rub my left forearm absentmindedly with my right hand.

It wasn’t the most obvious of injuries; the subtle mangling, the bend to what should have been a straight line from elbow to wrist. But with my sleeves pushed up past my elbows, the three faint scars from the surgery were visible.

There was something that looked like understanding on his face.

“Is that why you didn’t run?”

I knew immediately what he was talking about, and my stomach dropped, all hunger fading into nausea.

“You could’ve,” he continued. “When I watch that footage, I just want to scream at you to run but, you don’t. There’s no flight response in you at all, you barely even freeze. It’s all fight.”

I took a long, deep breath while I considered my answer.

“I really did want to run,” I admitted in a small voice. “But a bigger part of my instincts, or maybe the part of my brain that isn’t instinct, knew it was futile. Yeah, I could have run,” I agreed, “But even on a good day, in the right shoes, I wouldn’t have made it far enough, fast enough. And that was not a good day, and those were most certainly not the right shoes.”

His jaw twitched.

“I wasn’t going to go down without a fight,” I told him. “I knew that if I ran, I’d fall and I’d hurt myself and he would have far too much fun with all of that. But if I stood my ground, if I fought, I might have a chance. The tiniest, slimmest chance.”

He pushed off from the counter and uncrossed his arms, gently nudging me out of the way with his hip as he turned off the hob, taking over on pasta duty and draining the boiling water. “You were right.”

I nodded, “Yeah. I was. Against all odds, here I am, alive and well while he’s-“

“Irrelevant.” Bucky said, meeting my eyes with a hard stare, not letting me finish that sentence. “You are alive and well and thriving, and he is irrelevant.”

Neither of us said much after that, as I added pesto and peas and parmesan to the pasta while Bucky found dishes and forks.

We sat on the two tall chairs on the far end of the kitchen island and ate in silence until, close to finishing, Bucky said, “I’m sorry.”

I blinked at him. “For what?”

The sudden sparkle in his eyes made no sense.

“Underestimating you, this is delicious. The muffin was too. You’re a great cook, what took you so long?”

I laughed softly, feeling my blood heat and my toes curl. “I felt weird using someone else’s stuff.” I admitted. “I’m not the sort of guest who can just barge in and treat a place like home.”

He finished eating, watching me carefully. “Nobody’s ever used any of it, y’know. So it’s not someone else’s stuff. It’s been waiting for you.”

That made me feel even more awkward, and I kept my mouth occupied with eating the rest of my food, so that I didn’t say anything embarrassing.

The moment my fork touched my empty bowl, Bucky had grabbed it and was loading it into this dishwasher. “I’m proud of you. An actual meal!” The sarcasm was thick.

“You promised snacks and Lord of the Rings,” Is smiled sheepishly as he grinned. “Is it too early?”

“If it’s anything like the last movie, definitely not. I think that was the longest movie I’ve seen by a long shot, had to be like what, three hours?”

“About that,” I agreed, “And it wasn’t even the extended version.”

“There’s extended versions?!” He asked, and I nodded, smiling at the look on his face. He pulled open one of the three deep drawers next to the fridge and I hopped off the stool, curiosity overriding any shyness about getting too close as I leaned over the draw, my arm barely inches from his, every part of my hyperaware at the proximity.

I almost gasped at the sheer volume of sweets in the draw. “What even is this stuff? How do we choose?”

“Close our eyes and grab the first thing we touch?” He suggested, looking as lost as I felt.

I nodded in agreement and then screwed my eyes shut and plunged my hand into the draw, pulling out a colourful bag of “Sour gummy worms,” I read out, nodding with interest. “Seems inoffensive enough.”

Bucky’s eyes were glittering with amusement as he rolled them, but he too closed them to extract a large bag of peanut butter M&Ms.

“Ooh!” I said excitedly, “I’ve been wanting to try those.”

He let out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “Then we’d better get this movie rolling.”

We sat on the same sofa, no manilla folder of secrets between us. Nothing but a couple of feet of empty air and two bags of America’s finest sweet offerings.

I was painfully aware of that fact, as the film rolled and the sky darkened outside.

We didn’t speak much except for the occasional “Fucking Gollum,” from Bucky or me erupting into giggles at ‘we’re taking the hobbits to Isengard’, which I promised I would explain after the film finished, and the surprising delight of being able to tell Bucky about Viggo Mortensen broke his toe kicking the helmet.

“Ha!” Bucky exclaimed, pointing at the screen as Merry and Pippin found their way into Fanghorn.

“What?” I turned to frown at him.

“Tom Bombadil made it into the movies after all.” He said, grinning.

I blinked at him, lost for words for a moment before I recovered. “I’ve never seen someone look so smug or so pleased while outing themselves as such a geek.”

He ignored me, still smiling.

Near the end of the film, I turned again, to regale Bucky with some inane film fact maybe, or perhaps to ask him what he thought about Faramir, I couldn’t even remember because something much more interesting caught my attention.

My voice died with a soft gasp.

M&Ms, colour drained by the lack of light in the room, fell from Bucky’s raised hand as his eyes turned to me. Eyes that were greyer than blue in the darkness, sparkling with the light from the television, wide and highlighted with fear.

I’d not noticed him removing those leather gloves, which were now laid neatly on the lap of his dark blue jeans.

Bucky’s left hand was clenched into a fist, almost hidden behind his leg.

I might not have noticed it, had it not been gleaming. The reflected shine had been what had caught my attention.

“Bucky,” I said softly, pausing to swallow around the surprise in my voice. “Have you got a metal hand?”

He blinked.

He waited.

When I didn’t say anything, when I kept on looking at him with nothing but pure, confused curiosity, the fear in his eyes lessened just slightly, and the shiny fingers flexed.

“Uh,” he cleared his throat, the metal hand clenching and unclenching, the faintest sound of whirring gears. “I have a metal arm.” He clarified.

My eyes traced each gleaming golden line, wondered at the hard lines and marvelled at the incredible dexterity of it.

Bucky watched me. Waiting and wary.

My first thought was that his expression when he’d seen my left arm made sense. Understanding. I had two plates, and eleven pins worth of stainless steel medically implanted in my body.

He had a hell of a lot more.

Maybe that was why he’d finally felt comfortable enough to lose the gloves. Maybe he’d forgotten for a moment that he had anything to hide at all.

It took a long moment for the penny to drop and for the second thought to surface.

The film had finished, the credits were rolling.

My mind was reeling.

Memories surfaced, vague ones, faded ones, just little flickers of news articles my colleagues at work had written, of the stories I’d been able to read before they went live to the public. Of the pictures and the videos, for there had been so many of them that it was an absolute wonder I had not made the connection sooner.

My head tilted and I squinted slightly as I looked closely at him.

He looked very different than those pictures and videos.

His hair was shorter now, and his face was open, unobscured by masks or black smudges around his eyes.

The metal I could see peeking out of his sleeve was dark, not bright shining silver but black gracefully lined with gold. It was a work of art.

It was so hard for my brain to reconcile that the man in those news stories was the man sitting in front of me now.

He was just so different. In every possible way.

He was so rarely ever referred to by his name in any of the articles I saw. No mention that he was a Seargeant in his own right, never any mention of James Bucky Barnes or the many wonderful things that made him, him.

He was only ever Captain America’s Closest Friend, or Soviet Assassin, or listed among the now many names of the Avengers.

Most of the time, he’d been The Winter Soldier.

Bucky was watching me. Waiting, I assumed, for me to say something, to have some kind of reaction.

All I could do was stare at his metal hand, admire the craftsmanship and the strange beauty of it.

As if in answer to my silent question, his response to my curious but unjudgmental eyes was to push his sleeve as high as it would go, just above his elbow before it stuck on the swell of the metal bicep.

My fingers lifted, entirely of their own accord, to reach for him.

Before I could realise what I was doing, before I could drop my hand in embarrassment and apologise profusely, Bucky placed his hand in mine.

I traced the lines on his palm, imagined myself being able to read them like a fortune teller in a carnival.

This line told of his strength, that line spoke volumes about his resilience, the rings that wrapped around his fingers each spoke of a memory lost to the torture he’d been though.

I lifted his arm, turning it this way and that, feeling the substantial weight of it. It felt heavier than flesh, blood and bone would, I thought, but perhaps not as heavy as I expected an arm made of metal to be.

“Does it hurt?” I asked gently, as the television fell silent. The electricity in the room hummed between us, amplified by the near darkness.

“Not anymore,” he answered after a long while.

My heart clenched.

He had gone through so much.

World War Two, what had been his supposed death, whatever had happened for him to need an entire prosthetic arm. Eighty odd years of being the Winter Solider, of fighting fights he didn’t want to fight, of being trapped in a body that wasn’t his anymore. Having his mind scrambled over and over until all of the bits that made up James Bucky Barnes had shattered and scattered. Fighting again, not against Nazis but against God damn aliens, and losing. Fighting those same aliens again and winning. 

I blinked against the hot, prickling feeling in my eyes. Felt something warm trickle down my cheek.

There was no fear in his eyes now, just complete and utter bewilderment.

“Took you long enough.” His voice was soft, barely more than a whisper, laced with confusion.

My fingers clenched around the metal hand I was still holding. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered back, just as softly.

He laughed once, not a sound of amusement. “What? You just found out that you’re sharing a house with the Winter Soldier and you say you’re sorry?!”

“Well, yeah?” I asked, genuinely confused. “What happened to you, what they did to you, was awful.”

He scoffed, shaking his head.

“I killed people. Innocent people.” There was a touch of anger in his voice now, and I could feel the plates in his hand shifting with small movements, almost like muscles tensing. “I did terrible things, very well documented terrible things, and you sit there and look at me like that...” He stared at me, still bewildered, his brow furrowed in something that could have been confusion, or anger. “Fear, I would expect. Pity, I could understand. Hell, even anger at having been locked up with me. But that… ”

He did not elaborate on what, exactly, that was. He was right in that there wasn’t any fear, or pity. But there was anger. I was angry for him.

“No.” I told him in a hard voice, leaving no room for argument. “I’m not having it. If you can tell me the murder I committed isn’t a heinous crime, then I can tell you that what they made you do wasn’t your fault.”

He stared at me for a moment longer, the frustration leaving his eyes, the hard set of his jaw softening. The most gentle sigh. “What you did and what I did could not be further apart, doll.”

I straightened, felt my jaw clench with the growing righteous anger. “I’m not having it, Bucky." I said again, my voice harsher. “You cannot be held accountable for any of that. Everyone else should be accountable for what happened to you.”

He gave a small smile that didn’t touch his eyes.  

“You look at me like you can see me,” He confessed in a voice so soft I had to strain to hear him. “You barely even know who I am.” I opened my mouth to argue at that, but he continued in that still-soft voice, barely above a whisper. “I barely even know who I am now. There’s a hundred years of memories in here,” he touched the fingers of his free hand to his forehead, “And so many of them are… His. Mine? Violent and bloody and full of death. I went from fight to fight to fight for so long. And when I thought I’d finally found some peace, fucking aliens invaded. And then there was the whole Flag Smashers shit with Sam and honestly? I’m almost glad it happened. It gave me something to exist for, something to do. Sam gave me some tough love and… it helped. It’s taken a long time but, I finally got that closure I was looking for. And helped some other people to find their closure too.” He took a long, deep breath. “I’ve still got so much work to do.”

I wanted to hug him, wrap my arms around him and show him that, somehow, ridiculously, I thought I knew how he felt, even if it was only some teeny tiny drop in the ocean to what he’d been through.

I had killed someone too, I lived with the nightmares – waking and sleeping – of what I had done to another person. Of the life I had taken.

Of the life that had been taken from me.

I didn’t know who I was anymore either.

I had been a woman with a job and a family and silly little hobbies. And now I was nothing, nobody.

I wanted, so badly, to tell him that. Instead, I asked “How did you end up here?”, not adding the ‘with me’ part.

My question shifted something in him, lifted him just slightly out of the darkness. “Sam suggested I do some good, after I’d…” He seemed to struggle for the words for a moment, “Crossed some things off my to-do list. I’d finished attending all of the court-mandated therapy sessions.” At that, he pulled a face of disgust. “I spent a while trying to find some good that suited me. I volunteered with a bunch of different charities, helping with those displaced after the Blip, that sorta stuff. It was great for a while, fulfilling. But then I had a visit from the Director of the CIA.” 

He looked at me, his eyes focusing on looking into mine. “She had a proposition for me, and an offer. Separate things. The first I have yet to agree to.” And the hard set of his jaw told me that he would not elaborate. “And the second is how I ended up here.”

I waited, still holding the weight of his metal hand between my own.

“She needed someone to look through the referrals,” This much, we had already discussed. Bucky had said they were classified, and I knew nothing more than that I had been one.

“It had to be someone who with very specific experience. Knowledge of what enhanced individuals might present like. Most people with such experience were already busy with saving the world or teaching kids how to manage their powers or doing other incredibly important things.” He sighed. “I told her I wasn’t interested. But she left me with a file and told me to think on it. I called her an hour later and agreed to give it a go.”

“What made you change your mind so quickly?” I asked.

“It was so obvious what they wanted to do,” He said, the crease between his brows deepening, “Of course they didn’t say it in such explicit words but there was this paragraph about the value of this potential asset. I wasn’t going to let them turn someone into a weapon. I wasn’t going to sit by and let that happen to someone else, even if it wasn’t HYDRA doing it, even if it was for the greater good. I couldn’t stand by.” His hand clenched, fingers closing around my own.

“Did you stop it from happening?” I was desperate for him to say yes, that he’d changed their minds, that he’d managed to convince them to leave this person alone, let them be normal, not shape them into a weapon.

“I don’t know yet.”

For a moment, I felt disappointed. Slightly frustrated that there wasn’t an ending to the story.

And then I was confused. Why didn’t he know yet? How long had it been?

That confusion turned, very quickly, to surprise and I gasped with the realisation.

“The file was yours.” He confirmed. “There were these pictures of you in there. Footage from that hotel where you’d been at that awards thing, smiling in the sunshine. Photos where you’re shaking hands with important-looking people. You in that pretty dress and those fancy shoes and that red lipstick, looking like you’d stepped out of a movie screen from one of those flicks Steve and I used to go see. Dark, grainy screenshots from CCTV cameras across the city. And then there were stills from the footage of… the incident,” He was watching me carefully now, seeing if his words were triggering something in me.

I felt nothing except intrigue, curiosity, desperation to hear my story from his point of view.

“It’s hard to see much in the videos,” He gave me a look that was equal parts pleading and sympathising, worried that I might think badly of him for having seen that. But I didn’t care. “The light was so bright that all you can see is white. But there was this list, theories about what that light was. All these fancy words that are now fused into my memory.  Luminiferous Pyrokinesis. Thermal Photonic Emission. Ignis-Infused Kinetics. Dunno what any of them mean, but they’d listed all of the ways it could be weaponised. All the pros and cons, all of the benefits and dangers. And not once, in that very long list, not once in that entire goddamn file was there any consideration for the woman behind the potential.” `

He turned his hand, his palm meeting mine, metal fingers entwining with mine.

I was Schrödinger's asset. Simultaneously useful and useless, my fate hanging in the balance based on something that might or might not happen in this sealed box of a house.

“I won’t let them turn you into a weapon.” He promised. “I won’t let them forget that you are a woman who is so much more than a potential asset. So much more than a list of ways you can be used to do their bidding or kill people or win their wars.”

My eyes prickled again.

Twice, it had happened to him.

The HYDRA base Steve had rescued him from was a weapons factory, and not just the kind shaped like guns and tanks and bombs. And then again when they’d found him in the snow. Altered in both brain and body into one of the deadliest weapons in human history.

“And you,” I said with as much promise, “Are so much more than former Winter Solider. You’re James Bucky Barnes. You’re a fantasy geek, you’re a book lover. You’re brave and strong and good. And you’re such a pain in the arse but I am so grateful that you’ve got my back.”

At that, he laughed. The sadness and tension in his face dissolved, replaced by the surprised amusement I’d seen on him earlier. The atmosphere lifted too; the seriousness gone as quickly as it had appeared.

“I can’t believe you called me a geek.” He said, shaking his head.

“You have given me multiple fantasy novels to read, said your favourite book was The Hobbit and you knew that those lines from Merry and Pippin were actually Tom Bombadil’s. That is definite geek behaviour.”

“Pft,” He snorted. “Takes one to know one.”

We stared at each other for a short moment before we both started laughing. Just a tinge of hysteria, the tears that welled in my eyes not entirely from the laugher.

When, finally, we had lapsed into quiet once more, I turned my attention back to the metal arm, hand still in mine, shining in the near darkness, the lines of gold gleaming.

From the depths of my mind, my mouth pulled a quote.

“All that is gold does not glitter,” My eyes drifted back to his face. “Not all those who wander are lost.” My voice was barely audible in the unnaturally still silence.

He stared back at me, through my eyes and seemingly into the depths of my soul before he huffed, breaking the strange spell that seemed to have fallen.

“Are you seriously quoting Fellowship right now?” He grinned.

“Actually,” I said, trying to keep a smug smile from overtaking my face, “the original quote is from The Merchant of Venice.”

“Really?”

“’All that glistens is not gold, often have you heard that told, many a man his life hath sold, but my outside to behold.’ Tolkien was quoting Shakespeare.” I explained.

He shook his head. “So, not only can you quote Tolkien by heart, but Shakespeare too?”

I shrugged. “I studied literature.”

“And you say I’m the geek?”

“You are the geek,” I agreed. “I’m educated, cultured and well-read.”

“You,” He drawled as he untangled his fingers from mine, “Are such a little punk.”

Before I could miss the feeling of his hand in my own, he shoved me. Very gently, very careful, with little more than a flick of his wrist against my arm.

I went sprawling into the cushions.

I giggled into the face full of throw pillows, my cursing muffled and half-hearted.

“I can hear you, y’know,” he said casually. “Such vulgar language for a young lady!”

He was shaking his head at me when I righted myself.

“I’d push you off the sofa if I didn’t think I’d break my fingers trying,” I promised him.

“Yeah, we wouldn’t want you breaking another arm.” He agreed.

I scowled playfully at him. He’d known exactly what he was doing. The sad heaviness that had been in the air shifted, dissolved, fizzled into something different. Something sparkling and electric that made my blood feel hot and fizzy.

I was suddenly hyper-aware of how close we were. That my fingers were millimetres away from his leg, that our bodies had turned towards each other, that I could smell the soap and spice scent of him.

His tongue darted out, wetting his lips. They glistened in the soft, dim light.

It would be so easy.

To lean up, thread my fingers through his hair, to press my lips to his. Would he taste sweet like the chocolate he’d eaten? Or spicy like he smelled? Or something else entirely?

I blinked, shaking my head slightly to dispel the deliciously distracting thoughts.

Bucky smirked, as if he knew exactly where my thoughts had just been.

“I’m going to bed before you attack me unprovoked again.” I was grateful for the darkness, to hide how furiously I was blushing as I stood.

“Should’ve been on your guard, sweetheart. We’ve got a lot of work to do if you’re that easily thrown.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “That’s not fair. You’re a super solider with a metal arm.”

He popped a handful of M&Ms into his mouth and crunched down. “No excuse,” he said around the sweets.

I rolled my eyes, huffing.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, doll.” He said, grinning, eyes glittering in the low light.

Goosebumps prickled on my arms. A fire lit, heat pooling in the bottom of my belly.

“Or what?” I countered, slightly breathless.

Long, muscular arms, one metal, one flesh, stretched across the back of the sofa. He winked. “I’m sure you can use your imagination.”

Yes, I could.

I swallowed.

“We start tomorrow.”

I should have asked what, exactly, we would be starting. Should have asked more questions, prepared myself better. My mind was still too preoccupied with imagining, that I didn’t.

I just turned on my heel and padded off towards my room. Something small and hard smacked my in the back of the head, and when I turned to glare at Bucky, he popped another handful of colourful candies in his mouth and winked.

My whole body was aflame as I started my climb up the stairs and had to fight the urge to turn around until I made it into bed.

Even then, it was a struggle.

Notes:

🫣 Thank you for reading! More coming very soon. If you haven't already checked it out, there's a playlist for this story! https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5fpTzAfqFMKzTy5u2csPh4?si=eaGxC08wROa4IPJgDI1Ezw

I cannot say how grateful I am that you're here and reading my silly little story. 🥰❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Chapter 8: Alive and Blooming and Beautiful

Summary:

They were messy, haphazard and slightly unkempt as the bare stems had been. But they were alive and blooming and beautiful.

I was luxuriating in the last little bit of warmth from the sun, that one last almost-warm day before the earth pulled just too far away for any substantial heat to reach.

The breeze was definitely cold now, and the small amounts of skin that were exposed to the air prickled with it. Stands of slightly too-long grass tickled my ankles where my jeans had ridden up, and the back of my neck was itching.

I didn’t care enough to move. The feeling of the sun on my face and the wind in my hair were so pleasant that I didn’t mind everything else that came with it.

I had spent most of the morning with a book, laid on my stomach reading A Study in Scarlet until the dew-damp had seeped into my thin jumper enough to be uncomfortable. And then, for a while, I had laid on my back and imagined shapes into the clouds as they raced across the sky. I’d watched the leaves shuddering in the trees, counted the small number of trees that still had some green leaves.

Deep in some part of my self, I could feel that sunshine. Filling up all the dark crevices and corners, chasing away the darkness.

My eyes were closed now, trying to give as much skin surface area to the sun as possible, let as much of that light sink into me as it could before winter came and consumed it all.

At some point, the lullaby of fluttering leaves and breeze-kissed trees tipped me over the edge of consciousness. I drifted like the clouds, in and out of the lightest sleep. Until a darker shadow fell over my face, and the temperature dropped.

My eyes opened and I made a sound that was both scream and gasp at the sight.

A smug, handsome face, grinning at me.

It took a moment for my breathing and heart rate to calm enough for me to speak. “You complete arse Bucky Barnes!” I growled. He just kept on smirking at me. “How long have you been creeping over me like that?”

“Couple’a minutes.” Was his overly casual response. “Was worried you might be dead so thought it’d be prudent of me to check.” He stayed crouched next to me, far enough away that I knew he was still keeping a respectful distance but looking far too comfortable.

I glared at him, reaching over to push at his shoulder.  He did not so much as sway, and he laughed at me, eyeing my hand as if it were something pathetic. I almost kicked him. Would’ve, if I weren’t so sure it’d only embarrass me more.

Things had changed between us, that last layer of awkward tension had dissipated entirely. The atmosphere was lighter. And far from trying to respectfully keep his distance, Bucky seemed to relish in annoying me.

At the look on my face, he stopped laughing and instead offered me his hand. The reflection of sun on metal glared into my eyes and I blinked at the sudden brightness.

I stared at his hand, pointedly refusing to take his help.

“Look, doll,” I ignored the flush that I could feel creeping up my neck, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but it’s happening whether you like it or not.”

“And here I was, waiting for an apology,” I grumbled, frowning at the hand still stretched out to me.  “What exactly is the this to which you refer?”

He huffed, a noise of both frustration and amusement. “We’re going to work on that clumsiness of yours.” He wiggled his fingers towards me in a come-hither motion.

The thought filled me with dread.

I imagined all of the different, equally humiliating ways that could constitute working on one’s clumsiness.

A hundred different memories flashed through my mind in fast-forward. The ballet lesson where I had caught my heel on a radiator with enough force to make it bleed. Slipping from the beam of an upturned school bench, all eyes on me as the teacher held my hand to stop me falling. The bike riding lessons where I had fallen too many times to count, grazed and bruised and still my dad making me get back on until the sun had started to set. Flying, arse-over-head, as I tried the hurdles for the first time. Tripping over my own feet, the sensation of my stomach dropping as I fell face-first down the stairs.

I shuddered, swallowed the fear that had gripped my voice and whispered. “How?”

Bucky’s face softened. Still smirking, still smug, but softer. “If you get up, I’ll show you.”

“I don’t think I want to see,” I admitted in a small voice before placing my hand in his.

Before I could regret it, Bucky had yanked me to my feet in a movement so effortless it almost scared me. Such a casual display of immense strength, and this was him being gentle.

He did not let go when I was on my feet. “What are you doing?” I asked warily.

“What’re you worried about?” He asked in return, still wearing that irritatingly smug smile but there was a touch of concern in his eyes now.

“Don’t answer my question with a question!”

“Don’t deflect.” He scolded, his smile dropping. “You look as terrified as you should’ve done last night. What is it?”

“Oh, stop it,” I snapped, avoiding his eyes and trying to tug my clammy hand out of his.

He held tight, staring at me until I stopped struggling and met his eyes. “I’m worried that I’m going to make a fool of myself,” I muttered my admission.

He let out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, his posture relaxing in relief, the twinkle back in his eyes. “Is that all” He asked as he plucked a small remote from his pocket.

He pressed a button, and gentle swing music started playing from a speaker somewhere.

Bucky’s right hand settled on my back, bringing our faces mere inches away.

“Whatareyoudoing?!” There was pure panic in my voice now. It had become immediately clear what Bucky was intending on doing.

Dancing.

The blush that had been creeping up my neck had spread everywhere, flooding in my face, splotching across my chest, even my fingers felt hot.

I was terrified.

“You’d think I was holding a knife to your throat, not trying to get you to dance, jeez.” He shook his head at me.

“I think I’d prefer the knife,” I whispered, feeling the tension gripping at every muscle in my body.

Bucky leaned forward, just slightly, the inches between us closing, the electricity growing. “Stop being so being melodramatic.”

My hand automatically tightened in his, “I’m just saying that it would be a quicker, more humane death than dying of humiliation.”

He reached for my clenched fist, which had been hanging awkwardly by my side, and uncurled my fingers. There was almost as much strength in his right arm as his left.

With an effort at gentleness, he placed my hand on the top of his arm and repositioned himself.

“You are perfectly safe,” he promised, softening again at the look on my face. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you. Not even yourself.”

I didn’t want to admit that I knew that.

It wasn’t that I didn’t feel safe. In fact, I hadn’t felt this safe in a long time. But if Bucky had thought my clumsy before, he had no idea what he was getting himself into. There was no way this was going to end well. For either of us.

I felt his fingers twitch, knew he was feeling my muscles tense and twitch.

“All you gotta do is step backwards when I step forwards,” he explain slowly, speaking like one would to a spooked animal. “Move when I move, follow my lead. It’s easy.” He sounded equal parts encouraging and annoyed and it only made my embarrassment burn hotter, singing with shame.

“Easy if you spent your life doing it,” I said in a quiet, grumpy voice. “I bet you’ve danced with more girls than I’ve had hot dinners. I’m used to the Macarena and the Cha Cha Slide, not… This. I can count on one hand the number men I’ve danced with.”

“Yeah, and it shows.” I didn’t hide my offended look, and he softened his tone. “Look, if you do this for me, I’ll do your macawhatsit and the Cha Cha doo dah.”

I laughed, the tension in me lightening just slightly. “Tempting. But you’ve got to do better than that, Barnes.”

“We’ve still got one more Lord of the Rings film to watch?”

“You want to watch that anyway!” I accused, and he shrugged an admission of his guilt with zero remorse.

I tried to think about a worthy incentive. It was hard to think of anything with how he felt under my hands. His muscles were relaxed, but I could still feel them. Toned, trained, deadly.

“You have to read some of my books.” I offered.

“Books you don’t have?”

It was my turn to shrug, his hand gripped tighter with the movement. “I’m sure we can figure something out.”

We stared at one another for a long moment, hands gripping, my body seemed to be acutely aware of how close his was.

“Sure. We’ll figure something out.” He begrudgingly gave in, a reluctant smile spreading across his face as I grinned.

“I’d shake your hand to seal the deal,” I said, “But uh,” I nodded towards out joined hands, and gave the metal a gentle squeeze, immediately feeling like a dumbass. No nerve endings in metal.

I could feel the pressure of the unyielding firmness of his fingers sinking into my soft, plush curves. He was all firm lines, pure muscle and metal and powerful masculinity.

I was putty in those strong, capable hands.

A different song started, and Bucky wasted no time.

I tripped over his foot on the first step, and the cool metal of his thumb rubbed the back of my hand in reassurance. “’S okay. You got this. Look at your feet, watch what I do and just... do the opposite.”

I watched his foot move forward and took a step backwards in response. When he tried to step left, I went to the right.

“Not that opposite.” He snickered.

“Don’t blame me for your shitty instructions,” I grumbled.

When I dared to glance at his expression, I could tell that, despite himself, he was fighting a smile.

He resorted to telling me exactly what sort of step to take. His voice low and soft and patient. Rhythmic. “Back. Left. Forward. Right.”

Back. Left. Forward. Right. Back. Left. Forward. Right.

Over and over, slowly to the sway of the music, until the song ended.

“See?” He told me, giving my waist a gentle squeeze. “Easy.”

It was not easy.

Through the second song, I still tripped on nearly every other movement and stepped on his toes enough to make him wince. His fingers would tighten against me each time I did, keeping me upright, steading me, and the strange static sensation was making me feel dizzy.

Or maybe it was all the stepping.

On the third song, I started to get it. Could move around the awkward mental blockage and focus on the music, on our feet.

“You got it!” He grinned. “You’ll be as good as Ginger Rogers in no time.”

By the fourth song, I found that against my better judgement, I was having fun. Once I’d relaxed, I stopped tripping so much, stopped stepping on Bucky’s toes and a stupid little smile pulled on my cheeks.

“You’re doing great,” he said softly, our position bringing his lips close enough to my ear that I could feel his breath and I shuddered.

I lost count of the songs at that point and surrendered to the feeling of Bucky’s strong arms around me, the heat from his body chasing any wind chill away, the music blending with the breeze and turning it into something magical.

Time seemed to stop, or maybe we’d slipped back in time. We somehow existed out of time entirely, just a guy from the 1940s and a girl from the 2020s dancing on the grass as the autumn leaves fell.

Bucky span me out gently, and I giggled as he pulled me back in, both of his arms wrapped around my waist, holding me flush against his front. 

“Admit it,” he said, lips so close all I would need to do is push up on the tips of my toes to touch them with my own.

“I don’t want to give you the satisfaction of hearing it.” I told him, struggling to fight the stupid smile I didn’t seem to be able to get rid of.

His fingers gripped my waist tighter, hitting a particularly ticklish spot and another giggle bubbled out of me.

“Admit it.” He said again, more insistent.

“Can’t make me.” I teased.

He moved so quickly that the trees around me blurred, a view of the sky suddenly in sight as he dipped me so low that my hair brushed against the floor.

I squeaked, gripping his arms so tightly it made my fingers ache.

“Admit it or I’ll let go.” He promised.

“Okay, okay!” I scrabbled for purchase against the soft fabric of his shirt, the thin metal chain around his neck being pulled in the same direction I was by gravity. “That way not entirely unpleasant.”

He loosened his grip just enough for me to slip an inch closer towards the floor.

“It was fun!” I blurted out.

Two rectangular pendants slipped out of his shirt, dangling in front of my face. Dog tags, I realised, before he pulled me back up and let me go.

I couldn’t stop myself before I realised what I was doing, my fingers reaching for the tags curiously, gently.

He made no move to stop me.

I felt like I already knew what they said. I’d seen them once before, in a dream. Before I’d had any idea that Bucky was Seargeant James Barnes of the 107^th before he was the Winter Soldier.

“How do you still have these?” I whispered.

“Steve gave them to me,” he said, just as quietly. “Never said if they were the originals but, doesn’t matter.”

“Why do you wear them?” I wondered, “Aren’t they for like… identification purposes.”

“Yeah, well that’s why I wear them. Identification purposes. For so long I had no idea who I was, and even after… everything… I still need a reminder sometimes.”

James B. Barnes
32557038 T41 42 O
R. Barnes
3092 Stockton Rd
Shelbyville IN P

“So Bucky really is your middle name?” I looked up to see him smiling.

“I wish,” He scoffed. “It’s Buchanan.”

“James Buchanan Barnes,” I said softly, a fingertip running over the embossed letters on the warm metal. The mood shifted instantly as I snorted, giggling with the realisation. “James Buchanan?” I mocked, “Like the president?”

“One of the worse presidents in American history, apparently.” He deadpanned.

That made me laugh harder. “Yeah, I get why you’re ‘Bucky’ now.”

“He was the Minister to the United Kingdom too,” He grinned at me.

“Ever considered going into politics yourself?”

He gave me a look like I’d grown a second head. “With my background?”

“One, you’ve been pardoned. Not sure a certain former President can say the same for his convictions. And you’ve got a military background. Aaand aren’t you basically being Minister to the United Kingdom right now?” I teased.

“Well, when you put it like that.” He rolled his eyes. “I’ll run if you lead my campaign.”

I tossed my hair over my shoulder, fixing on my best smug face, “I do have extensive experience in making other people look good.”

“Together we’ll take over the world,” he joked, shaking his head as he walked away.

I hurried after him. “Why don’t you go by James?” I wondered. “Or Jimmy? Or… Jamie?”

He held the door open for me, the image of the old-fashioned gentleman. “I was Jimmy briefly at school,” he said, looking far away, a slight frown like he was struggling to reach for the memory. “But there were so many Jameses that some of us started to go by our middle names. Nobody wanted to call me Buchanan, so Bucky seemed the natural progression from that, I guess.”

His words were casual enough, cheerful almost, but as I watched him, I could see the ghost of his reflection in the glass of the door as he shut it. That far-away frown had deepened, and something profoundly sad had settled on his features.

Before I could reach out, before I could offer any form of comfort, he turned and smiled at me with that easy, boyish grin, not quite touching his eyes. “Are you staring at me again?” He teased.

I rolled my eyes and turned my back on him, stalking towards the sofa, not bothering to dignify his teasing with an answer. I flopped down onto the sofa, falling onto my on my back, with a soft flump, grateful that the position hid my now-burning cheeks.

I was strangely exhausted. The dancing had been more exercise than I’d gotten since I’d trapsed around Target.

I could barely hear him clunking around in the kitchen, for someone so tall and broad, and with an arm made of metal, he was remarkably silent. Stealthy. I wondered if that was a super solider thing, a Winter Solider thing or just a Bucky thing.

I was learning, slowly, which quirks came from each facet of his history.

I had barely seen anything of the darkest part of him. There was only the barest hint of Winter Solider in the effortless confidence of his swagger, a dangerous grace to his movements. More obvious was the weight of the guilt it had left on him, lighter than I imagined it had once been, but not gone entirely. 

With time and familiarity, I was starting to see more and more of the man Bucky had been before. The super solider serum, supposedly, according to what little I’d read about in history books or in the news, enhanced every part of a person. Not just their strength or their skills but the little bits that made them, them.

I didn’t doubt that Bucky Barnes of the 1940s had been effortlessly charming. The more time we spent together, the more of that charm I was starting to see. The dry sense of humour, the relentless teasing, the brilliant spark that ignited in my veins whenever we got too close. All of that was him.

I stared, unseeing, up at the ceiling, daydreaming about a young man in a soldier’s uniform with sparkling blue eyes and a sinful smirk.

It took a moment for me to realise that those same eyes and lips were right in front of me, looking far too smug as he leaned over me again. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“Gah!” I flinched at the sudden intrusion, grabbing the nearest throw pillow and smacking him with it. “Stop doing that! Are you always such a complete arse?!”

Being an insufferable, flirtatious, self-satisfied jerk was all him.

“Only to little punks who deserve it,” he said before the pillow collided with his face.

He backed away, hands held up in surrender. I sat up straight, holding the cushion like it was a genuine weapon, eyes narrowed and unrelenting.

“All fight until you’re about to dance,” he teased.

I threw the pillow with as much force as I could at him, feeling satisfied when it flumped in his face. I felt just the faintest frisson of fear as he slowly turned, metal hand rubbing absentmindedly at his cheek, until I saw that he was grinning.

“’Atta girl,” he winked.

“Such a wanker,” I mumbled, flopping back down and willing my heartrate to slow.

My eyes were closed, and I felt the sofa dip as he sat down. His leg couldn’t have been more than a couple of inches from my head, I could sense his closeness, that strange almost-electrical buzz made my scalp tickle. I quickly pushed away the thoughts of shifting just enough to rest my head in his lap.

I was almost grateful for the twinge of pain in my temples, the looming threat of a headache I could feel on the periphery of my skull, for it gave me an excuse to keep my eyes closed. If I opened them, I feared I’d be caught staring. Again.

I could hear the click of the TV menu, the opening bars of music at the start of Return of the King, and I kept my eyes firmly shut.

“Are you asleep?” He asked softly.

“No,” I replied, keeping my face as blank as I could. “I’ve got a headache.”

“Do you want me to turn the movie off?”

At that, my eyes did flutter open. He was frowning down at me with a deep crease between his eyebrows.

“No!” I said, trying for a smile and then wincing slightly as the light from the afternoon sun caught my eyes painfully. “Keep it on.”

He was still frowning when I closed my eyes again.

We fell into silence, letting the film do the talking. At one point, I started to drift off, until the weight of a cold, metal hand draped over my forehead.

The sudden sensation made me jump, and he moved to pull his hand away, so I stopped it, holding it with both of mine. I cracked open one eye. “Thank you.”

I tried not to dwell on the feeling of his hands on me. Big, strong hands; both unyielding, both gentle, both very much capable of killing me. I could almost still feel the heat radiating from where he had gripped my waist, warm and tingling and concentrated in the most distracting of areas.

I tried not to think about how close he had been, how the timbre of his voice had stirred things in me, how his praise had made me feel somehow both proud and also… other things that I didn’t want to admit, even to myself.

I could not afford to find Bucky Barnes attractive.

And yet, here I was, trying my hardest not to think about how bloody attractive he was.

We stayed in a comfortable silence, letting the film do the talking.

The looming headache had eased by the time Eowyn killed the witch king.

Outside, the sun was setting, setting the sky ablaze, mirroring the colours of the leaves. Reds and greens and oranges casting everything the light touched in a gilded glow. The grass seemed more verdantly green, the grey of the patio and the pots and the chairs seemed no longer dull and desolate but, alive. Awake.

A flash of colour caught my eyes, and I bit back an expletive.

The concrete pots on the patio were blooming. Atop healthy stems and green leaves were three sets of delicate flowers.

They were messy, haphazard and slightly unkempt as the bare stems had been. But they were alive and blooming and beautiful.

I wanted to rise from the sofa, wanted to touch the flowers, see if they were real or some figment of an over-tired imagination.

How had I not noticed them earlier? I supposed my attention had been otherwise engaged, and Bucky Barnes was a very thorough distraction.

But... How? I’d been so sure they were dead. Really, most sincerely, dead. I’d only tended to the pots out of something like respect for their corpses. Had that really been all they needed? Just a moment’s notice, just the slightest bit of attention, the tiniest amount of TLC?

Something tugged at the back of my brain, a train of thought that went against all logic and that I was very pointedly ignoring. Flashes of memories of six-headed dandelions and, more recently, punnets of almost-rotting raspberries remarkably returned to plump ripeness.

I settled back into the warmth of the room, allowing myself to be pulled back into the world of hobbits, elves, and wizards, leaving the flowers, and everything they might mean, to the quiet of the falling night.

Notes:

Thanks for sticking with me, I appreciate you ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Chapter 9: The Counter Next to the Sink

Summary:

I was about to ask what to do, when Bucky bent down, picked me up, and plopped me on the counter next to the sink.

I woke especially early that morning, my brain practically begging to go back to the living room window, to go outside and to see if the flowers had been some strange dream. I probably would’ve had it not been too dark outside to actually see anything.

And so, impatiently, I waited for the sun to rise.

As I waited, I pondered. My mind jumped, erratically, from train of thought to train of thought. I thought about the flowers. I was no Alan Titchmarsh, but I’d spent enough time in a garden to know a dead plant when I saw one, and the three cold, concrete pots on the patio had been very much dead. Not dormant, it was much too early in the season for that, but well and truly past it. No amount of weeding or watering or good vibes could’ve brought those plants back to life, and yet...

I was practically vibrating with the eager urge to check, just in case I had been imagining things.

Had Bucky noticed? He'd been out there too and hadn’t said anything.

Maybe he had been as distracted as I had. Did Bucky even get distracted? It seemed unlikely. Super solider, world’s deadliest assassin, Avenger. Definitely not the sort of person who would be distracted, especially not by someone like me.

Maybe there was a gardener I didn’t know about. Perhaps the house was looked after by a stealthy team of staff that I just hadn’t noticed. A gardener, a cleaner, someone who dealt with the little maintenance issues houses got.

Maybe the plants had been replaced; someone had noticed my fiddling and had realised, at last, that the pots needed tending to.

It made sense. It was the only thing that made sense.

But it didn’t explain the raspberries.

What could explain the raspberries?

I could remember pulling the soggy punnet from the fridge, the berries sitting limp and slimy in the bottom, maybe half a day from developing a thick coating of fuzz. I’d left them on the draining board while I’d rummaged through the rest of the produce in the fridge, and when I’d picked them up again to throw them away, I thought I’d been hallucinating.

I’d put it down to my own mistake. I had simply misinterpreted what I’d seen when I had, really rather thoroughly, inspected the berries. Surely somehow, despite my careful checking, despite looking through the transparent plastic from all angles and giving it a gentle shake, I had seen wrongly.

I’d ignored the thoughts that screamed at me that I had seen it correctly the first time and put it down to just, not noticing that they were beyond fine, were in fact, the epitome of perfect. The sort of berry you’d use in an advert, the sort they photographed to use on posters.

Instead of trying to make it make sense, and all of the mental gymnastics that would have entailed, I just... hadn’t thought about it.

What I also hadn’t thought about, or rather had made a very big effort not to think about, was my first meeting with Valentina, and how on earth she knew about the six-headed dandelion and the fairy ring.

More than once I had wondered how she knew, and put that down to her being the Director of the CIA. I was in her custody now, or her care, and it was her business to know everything about me. But that she chose those things to mention, so very strangely specific.

What if, somehow, impossibly, the plants in the pots hadn’t been replaced by a gardener? What if, somehow, impossibly, the raspberries had been half-rotten one moment and restored to ripeness the next.

What if, somehow—impossibly—those things had been me?

Was this what they had been waiting for? Was it enough to turn me from an interest to an asset?

Unlikely.

What good were plants and produce to a government that had innumerate enhanced individuals at their disposal? I mean, for heaven’s sake, I was sharing a house with a super solider.

I was not interesting. I was not useful.

Soon enough they would all realise that I was nothing more than a normal, ordinary, boring woman with little more to offer the world than a good work ethic and, maybe, a bit of a green thumb.

You burst into flames in the middle of the night, a small voice whispered in the back of my head.

I ignored it.

You burned a man to death and did not so much as singe yourself, it insisted.

I ignored that too.

I had more pressing thoughts to investigate.

Because the sun had risen.

 

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚─── ┘

 

I didn’t know what I had expected, really.

But it certainly wasn’t this.

The cold light of day had revealed exactly what I had seen last night. The flowers were still there, blooming and beautiful in the muted light of the sunrise.

Up close, they didn’t appear to be new. The soil seemed as I had left it, dimpled with fingerprints, haphazardly pushed around exposed roots. It did not look carefully tended to; the way I would expect a gardener would leave things.

The pots looked exactly like my clumsy fingers had been poking around in there.

That didn’t surprise me, not really. What was unexpected, what was both shocking and surprising enough that I had fallen to my knees in the dew-damp grass, were the other flowers.

Ones that had sprouted overnight, from nothing, in autumn, and were growing only in one very specific patch of the grass.

The spot where Bucky and I had danced.

I could tell by the slightly flattened patches of grass, where our feet had bent or broken the strands, especially obvious from this angle. The little pops of yellow and white popped up between those patches, pristine and perfect, untouched and untrampled.

The cacophonous thoughts in my mind seemed to numb and blur, the thoughts no longer coherent but now just, noise. I was confused, bewildered, and more than a little bit anxious.

“Doll?”

I could barely hear him.

A warm hand gripped my shoulder, shaking me gently. “Are you okay? Jesus, you’re freezing. What are you doing out here?”

I blinked, my eyes moving for the first time since I’d spotted the flowers to look up at him.

“Look,” I whispered hoarsely. He followed my outstretched hand, frowning at the lawn for a moment before his eyebrows rise and he eyes opened wide.

“What the fuck?”

What the fuck indeed.

I cleared my throat, moving my pointed finger from the daisies and buttercups to the pots on the patio.

I could see his head turn, watched his furrowed brows lift towards his hairline.

“What the fuck?” He said again. “Weren’t they...?”

“Dead.” I finished for him. “Yeah. I remember thinking how sad it was when I saw them the first time.”

His mouth opened and closed a few times, as if on the verge of asking a question and then thinking better of it.

“How?” He finally asked.

“I think...” I swallowed around the intense dryness of my mouth. “I think it was me.”

Frowning, he looked at me, a muscle in his jaw twitching. Thoughtful and calculating for a moment before he softened his face and offered me his hand.

“Let’s get you inside,” he said softly, “You’re shivering.”

I placed my trembling hand in his, warm and firm and gently heaving me to my feet. My knees were stiff, my muscles reluctant to move with the cold dampness and my steps were slow and stilted. Bucky did not let go of my hand, staying close to me, steadying and supporting me and only releasing me once I was sat on the sofa, and he draped a soft, heavy blanket around my shoulders.

“Let me get this straight,” he said in that still-gentle tone, the image of patience. “You think you’re responsible for resurrecting the dead plants in the pots on the patio, and for making those little flowers appear in the lawn?”

I nodded.

“How?”

I shrugged. “No idea.” I watched his expression for a moment before adding “I think I miraculously saved some manky raspberries too.”

A tiny smile cracked on the corners of his lips. “Manky?”

The glimmer of amusement in his eyes made my face feel hot.

“Yes,” I said, raising an eyebrow in challenge. “Manky.”

“Which I’m assuming means they were past their best?” he leaned back into the cushions, looking at me with a sideways glance.

“You assume correctly.” I tutted. “Of the parts of that sentence to focus on, you chose ‘manky’?!”

He let himself laugh briefly before taking a deep breath, letting it out as something between an exhale and a sigh.

“Valentina is coming tomorrow.” He said, sounding like he very much did not want Valentina to be coming tomorrow.

“Because of the flower thing?” I said, feeling my face pull into a frown.

Another half-smile appeared on his face, disappearing almost as quickly as it came. “No, doll. Routine visit. Probably to moan about how little progress we’ve made.”

“Progress?” I asked. “In what?”

He thought about his answer for one, long minute, watching my confused expression with a matching frown. “You.” He said simply, jaw clenching.

I could see something like anger brewing in his eyes, not at me, but for me.

Casually, almost like he wasn’t even thinking about what he was doing, his fingers laced with mine between us. “Don’t tell her about the pots. Or the lawn.” He said, looking very serious before the corner of his lips twitched. “Or the raspberries.” His fingers tightened around mine. “We keep this between us.” He was looking so deeply into my eyes, leaning towards me as I was towards him, magnetic, drawn to each other. I felt a little dizzy. “You understand?”

“Won’t she already know?” I wondered, looking up at the barely hidden camera in the corner.

“Cameras don’t cover the garden. You can only see up to about three slabs in on the patio.”

“And the audio?” I asked.

“There isn’t any. They uh,” he cleared his throat, his free hand rubbing at the back of his neck, “had a very awkward time with audio footage from another safehouse and decided it was in everyone’s best interests not to go there again.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Agents on missions can get quite... amicable.” He explained, the seriousness in his eyes dissolving back into that cheeky sparkle.

Ah.

Imagining, before I could stifle the intrusive thoughts, about getting amicable with the agent sat next to me.

Perhaps it was my imagination, but it felt like the fingers tangled with mine gripped tighter.

“Couldn’t they have bugged the place?” I asked to distract myself.

“Could’ve.” He agreed. “Haven’t. I checked.”

I let out a breath I didn’t realise I’d been holding. He smiled. He untangled his fingers from mine and slapped the palm of his hand gently against my thigh, just below the hem of my pyjamas shorts.

I froze.

His skin was hot against mine, the roughness of his callouses made all the more noticeable against my sensitive skin. I could feel how wide my eyes had gone, fixed on the little indents his fingertips were pressing into my flesh.

“Come on, buttercup,” he grinned. “Get dressed and let’s get out of here before Val grounds us for not being interesting enough.”

At that, I blanched.

Would she be angry? What would she do with that anger?

Bucky’s grin shifted to an overdone look of patience, and he rolled his eyes. “I’m joking. She’s not going to do anything.” His fingers on my leg gripped, and the breath caught in my throat.

Bucky heard that noise, despite it being a near-silent intake of breath and misinterpreted it.

“It’s okay,” he soothed, thumb rubbing little circles against my leg. “I won’t let them do anything you don’t wanna do.”

I cursed my traitorous body, cursed the blush I could feel creeping into my cheeks with each hurried beat of my heart, cursed the goosebumps that appeared where Bucky’s skin met mine.

I took a deep breath to steady myself before I asked. “Out? Where are we going?” And hoped it distracted him from the fact that my face was burning.

He was smiling again, his eyes sparkling with a mischievous glint that made me think he knew exactly why I was blushing. “I believe I owe you some books.”

This time, my gasp was one of delight and I was hurrying out of the plush cushions, dropping the blanket on his lap and calling, “I won’t take long!” behind me.

Indeed, it did not take long for me to dress and throw a brush through my hair. I nearly fell down the stairs in my excitement, tripping into Bucky’s waiting arms at the bottom.

“I’m glad to see that dancing has helped with your coordination,” he teased, not immediately letting me go, leather-clad hands braced on my back.

I tutted playfully. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I said primly, slipping out of his grip before I could get too comfortable and not want to move. “Are you coming or not?” I gave him one of my customer service smiles over my shoulder as I opened the front door.

“Impatient little madam,” He grumbled, frowning at me in a way that made me smile.

There was no rushing off on his part, and no pausing to enjoy the fresh air on mine.

We ambled, at my leisurely pace, arms brushing against each other with how close we were. As we waited for the electric door of the garage to open, Bucky dangled the keys in front of me. “Wanna drive?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’ll have you know I’m an excellent driver.” I said matter-of-factly. “And the first car I ever drove was a left-hand drive.”

“Really?”

“Yep. On the back streets of Milan.”

He looked down at me, a thoughtful furrow to his brow. “You are full of surprises.”

I winked at him. “You don’t know the half of it.”

The door finished opening with a metallic groan. Bucky, the image of a wartime gentleman now he was starting to get over his awkwardness, opened the passenger door for me.

The car was still full of that magnetic, electric tension—more so now that I was almost certain he didn’t hate my guts. With his free hand, he fiddled with the radio, flicking through to some golden oldies station.

“Do you only listen to old timey music?” I wondered aloud.

“I like forties music!” He said defensively, as if he’d had this conversation before.

I listened to the song, concentrating for a moment. “But... this is from the fifties.”

He turned his face in my direction give me that frown again. “How do you know that?”

“I’ve got a good ear and an even better memory. More importantly,” I turned in my seat to face him, “What’s your problem with modern music?”

He looked back at the road, the sound of leather against leather as he gripped the steering wheel. “I don’t have a problem with it, it’s just...”

“A lot?” I offered, and he nodded emphatically.

Compared to the forties, or even the fifties, music these days was an entire universe away. From simple swinging melodies and relaxed jazz bar vibes to… Limp Bizkit and The Prodigy and Taylor Swift and Lizzo.

“And yet,” I offered, thinking about it, “Prokofiev is still some of the hardest stuff I’ve heard.”

Bucky scoffed. “Prokofiev? You like Prokofiev?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Don’t sound so surprised. I’m educated and cultured.”

He smirked. “So you say.”

“I like most things,” I explained. Prokofiev included.” I thought for a moment, tried to imagine what from my eclectic taste Bucky might enjoy. “I bet there’s plenty modern stuff you’d like, that’s one of the great things about there being so much of it. Something for everyone.”

His shoulder lifted in a shrug. “I like Marvin Gaye?” He offered.

I cracked at that, giggling. “Marvin Gaye is great, but not exactly modern. What else do you like?”

He shrugged again.

“We’ll figure it out.” I assured him, and he smiled, not turning to look at me this time, probably wrongly thinking that I couldn’t see that it didn’t touch his eyes.

We lapsed into silence after that, both of us deep in thought. He looked far-away, a slight look of wistfulness on his face. I wondered where he’d gone to, in his mind’s eye. A 1940s dance hall? A dim memory of a song playing in the background of one of his missions as the Winter Solider maybe?

Eventually, we pulled into a town. Small by American standards, I was sure, but pretty darn huge by my estimation. I was entirely unsurprised by Bucky’s effortless parallel parking, and I frowned at his smug, smirking smile. At least his eyes were sparkling again now.

“Is there anything you can’t do?” I asked, voice thick with sarcasm.

“Probably.” He teased.

Despite my earlier eagerness, I did not immediately enter the bookstore a short walk down the road.

I was much too interested in the frontage.

“What are you looking at?”

I pointed to the name of the shop, in large, neat letters. “Relative of yours?”

He looked confused for a fraction of a second before it clicked, and he laughed. “If only. You really think I’d be in the employ of the CIA if I had any part of that Barnes and Noble fortune?”

“Rich people do weird stuff all the time.” I answered. “Weirder things have happened.”

He shook his head at me, wearing that long-suffering, slightly confused look again. One that he often had when looking at me. “You are wasting valuable book buying time.”

I wasn’t sure I had ever moved quite so fast, pulling Bucky along by his forearm until we reached the section between fantasy and romance. While I browsed, he wandered close by, occasionally picking up a book to read the blurb or flick carefully through the pages.

I could have stayed in there for hours. Probably would have stayed a lot longer, excitedly looking at the surprising number of new books that had been released in the time I’d been shut away from society.

But something else caught my attention. Something that I couldn’t ignore.

A feeling that crept up my neck, made the goosebumps prickle in a way entirely different than the way they had earlier.

That had felt nice, warm and sparkly.

This felt cold and creepy, almost sharp. A feeling that I had last felt back on the damp streets of England, in the early hours of the morning, as I had been pursued by a serial rapist and murderer.

Danger.

I looked up, finding Bucky closer than I had expected. Gone was any trace of the smile he had worn. He was frowning, and the muscles in his jaw twitched.

From an outsider’s point of view, I imaged we would look like any normal couple in a bookstore. The man growing increasingly frustrated with his girlfriend’s indecision, eager to get out of there. Bucky’s frown could easily have been one of annoyance, the set of his jaw interpreted as anger. But I could read Bucky better than that now, and I knew that his expression was not one of frustration, but of worry.

He reached to take the books from my arms in one of his, his left arm curling protectively around my waist as he pulled us towards the counter. I was almost grateful that the fear had tamed any flushing.

“Find anything good?” He asked, in a surprisingly normal voice.

“I hope so,” I answered as we waited in line to pay, trying my best to look and sound normal. I wasn’t nearly as good at it as he was. “Did you?”

“Thought I might try something different,” he said, gesturing with a dip of his head to the books on the top of the pile in his arms. A book on magic and one on Greek mythology.

The look of amused surprise on my face was genuine. “You are full of surprises,” I told him.

His lips pulled up just slightly.

The young lady cashier was entirely taken with Bucky, all fluttering eyelashes and pouting lips.

I couldn’t blame her. I watched her clock the arm that was still firmly around my waist and saw her face drop. Poor girl.

If only she knew that I was fairly certain that bruises were starting to form under his fingers.

I found a strange comfort in that sensation, knowing that it was Bucky’s hand gripping me that hard. It felt protective. Possessive in entirely the way I needed it to feel right now, with the uncomfortable prickle of danger I could still feel at the back of my neck.

I kept my head down, focused on my feet as we walked out of the shop, only looking up once the soft caress of fresh air brushed against my too-warm face.

My eyes met those of a man, leaning against a wall of a building on the other side of the street. A perfectly ordinary man, decent looking, with a long, angular face. Dressed casually in jeans and a grey jacket, open over his white shirt. His hands in his pockets, one foot propped up against the wall behind him.

Entirely unnoteworthy.

Or would’ve been, had he not smiled at me.

There was no kindness in that smile.

It was not one of polite greeting. It grew, as the man’s gaze shifted to Bucky. I had caught a glimpse of a smile just like that, grinning at me in the dark just before the world exploded into flames.

It was a grin of sick, twisted pleasure. Of victory.

Bucky held the car door for me again, not extracting his arm from around me until I was safely tucked into the car.

“Did you see it too?” I whispered once he was safely inside too. He reached down, under the seat, grabbing for something.

“If by ‘it’ you mean the serial killer smile. Yeah. I saw it.” He straightened up, a gun now in his right hand.

I swallowed, my eyes wide.

“Just in case,” he assured me, slipping it into his right pocket. “I’m sure it’s nothin’ to worry about.”

“How sure?” I squeaked as the car started.

He reached over to squeeze my knee. “You just let me know you notice anything strange.”

“I already did,” I said, impressing myself with how convincing my joking tone had sounded. He pulled out of the space, accelerating so fast that the seatbelt locked, holding me firm against the seat. “Why’d you buy a book on magic? And Greek mythology?”

Had we not been fleeing a potentially dangerous situation; I was sure he’d give me one of those looks again.

“Because I’m educated and cultured.” He teased, eyes darting to check in the rear-view mirror.

“Sure. Not because it was the book you were holding when we were so rudely interrupted?” I glanced in the wing mirror, squinting as I concentrated. A few cars back was a black SUV not unlike the one we were driving. Bigger, beefier. A little less conspicuous.

“Definitely not.” He looked at me from the sides of his eyes.

“Four cars back?” I asked.

“That’s the one.”

We sat in tense silence, the radio off, as Bucky seemed to drive through every road in what I assumed was an attempt to lose anyone who might be following us.

Sure enough, the beefy black car followed each and every turn, staying just far enough away.

“They are definitely following us,” I said, stating the obvious, a slight wobble to my voice. “Who would be following us?!” There was a frantic, desperate edge to my words.

Bucky took a deep breath. “Honestly? Could be any number of possibilities.” I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. He kept his eyes fixed on the road, shifting occasionally to the rearview or wingmirrors, frowning the whole time.

After fifteen minutes of driving, we still hadn’t lost them and there was a gap a car’s length between us.

“What do you think they’re doing?” I whispered, as if they could hear me.

“Waiting.” Even Bucky sounded tense.

“For what?”

We turned the next corner, leaving the last of the houses and businesses behind us as the road stretched out in front of us. Long and straight and empty, trees lining either side, and the sun was beginning to set, casting long shadows across the tarmac.

“The right moment,” he said as he floored the accelerator.

Sure enough, the car behind us followed, matching its acceleration to ours, no longer content to follow.

It was gaining on us, creeping closer with each second.

“Oh my god,” I squeaked, and something pinged loudly against the back of the car. “Please tell me that was a pebble.” I whimpered, my voice an entire octave higher than usual.

Almost as if in answer to my plea, the sound came again. And again. And again. Unmistakable now.

“Definitely not pebbles.” He leaned over, pulling a lever on my chair that sent me sprawling backwards. “Stay down.” Bucky instructed, his grip on the steering wheel tightening as he swerved to avoid the shots.

The engine growled as it shifted into top gear.

“Is this thing bulletproof?” I asked, nausea rolling in my stomach.

I watched Bucky swallow, could hear the leather of his gloves creak as his fists tightened on the steering wheel.

“Mostly.”

Bile role in my throat and I swallowed it down, willing my body not to puke. Not here, not now.

From my upside-down angle, head thrown back, I watched the bullets hit the rear window. At first, they left little more than dents, tiny dinks in the glass. When those dinks were hit a second time, cracks appeared, spider-webbing across my vision. Each hit made the cracks grow longer, and then the cracks joined, merged, grew.

“Bucky?” I asked, worry growing.

“What?” His voice was terse and tense, his tension audible.

“How much can the glass take before it-“

As if in answer to my unfinished, question, the window exploded.

It almost looked like glitter, the sound a pretty, almost musical twinkle. I had enough time to bury my face behind my forearms before the tiny shards rained down, lodging themselves in the knitted stitches of my sleeves, burying into my hair.

Five hurried heartbeats, and then the adrenaline kicked in.

I righted myself, the seat springing up.

“I thought I told you to stay down.” Bucky grumbled.

“The back window just exploded on my face.” I said with alarming calm. “And I get car sick. I’m not staying down there.”

He glanced at me for a second before concentrating back on the road. “Fair enough.”

The shots were more sporadic now, the sound of roaring engines and rushing wind blurring in my ears.

In the distance, fast approaching, was a junction. Only two options: left or right.

I glanced behind me, out of the space where the window had been. The black SUV had fallen behind, seemingly unable to both shoot and catch up, but was gaining on us.

The adrenaline coursed through me, seemingly to slow time itself.

I looked, between the junction ahead of us, the pursuers behind us, and at the gun in Bucky’s pocket.

I guessed we had about thirty seconds.

“Do you trust me?” I asked.

Bucky turned to me, eyes worried. “Why?”

I took a deep breath and undid my seatbelt.

“What are you doing?”

I pressed the button to wind the passenger window down.

“What are you doing?!”

I leaned towards him, my left hand cupping his face. “Please trust me,” I asked softly, so close to him that I could smell the cedar and cinnamon, could see the different strands of blue and grey and green in his eyes.

My right hand reached into his pocket.

“Don’t you dare.” His voice was ice.

We’d nearly reached the junction. We were out of time.

It was a wide, open junction, and I thanked our lucky stars that everything was bigger in America.

“Take the right.” I begged, pleading with my eyes as I clicked the safety off.

I didn’t wait for his reply, pushed my top half out of the window.

Time slowed further still.

The long-faced man was leaning out of his passenger window too, the windscreen tinted so dark that I couldn’t see the driver.

I had long enough to watch the grin on his face drop before the car shifted, I braced myself with my legs, the edge of the window slamming into my ribs and knocking the breath from me.

He fired at the same time I did. Three loud cracks in quick succession. Two explosive pops. The screeching squeal of tyres against asphalt, ear-splitting.

I slipped back down into my seat, chest heaving with my rapid breaths. The momentum of acceleration pushed me back against the seat and I winced as pain shot through my arm.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing!?” Bucky grumbled, turning to glare at me.

I glared right back. “It worked, didn’t it?” My breath was still coming in ragged gasps.

His eyes darted over my body, his frown deepening, guilt flashing across his face. “You’re bleeding.” He sniffed in my direction. “A lot. Where are you bleeding? Did you get hit?”

“Are you telling me you can smell the blood?” I asked, almost indignant.

If he could smell that, what else could he smell on me?

I could only describe the angry noise he made as a growl. “Does it fucking matter?”

I shrugged, and the movement made me flinch again, hissing at the sharp. “It’s just from the glass. I think I’d notice if I got shot, Bucky.” I frowned at him.

He slowed the car down enough to get a good look at me, I watched his expression shift from anger, to concern, to something that was very clearly both.

“Evidently not.” His voice was clipped.

I followed his gaze to my upper left arm, my jumper was torn, a gaping gash in the sleeves about four inches long slashed diagonally between my elbow and my shoulder.

I was bleeding. A lot.

The red of my blood was a near perfect match for the colour of the wool, disguising the matching gash in my skin.

“It’s not that bad.” I offered. “I guess it must’ve grazed me?”

“’I think I’d notice if I got shot’” He mimicked in a poor imitation of an English accent. “I cannot believe you.”

“It doesn’t even hurt that much!” I insisted, knowing logically that the adrenaline was dulling the pain and, soon enough, I would know exactly what being shot felt like.

The leather of his glove creaked as he gripped the steering wheel with one hand, the other reaching over to wrap around my arm, palm pressing against my wound.

“Ow!” I yelped, instinctively trying to pull away. His grip tightened and I gasped. “Now it hurts. It’s not even bleeding that bad.”

He flashed me a sharp look of irritation. “I’ll let you explain to Val why there’s blood all over the car then.”

I felt my face screw up, my face scrunched in pissed-off confusion. “Pretty sure the millions of holes, and the missing back window can answer that one.”

There was a moment of quiet. An impasse. The gentle thrum of the engine and the whistle of wind from said missing back window filling the awkward silence.

“What were you thinking?” He said, voice softer, his face still angry. “You could’ve been killed.”

My voice was still acidic. “I was thinking that I wanted to stop those people from shooting at us. And they did stop, and I’m not dead. So, all’s well that ends well.”

He didn’t reply.

Neither of us spoke after that. With how fast Bucky was driving, the journey back took very little time.

The engine turned off, and in the sudden still air, the silence was deafening.

Bucky turned in his seat to face me, hand still gripping my arm, the pain an insistent ache. “You can’t go inside looking like that.”

I raised an eyebrow, and flinched as pain spiked through my scalp.

“So, I’ll just stay in the garage then.”

He didn’t smile.

His eyes were dark. Stormy. Dangerous.

“You are going to do as you’re told for once.” It was an order. “And we’re gonna sort this out.”

We left the car, and I was amazed at how remarkably unscathed it was. A couple of scratches, a handful of dents, the missing window, and a chunk cleaved from the passenger wing mirror. Remarkable.  

I, however, was a mess.

As Bucky removed his gloves and jacket, I watched my reflection in the darkened glass.

My hair was snarled with dried blood, tangled from the wind and glass. Now that the adrenaline was fading, I could feel the tiny cuts sting.

My cheeks were not their usual flushed pink. I was drained of colour, the streaks of red framing the edges of my face thrown into stark contrast but the sickly pale, almost green that my skin had turned.

Bucky cleared his throat softly and held his jacket out to me.

I groaned as I lifted my arms into the sleeves. He zipped it up, right to my chin, and then gently tilted my head towards him. He worked quickly; the fingers of his left hand surprisingly dextrous as they plucked tiny shards of glass from the snarls of my hair. I could feel the heat radiating off him, even through the layers I was wearing; the thick leather of his jacket and the chunky knit of my jumper. The electricity between us hummed, more intense than ever.

I should have been distracted by the pain and the blood and the gosh darn trauma of what we’d just been through. The logical part of me knew that.

But a bigger part of me was preoccupied with just how close Bucky was. With how his fingers felt in my hair, hot and cold and fascinating in their contrast. And how goddamn good he smelled. Impossibly, he didn’t smell of fear or sweat or blood, but of something fiercely masculine, strong and delicious.

The heat of his fingers were on my chin, tilting my face up to his.

There were mere inches between us, between those plush, soft lips and my own.

His thumb stroked my chin, the tip barely brushing against the edge of my bottom lip. His fingers traced up my jaw, over my cheek, until his hand cupped around my face.

I wasn’t sure I was breathing.

The room was spinning, electricity was humming in my veins, in my skin.

I couldn’t feel the pain anymore, no longer noticed the sticky itch of drying blood.

I could feel only him.

The callouses on his hand, pressed against my face. The scent of cedar and cinnamon and books.

The overwhelming urge to kiss him.

And then Bucky’s hand was gone from my face, his thumb pressing against his tongue.

I had a brief moment to wonder what he was doing, to see his eyes light up and to see his mouth quirk into the tiniest smile, before that thumb scrubbed at the side of my face.

“Ohmygod,” I grumbled, trying to pull away. Metal snaked around the back of my skull, holding me in place.  

“Stop squirming,” he licked his thumb again, rubbing at a spot above my eyebrow.

“Ewww,” I groaned. “You’re an absolute freak.”

“Do you see any napkins around here?” He narrowed his eyes, the grip on the back of my head unyielding as I tried to turn away. “I thought you were going to do as you’re told.” He accused, giving me a disappointed look.

I scrunched my face up. “That was before you started spit washing me.”

“If you’ve got a better idea,” Another swipe of his thumb against his tongue, “I’m all ears.”

I did not have a better idea, and so I let Bucky wipe the blood from my face, and tried not to think about what it would taste like to kiss him now.

When he’d finished, he turned my head this way and that, admiring his handiwork.

“I’ve never looked better.” I said flatly, and he laughed despite himself.

“You’ll do.”

In one hand, he grabbed the bag of books I had forgotten existed, and the other, warm and probably smudged with spittle and blood, twined with my own.

“We’re gonna go upstairs to your room.” He said as we wandered along the path, pretending like we hadn’t just been involved in a car chase. “And we’ll get you cleaned up.”

“Won’t that look suspicious?” I wondered as he let go of my hand to unlock the front door.

“Not as suspicious as you bleeding all over the kitchen would look.”

From what he’d told me, and from the strange tension between Agent Marshall and Olivia, I guess that agents going into one another’s bedrooms wasn’t unheard of.

“Why all the subterfuge anyway?” I asked in an unnecessarily hushed voice as he let me lead the way into my room. “Won’t the CIA know what happened soon enough?” He placed the bag of books carefully on the bedside table.

He shrugged. “Better to call their bluff and let them show their cards.”

He gestured towards the bathroom, and he followed me in. It wasn’t small, especially not for an en suite, but with the addition of a super solider, there wasn’t a whole lot of room to spare.

I was about to ask what to do, when Bucky bent down, picked me up, and plopped me on the counter next to the sink.

Our faces were level, my legs dangled either side of him, the denim of our jeans brushing with a soft whisper. 

The gasp that came out of me was not one of pain.

He cleared his throat, pulling away to root through the cupboard under the sink, emerging with a large white first aid box.

“Can you take your sweater off?” He asked, already gently pushing the leather jacket from my shoulders. 

It wasn’t elegant, and it certainly wasn’t sexy.

It was clumsy and painful and awkward, and I was very grateful I’d had the foresight to wear a vest under the jumper.

Bucky kept his eyes very professionally on my arm.

With the jumper gone, the gore was impressive.

The bleeding had slowed, but not stopped, and blood had soaked the entire way down to my wrist, crusting in the crease of my elbow. Some of the glass from the back window has snuck through the holes in the knit, leaving tiny knicks of red across my forearms.

He worked slowly, his hands incredibly gentle as he cleaned the blood away with warm water, gauze, and an antiseptic that made my nose tickle. He worked his way steadily towards the wound, avoiding looking at me as he warned, “This might hurt a bit.”

It did sting. And when he pushed and prodded at the tender flesh on either side of the cut, I whimpered slightly.

“Sorry, doll.”

He pushed and poked a little more before declaring. “I don’t think it needs stitches. It’s pretty deep but nothing a few strips won’t fix.” His eyes, at last, met mine. “You’re gonna scar.” He looked regretful.

I shrugged and immediately regretted the movement. “Another one to add to my collection.” I said, and he flashed me a brief, sad smile, his gaze dropping to count the three straight silver lines between my elbow and my wrist.

“Who do you think they were?” I asked quietly as he worked. He paused, and his earlier words suddenly clicked in my mind. “Do you think it was Val? The CIA?”

Another pregnant pause, a sigh before he answered. “I reckon she’d be bold enough to try and… encourage a response.”

“From me?”

He nodded.

“You mean, try and make me do the whole spontaneous combustion thing?”

He nodded again. “But they did not account for you stealing my gun and going all Black Widow. Nor did I to be honest. When you asked me to trust you I did not expect that.”

If my arm hadn’t still been oozing blood, I’ve been blushing. “Even if I could control it, bursting into flames in a car doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

“Nor does hanging out of the window of a moving car that is actively being shot at.” He narrowed his eyes at me.

“What do you think they’ll make of that?” I wondered.

He took a deep breath, exhaling through his nose. “If you weren’t a potential asset before, you certainly will be now.”

That thought filled me with dread.

We fell into a thoughtful silence, as he continued to carefully seal the gash closed with little sticky strips. To distract myself, from the pain and the unsettling anxiety, I watched him.

He really was gorgeous.

His jaw was covered in dark stubble, which only served to enhance the strong lines and angles. His skin was still tanned, and I wondered what he’d spent his summer doing to have caught the sun so splendidly. The golden hue made the blue of his eyes shine. His brows were furrowed as he worked, and I wanted to smooth that deep line with my fingers, wanted to press my lips to his forehead, run my hands through his soft, dark hair.

He caught me looking, and I felt heat ghost across my cheeks.

“Is it waterproof?” I blurted out.

He laughed softly. “Is what waterproof?”

“Your arm.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling, “It’s waterproof. Why”

“I was wondering how you’d wash your hands.” We both looked down, my blood dripped down his fingers, smudged on the back of his hand, glistened and gleamed against the black metal.

He laughed again. “You really are full of surprises.”

There was no avoiding looking at me for the next bit, my face in his hands as he properly washed away the trails of blood from my skin and hair.

“I can’t believe you shot out their tires,” he said, a mix of admiration and surprise in his voice as he cleaned a cut along my hairline. “That was incredible.”

“Thanks,” I managed to say, my head starting to spin. “Just... reflex, I guess.”

He made a point of washing his hands, and I rolled my eyes at him.

“Damn good reflexes for someone who’s never held a gun.” He tilted his head, studying me. “You didn’t even hesitate. How?”

I smiled up at him. “I really have no idea. Maybe I’m just naturally gifted… Or I’ve watched too many action films and have really good luck.”

He was grinning. “You’re certainly one of a kind,” He murmured softly, seeming not to notice that he was shifting closer and closer to me, his eyes darting to my lips.

He discarded the little ball of cotton he’d been using to clean my face, but he did not let me go.

I had been so sure that whatever I felt for Bucky Barnes was one-sided. That to him, I was nothing more than a job. An inconvenience, at best.

But with the way he looked at me now, with his metal arm wrapping around my waist, his face dropping down towards mine, his hand curling around my neck, I was no longer so sure.

I could feel his breath, could almost taste him between my parted lips.

He hovered there, so close I could feel his breath. My heart stuttered. My whole body ached for him to close the distance. But he didn’t.

He just watched me, expectant. Waiting.

“Please,” I begged softly.

And then his mouth was on mine.

His lips were exactly as soft as I thought they’d be, a tantalisingly stark contrast to the rough scratch of his stubble against my skin.

At first, the kiss was delicate. Just the brush of our lips, sharing breath, waiting. The air seemed alive, electric, tangible, as time itself waited to see what was going to happen next.

He was tense, frozen and still, as if torn between pulling away or pushing in. Even with my eyes closed I knew he was at war with himself.

I sighed against his lips, the sound shaky and desperate.

He inhaled, the grip of his fingers tightened, and like the sun breaking through the clouds, Bucky kissed me.

He kissed the way men in old fashioned movies kissed, as if every movement was deliberate and intentional and yet utterly effortless. It felt for a moment that if I were to open my eyes, everything would be black and white.

That kiss consumed me, burned me with more heat than any flame could hold. Charred me from the inside out. His hand knotted in the hair at the nape of my neck, my fingers grasped at the fabric of his shirt.

He was everywhere, wrapped around me, every part of my body yearned for him. I could smell him, the comforting warmth of the spice, the clean scent of soap, the heady scent of something that was uniquely Bucky. The grip of metal around my waist pulled my body flush against his, my feet curled around his calves, entwining us entirely.

I whimpered, and he froze, pulling back just barely, giving me room to breathe, his forehead pressed against mine. We stayed that way, breathing in each others’ air, until those breaths slowed. Until the roaring in my ears hushed, and the racing gallop of my heart slowed.

“You taste like sunshine,” he whispered, leaning in to whisper the words against my mouth. I could feel his smile.

“What does that even mean?” I mumbled and we laughed together, almost silently, between unhurried little kisses.

Kisses that promised more, before he pulled away far enough to look at me.

I could feel myself frowning, and he laughed at that too.

“Why’d you stop?” I pouted.

“Because” he said, gently tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear, “If I don’t stop now, I’m not sure I ever will.”

“Doesn’t sound like a reason to stop to me,” I grumbled, my fingers creeping up his back, tracing the line where metal met flesh through his shirt. “Sounds like a reason to keep going.” My voice was little more than a whisper.

“One, you’ve just been shot,” I opened my mouth to protest, and he pressed a finger to my lips to stop me. “And the things I wanna do to you,” His voice had dropped, low and husky, “Are not the sorta things we should be doin’ when you’re injured and coming down off an adrenaline high.”

He smiled at my frown, pressing a brief, chaste kiss against it. His hand moved to curve around my hip. “And two, we gotta talk about tomorrow.”

“What about tomorrow?” I asked, confused.

“Val.” He said simply.

That was a sobering though. “Oh.” I said simply, the heat that had been burning at me cooling rapidly. “Shit.”

I hated to admit it, but he was right. From what he’d said, Val was coming to politely enquire as to why there had been such little progress.

Things had changed drastically in the last few hours.

Bucky and I had already agreed that keeping quiet about the raspberries and the flowers was our best course of action, better not to give them more that might make me interesting.

The last few hours had been very much interesting.

“Shit.” Bucky agreed. “Let’s get downstairs.”

He lifted me from the counter with the arm still around my waist. He was already pulling the black hoodie from the few items of clothing in the draw, holding it out for me to put my arms into. “You’re gonna struggle with anything you have to pull over your head,” he explained as I flinched while getting my arm through the sleeve. “The pain’ll get worse before it gets better.”

He hooked a finger through the handle of the shopping bag with the books as he left the room, bringing them with us. “I wanna see what you chose,” he said, noticing my confused expression.

The pain was slowly, steadily, getting worse, just as Bucky has promised.

I could feel each step down the stairs, an ache in the backs of my legs that I assumed had been from holding myself out of the window. A throb in the sides of my ribs from where I’d been thrown against the frame of the car door. A dozen small, nagging stings across my scalp. Brushing my hair was going to suck. The gash on my arm was a myriad of painful sensation, somehow both sharp and hot and also deep and dull and aching.

I tried not to wince as I sat on the sofa.

Bucky noticed, popping the bag on the coffee table and disappearing to the kitchen, retrieving a glass of water and a packet of Tylenol before sitting next to me on the sofa.

“Make sure you take those with you when you go to bed. Take them when you wake up and try not to tense too much.”

His instructions were as much for my comfort as they were to keep the secrets we were hiding.

“So, we’re not going to tell Val about today?”

He nodded. “I mean, you can if you want to,” I interrupted him with an emphatic shaking of my head.

“Even if it wasn’t on her orders, it’s probable she knows what went down,” he said, a small frown tugging at his eyebrows. “In which case we take our lead from her. But if she doesn’t mention it, I don’t think we should tell her.”

“Won’t she be pissed if she finds out we were lying?”

He shrugged. “Massively. But if we tell her, and it wasn’t the CIA’s call and there’s someone else after you, that’s only going to make her more eager to keep you where she can see you.”

I blinked.

What?

Val taking drastic action to encourage me into action made sense, but someone else being after me? No way. Bucky was the asset. The super solider with the Vibranium arm. Bucky was the valuable one.

Me, with my flowers and my raspberries and the one-time-only bursting into flames thing, couldn’t be what had drawn them to us.

“Why would anyone else be after me?” I said, laughing without humour, “How would anyone else even know I exist?”

“Easily,” Bucky said earnestly. “CIA’s not as secure as you might think, I was technically a civilian when I was given your file the first time. If they shared it so easily with me, who else might’ve seen it? And then there’s that your information has been shared across countries. That in itself is a massive security risk; the more people who know, the more chances there are for leaks. You were picked up by a relatively small local police department, too. People who haven’t had the CIA or MI6 drumming into them about the importance of security and confidentiality and secrecy. Would be so easy for one of them to mention the woman who burst into flames to their family over dinner. You’d be an incredible anecdote at the pub.” He paused to give me a smirk. “Then it spreads out, further and further. You become a conspiracy theory, the superpowered vigilante ridding the streets of scumbags. The secret government weapon for getting rid of unwanted criminals so they aren’t clogging up the prisons. The sort of mysterious myth they post about on the internet.”

I snorted. I wanted to insist that I wasn’t nearly interesting or memorable enough for any of that.

But he was right, and the logical part of me knew it. Freak fluke spontaneous combustion or some genuine power that lurked inside me, I’d still killed a man in a rather spectacular fashion. And that was interesting.

All it took was one wrong person getting wind of the potential of that power, and if they were looking for it, if they had eyes and ears looking out for exactly that kind of information.

Bucky was so right.

“Fuck.” I muttered.

“Yep,” He popped his lips on the p.

I rubbed my tired eyes with the ball of my hand, trying to ignore the ache that throbbed in my arm. “So,” I said, trying to make sense of it all. “We say nothing. Hope Val doesn’t know anything. What then? Hope she gets bored and lets me go?”

He shrugged. “Something like that. I’m not sure she’d ever really get bored of you, but you might get some cushty job offer that means she can keep a close eye on you.”

“Is that what happened to you?” I teased.

He laughed softly. “If only. All the keeping a close eye, none of the cushty job.”

I raised a brow, “They’re paying you now, right? Accommodation, food, transport, all provided. Get to hang out with me.” I teased. “Pretty cushty.”

He let out a long breath. “I’m paid to turn you into an asset. Let’s see what happens after tomorrow.”

At that, panic sank its claws into my ribs. “She won’t make you leave, will she?” My voice was smaller than I wanted it to be.

What if they put someone in here with me who knew exactly what to do to get the reactions from me that had, so far, been missing in action?

What if Bucky couldn’t keep his promise?

What if they did turn me into a weapon?

“Shh,” his hands found mine, wrapping around them and holding me tight. “It’s okay. I won’t let anything bad happen.”

“But, but,” my breath was coming too quickly, my brain skipping like a broken record. “They’re the CIA, Bucky, how could we stop them?”

A bleak, humourless laugh. “Sweetheart, you don’t wanna know how many government agencies I’ve stopped. Or entire governments for that matter.”

The realisation was a sobering one. One that should have scared me, or at the very least unnerved me. But it didn’t.

It comforted me.

All that power, all of that super soldier serum strength, was being used to protect me.

“And you really think anyone could make you do something you don’t wanna do? Remember what happened the last time someone tried?”

How could I forget?

“What if I can’t do it again?” I whispered, fears I’d refused to even think about creeping in to the question.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re special because you’re you. Not because of anything you can or can’t do.” He said softly, pulling me in close to his side, wrapping his arm around me, careful to avoid my arm and the bruises he couldn’t see that were no doubt blooming across my ribcage.

I felt so tired all of a sudden, my head flopping to rest against his chest, solid and warm and comforting. I wanted to cry, overwhelmed by so many different emotions. I took a few deep, steadying breaths.

“Wanna watch a film?” Bucky asked.

“What were you thinking?” I asked, curious.

“Sam said there’s films of The Hobbit?” He sounded unsure, and I snorted.

“Oh boy,” I laughed. “You better prepare yourself, Barnes.”

“That good, eh?”

I was still smiling as the film began to roll, warm and comfortable and safe, the pain nothing more than a nag in the background of the more lovely sensations.

I fell; slowly, surely, inescapably, into more than just sleep.

Notes:

🫣 It was going to happen sooner rather than later!
Thank you for sticking with me, I am so grateful you're here! Lots of love ❤️‍🔥

Chapter 10: Bringer of Death

Summary:

“I always assumed she was just the goddess of spring,” He kept his voice casual. “But did you know that ‘Persephone’ actually means ‘bringer of death’?”

I woke in my bed, hoodie neatly hanging from the wardrobe door, two Tylenol sitting neatly next to a fresh glass of water on the bedside table. The smile that spread across my face was as silly as the one I’d fallen asleep wearing.

Undressing for the shower quickly wiped that smile away.

Every part of me ached, from my stinging scalp to the aching joints of my fingers, every muscle in my body felt stiff.

The sight of my own body in the bathroom mirror made me jump.

I’d expected bruises. The side of my ribs was smudged with purple so extensively that it made me feel a little bit sick. I could feel the deep ache turn to a bright, sharp stab if I breathed in too deeply.

Less painful were the four faint finger-shaped marks curled around the flare of my hips.

The cut along my arm was surprisingly straight, a few inches long, curving diagonally around and up my arm between my elbow and my shoulder. Bucky had done a beautiful job of securing the two edges of the wound together, the whole thing neatly closed with perhaps more steri-strips than strictly necessary.

It would scar, but at least it’d be a neat scar.

Showering was even more uncomfortable than undressing had been. I tried to be gentle as I scrubbed the dried blood from my hair, so as to not reopen the small cuts from the glass, but it still stung like a bitch.

Bucky had been right about lifting my arm. Moving was enough of an effort, with the aching stiffness that seemed to have made its way into each and every muscle, but lifting my left arm was an altogether different pain.

It burned.

I wanted nothing more than to stand under a cool spray of water, letting it sooth the angry red cuts and grazes, to numb my muscles into oblivion, but I let the water run as hot as I dared, hoping against hope to relax the stiffness.

It took me over an hour to get ready. Between the shower and the monumental effort of dressing myself, it was almost time to face the music.

Bucky was exactly where he’d been last night, reclined on the sofa, feet up on the coffee table.

He was reading, the television set to a news channel and just barely audible.

“What’cha reading?” I asked, perching on the arm of the sofa.

He smiled, holding up the intriguing looking book on magic and Greek mythology he’d bought yesterday. His eyes swept over me, from my head to my toes, and then back again, the smile fading to a look of concern. “Why are you so pink? Do you feel okay?” He was up quicker than I could answer, the book left face down on the table, keeping his place.  His hands were on my face, one warm, one cool. “You’re really warm.”

 I leaned into the soothing coldness of metal against my cheek. “I had a hot shower,” I explained. “I’m prone to a bit of pinkness.”

The furrow disappeared, replaced by a cheeky twinkle.

“So I’d noticed,” he teased. He tilted my head this way and that, assessing. “You look good.” That certainly wasn’t helping with the flushing, “You feel okay?”

I shrugged, trying my best not to wince. “All things considered... I’m fine. Thanks for the drugs.”

The blood quickly drained from my face as I, finally, put the pieces together.

I couldn’t remember getting to bed. Had woken to water and painkillers and “Oh god,” I groaned as Bucky’s smile grew. “Did I fall asleep on you?”

His expression could only be described as gleeful. “You know you drool in your sleep?”

“I don’t do it all the time!” I insisted, defensive, as I pulled out of his arms.

“I’m just glad you slept,” he said sincerely. “You’re shit at sleeping at the best of times.”

I glared at him from the kitchen, making much too noise as I found some Pop Tarts and plunked them in the toaster. “Alright, Edward Cullen, knowing that much information about my sleeping habits is a little bit creepy.”

He huffed a laugh. “Who’s Edward Cullen?”

Between bites of Pop Tart, I briefly explained Edward Cullen and Twilight and promised to show him the films. “The books are better though. They’re... maybe not objectively good but, fun. I enjoyed reading them, even if it’s not cool to admit that out loud.”

“Isn’t that the case for most fantasy stuff though? I’m not sure reading The Hobbit was ever cool, but we cared less about that sorta stuff I ‘spose.”

“Bullshit,” He smiled at my bluntness. “You totally cared about being cool back then, you just had different ways of showing it.”

An eyebrow raised, he asked, “Yeah?”

“Oh definitely. I bet you were really proud of how much interest you got from the ladies. I bet the other boys were always coming to you for tips. ‘How’d you do it Bucky? Aren’t they turned off by those books you’re readin’?’.” My imitation of a New York accent was, admittedly, absolutely terrible and Bucky laughed harder than I’d seen him laugh before.

“You’re more on the money than you know,” He admitted. “Nobody could understand why I hung out with Steve but I never cared about fitting it or doing things for other people’s approval.”

“You only didn’t care because you didn’t have to. You had good looks and charm to fall back on. Some of us aren’t so lucky.”

He glared at me then. “Bullshit.”

I rolled my eyes at him, changing the subject to the more important matter at hand. “When’s Val coming, anyway?”

He checked his watch. “Any minute now, actually.” A flicker of anxiety passed over his face before he looked at me. “You wanna answer the door or shall I?”

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚─── ┘

“Hello, Valentina.” I kept my voice and face polite, the same expression and tone I used at work.

“Call me Val, kid.” She frowned at my outfit, before quirking a dark brow at me. “Something wrong with your own clothes?”

Plenty, at the moment. I had nothing that didn’t require being pulled over my head. I couldn’t even get a vest on that morning, let alone a jumper. After the pain of clasping my bra behind my back, I just didn’t have it in me to do any more than shrug on Bucky’s hoodie with the zip up the front.

“How do you know this isn’t mine?” I countered.

She appraised me for a moment longer before taking off down the hallway, leaving me in her wake.

“How’ve things been?” She asked as we walked. “Less awkward, I assume.” There was something in her tone that had the hairs on the back of my neck raising, but I couldn’t pinpoint why.

“We’ve settled in nicely, thank you.”

She made a noncommittal noise, one that acknowledged she’d heard me, but gave very little else away.

Bucky was leaning against the frame of the meeting room door, hands in pockets. “Val,” he said by way of greeting.

“Bucky.” She returned.

For one second, Bucky’s eyes met mine behind Valentina’s back. Concern, suspicion, anger, and then that professional blankness as he looked away.

Shit.

“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” Val said as we sat down, opposite one another with her at the head of the table. “We’re concerned that you aren’t delivering the results we expected.” She was looking at me as she spoke.

Bucky said, “Results?” at the same time I asked “We?”.

Intrigue sparked in her eyes. “The board have decided to give it one more month,” she explained. “If, after that month, you still haven’t delivered, then we’ll need to... rethink things.”

“What, exactly, is it we’re supposed to be delivering?” Bucky asked, visibly annoyed.

Valentina ignored him. “There’s something spectacular inside you,” she told me. “Why won’t you let it out?”

I laughed once, devoid of humour. “I’m surprised you think I had any control over that.”

“You can keep telling us that you had no control over it, you can keep on pretending that’s what you believe, but you and I both know that’s utter nonsense.”

I frowned at her, watching Bucky do the same from the corner of my eye.

To call it control would be incorrect, but there was more truth to what Val was saying than I’d ever admit to her.

But I had admitted it to Bucky.

“How will we need to rethink things?” He asked.

“We let you try things your way,” she told him. “We’ve been patient with the both of you. I’ve been rooting for you.” She pressed a hand to her heart. “I don’t want to have to try more... traditional methods of getting what we want. But we will. And as much as you’d like to think you can stop us, you can’t, Bucky.”

The threat was veiled, barely perceptible under what looked like genuine remorse and care from Valentina. But I could hear it.

If it’d been possible, I would’ve opened those powers then and there. Shown Director De Fontaine exactly what she wanted and why keeping it locked away was the best thing for everyone.

But it didn’t work like that. Wouldn’t work like that.

That bright burning light that had burned my attacker wasn’t something that I could just pull upon. I was, for the most part, being truthful when I said I couldn’t control it. It wasn’t my power.

“You can take whatever measures you want, Director,” I said, forcing my voice to stay steady. “It won’t change a bloody thing.”

She sighed. “We’ll see.”

The three of us sat in tense silence for a moment before Val gathered up her things and stood. “One month, Bucky. My previous offer, and your time here, ends in one month.”

She turned to me, “Be a doll and walk me out, would you?”

Bucky tensed, and again our eyes met as Valentina left the room.

I could tell that he was thinking the same thing I was.

Valentina knew more than she was letting on.

I followed quickly after her, her pace unhurried. “I’d really hate for this to turn nasty,” She smiled sadly at me. “You’re such a pleasant young lady. Would be a real shame for that to change.”

I said nothing.

“But there’s so much more to you than we’re seeing. You’ve two’ve got a lot more in common than we first thought.” She paused, hand on the handle of the front door. “Same taste in books, same defiant streak a mile long,” Her eyes narrowed just slightly as her eyes locked on mine, “Same natural talent for having impeccable aim.”

My polite smile shattered. My stomach dropped. Ice-cold dread slithered up my spine.

And then, she was gone.

“Shit.” I muttered.

Bucky was next to me in an instant, metal arm curling around me. “Shit,” he agreed.

“She knows,” we said simultaneously.

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚─── ┘

We sat outside, Bucky had moved the chairs away from the patio to a spot near the trees, between the ever-growing piles of leaves. Two books sat, under his chair.

Away from any cameras.

He wrapped me in a blanket, my feet on his lap as we talked.

“Why do you think she was so vague about it?” I asked, “Clearly, she knows what happened. And now we know that she knows. Why not be honest? If the CIA ordered for us to be attacked, why the weird secrecy?”

“The CIA didn’t order it.” Bucky answered. “Val did.”

I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

He shrugged. “She’s got some ulterior motive that she doesn’t want the government knowing about.”

“Do you think what she said about ‘the board’ is true?” I wondered.

“Yeah, I do. You being here, assigned to me, isn’t some secret. Both the CIA as a whole, and Val as an individual, have a vested interest in us both. Makes sense that they’d expect a return on their investment at some point.”

“What do we do?” I asked blankly, the fear that had been ebbing and flowing all day peaking.

“About that?” Bucky’s expression was a mixture of confusion and sadness. “I’m not sure yet.”

The silence between us was comfortable, if a little tense. Both of us trying to think of something we could do.

“I really can’t control it,” I admitted. “The bursting into flames thing and the weird plant stuff. Whatever the hell I’ve got going on.”

His eyes didn’t leave my face, his gaze cautious. “Have you tried?”

“No,” I said, sheepish. “I wouldn’t even know where to start. And I’m not sure I want to. Nothing good ever comes from playing with fire.”

At that, his serious stare cracked, and a smile tugged at his lips. “I dunno. S’mores are delicious.”

I rolled my eyes at him.

He reached under his chair, leaning to drop a book in my lap. “Hope you’re not one of those book purists who hate folded pages.”

I opened the book to the page he’d marked. A chapter on, “Persephone?”

“I always assumed she was just the goddess of spring,” He kept his voice casual. “But did you know that ‘Persephone’ actually means ‘bringer of death’?”

I looked up from the book, frowning at him. “Is that what I am? Bringer of death?”

He lifted an eyebrow at me. “That’s certainly what they think you have the potential to be, but that’s not what I’m getting at.”

“What are you getting at?”

He shrugged again. “I just think it's interesting. The similarities.” He wasn’t joking, no hint of humour on his face. “Maybe you’re a witch,” he said, entirely serious. “Or a mutant. Or all of the above.”

At that, I snorted. He raised an eyebrow, almost in challenge, and swapped the first book for the second, open on another folded-down section.

Magyk is the force that binds all things, seen and unseen, to the natural world. At its core, Magyk is divided into four elemental disciplines: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. Each discipline channels distinct energies, revealing different aspects of the world’s.

Earth Magyk draws from the soil, stone, and deep roots of the world, offering strength and endurance. Practitioners of Earth Magyk are attuned to nature, able to manipulate stone, metal, and plants, often serving as healers or protectors. Earth Magyk is steady and resilient, growing in power with time and patience.

I looked up at him, my forehead crinkled with my confusion. Before I could ask any of the dozens of questions forming in my head, he held up a hand. “Keep reading,” he said simply.

Fire Magyk is a raw, often untamed force, embodying both creation and destruction. It is the power of the sun and the heat of the hearth, capable of warming or devastating. Practitioners of Fire Magyk are passionate and intense, their magic requiring careful control. Fire can be summoned at will, used to light the way, or even forge new creations. But its destructive nature is never far away, and without mastery, it can quickly spiral into chaos, consuming all in its path.

I frowned at the page, my mind caught between disbelief and something more dangerous… recognition. It sounded ridiculous, fantasy-novel nonsense. But the words echoed too closely to what I’d already felt. The raspberries. The flowers. The fire. My fire.

As much as the sensible, logical, scientific part of my brain wanted to argue that magic wasn’t real, that witches were more a spiritual thing rather than actual practitioners of magic, that even if magic was real, it wouldn’t be something I could do.

“I fought against aliens,” Bucky said, in a matter-of-fact voice that left no room for arguing. “With magic-wielding sorcerers. And a really powerful witch.”

“Yeah but,” I started, arguing with him anyway and trying not to laugh at the look of annoyed exasperation that fell across his face, “they’re all,” I made some elaborate shapes and movements with my hands, feeling completely ridiculous.

“Maybe they just have a flourish for the dramatic.”

I stared at him. “Doesn’t change anything though, does it? I still don’t know how to control any of it, and I’m not sure Valentina cares about the whats and whys and hows. Knowing that it’s earth magic or fire magic or goddess power won’t stop them from keeping me locked up here and doing God knows what to get it out of me.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too.” He said, pulling a folded piece of paper from his pocket, the beginnings of a smirk tugging at his lips.

“Of course you have.”

His smile grew. “You’re here willingly, right?”

He unfolded the paper, a photocopy of one of the millions of bits of paperwork that I’d had to sign, and handed it to me.

I hereby acknowledge and affirm that my decision to travel to the United States of America and cooperate with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is entirely voluntary and made of my own free will.

I confirm that I have not been subjected to any form of coercion, threat, or undue influence by any party. Furthermore, I understand that I am not under arrest or facing any legal compulsion to participate in this arrangement.

My cooperation with the CIA is based solely on my own choices and personal commitment, and I retain the right to withdraw said cooperation at any time, without fear of penalty or reprisal.

All of it was nonsense, legally binding lies.

And in a month, I would probably have to sign different paperwork that meant while willingly working with them, I was contractually obliged to do exactly what was asked of me. So far, I hadn’t agreed to any of that. The expectations of me were implied and verbal.

He leaned over, tapping the last section. “You can leave any time.”

For one, fleeting heartbeat, the idea of leaving felt like oxygen after drowning. The thrill of it buzzed under my skin. But then my stomach twisted.

There was no way it could be that easy.

“No, I can’t.” I said, staring blankly at him.

“You can.” He argued, staring back at me.

“This doesn’t mean anything.” I gave the paper a little shake. “It was just the necessary stuff to get me on that plane, of course I can’t leave.”

“Doll there’s not a lawyer around who would try and go against that contract.” He smiled, though there was something cold in his eyes. “I’m surprised, really. They normally have some kind of loophole, but I guess they didn’t think it necessary for you.”

There was no way.

“Really?” I asked in a small voice.

“You retain the right to withdraw your cooperation at any time. Without fear of penalty or reprisal.” He quoted.

That frisson of excitement pulsed through me again, before my blood cooled and my heart sank. “Where else would I go?”

“My place.” He said immediately, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “We get out from under the constant supervision. I’ll train you. We can test my theories. Do everything at your pace.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. There was so much going on in my head that I couldn’t pick one thing to focus on.

Freedom, so close I could almost taste it.

The realisation that Bucky did not want to be rid of me at the earliest opportunity, and in fact, wanted quite the opposite.

The excitement of it all.

The fear. The worry and the anxiety.

“Val won’t like it. Do you really think they’d let us?”

He sucked on his teeth, considering. “Depends on how successful we are.” He looked at me, a thoughtful frown tugging at his brow. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you hold all the cards here. You have something they want. They’ll try and pretend otherwise, try and make out that you need them, but that’s not the case at all.”

The worry and the excitement warred within me. “What do you think I should do?”

The frown relaxed, and a grin stretched slowly across his face. It was the kind of smile that made me shudder, both disarmingly lovely and yet, something almost scary.

“Make ‘em beg.”

I stared blankly at him. “Be serious, please.”

“Oh, I am.” He leaned forward in the chair, my feet slipping off his knees. “They want something from you. Make ‘em work for it.”

I giggled, “Is that what you tell all the ladies?”

Bucky winked.

“Nah,” I decided as I looked at him, admiring the crinkle at the corner of those pretty blue eyes, remembering precisely how soft his lips were against mine. “You’d have them eating out of the palm of your hand.”

He gave me half-shrug and a look that told me I was spot on before standing and holding his hand out to me. “So what d’ya say, doll?”

I didn’t even have to think about it. All the worries and fears, all of the thoughts of the things that could go wrong completely disappeared from my mind at the look of absolute confidence on Bucky’s face.

“Why didn’t we think of this sooner?” I grinned at him.

He raised one shoulder. “Had to be sure they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, lock us both up for real if we tried.”

A pause the length of a heartbeat.

“Fuck it,” I muttered before placing my hand in his and grinning up at him. “What have I got to lose? Land of the free and home of the brave, right?”

He pulled gently, my muscles still screaming in protest, wrapping his arms around my waist once I was upright. The blanket that had been draped around my shoulders pooled at my feet.

“That’s the spirit,” he crooned, head tilting down as mine tilted up.

His eyes searched in mine, looking, I thought, for doubts, for questions, and finding nothing but certainty.

He didn’t speak, didn’t push. Just stood there, waiting. I could see the question in his eyes, unspoken but unmistakable.

What do you want?

With deliberate slowness, each second still searching for any hint of pain, any glimmer of uncertainty, his fingers brushed against the line of my jaw. My eyes fluttered close, my breath hitched, my heart pounded wildly in my chest as I felt his breath, warm and inviting, ghosting across my lips just before they met his.

So softly, feather-light. Tentative, exploring, testing.

I knew exactly what I wanted.

I reached up, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt and standing on the tips of my toes to crush myself against him. The arm around my waist tightened, metal fingers shaping to my curves as he held me closer, until there was no space between us, only the exquisite friction of our bodies pressed together.

The kiss deepened, his lips moving against mine with a gentle insistence that made my knees weak, a slow burn that lit a fire inside me. One of my own makings, not some borrowed power but something infinitely more devastating.

The taste of him, the feel of him, was intoxicating. I didn’t think I would ever get enough.

His hand moved to the small of my back, pressing me even closer, and I could feel the steady beat of his heart against my chest.

Our breaths mingled, ragged and uneven, as the kiss grew more urgent. Almost desperate, as if the moment would slip away if we didn't hold on tight enough.

We stayed, entwined in one another, for so long that time shifted and warped. It could have been seconds, or minutes. Could’ve been days, even.

When we finally broke apart, I pulled away, opening my eyes to find him watching me with an intensity that made my heart skip a beat.

His eyes were dark, filled with emotions that mirrored my own – desire, vulnerability, a deep, aching need. A slow, tender smile spread across his lips, and he leaned in to press a soft kiss to my forehead, his breath warm against my skin.

Both of his arms wrapped around me, one so warm that I could feel the heat radiating through the layers of fabric that separated us. One solid and cool, the indent of each solid finger splayed around the unbruised side of my ribs. I could feel the potential of the power in that grip, knew through some instinct that he could shatter my bones with barely any effort.

That thought didn’t scare me. I was not intimidated by the power in the arms that held me, not frightened by their power.

I felt safe.

He held me not like I was a ticking time bomb; not like I was as potentially deadly as he was, nor like I was some delicate thing, prone to breaking.

He held me like he hadn’t held someone in a very, very long time.

His breath was warm against my neck, tickling, a comforting rhythm that matched the steady beat of his heart. I nestled closer, feeling the contrast of his heat and cold, the living and the mechanical. And then, he tensed. He looked at the ground, then at me, his brow furrowing. Like he was trying to piece together a puzzle

The muscles under my hands twitched, and then an abrupt rumble of laughter.

“You do know that bluebells aren’t native here, right?” His voice was low, sultry, close enough to my ear that it made me shiver.

I was confused enough to extract myself from his arms to look around.

At first glance, they were sporadic. The odd flower, boldly, brightly, ostentatiously blue, popping up between the leaf litter. I didn’t know that America had bluebells at all, even non-natives ones, and it wasn’t even bluebell season.

As I turned, I realised the pattern.

A spiral, barely discernible from the scant few flowers there were, but unmistakable, with us at the centre.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I groaned, one hand rubbing at my forehead as Bucky started laughing. “That’s so embarrassing.”

Notes:

After watching Brave New World I feel the need to point out that the bit I jokingly wrote a couple of chapters ago about Bucky being a politician was written way before I had even the slightest inkling that he would go on to... actually be a politician. I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking it! 😅

Anyway I hope you enjoyed! I'm so sorry for the big delay between last chapter and this one, have just moved house and it's been a disaster 🙃but I promise not to take too long next time. Thank you so so so much for reading. Lots of love! 🥰❤️‍🔥

Chapter 11: You Can Make It Anywhere

Summary:

“Welcome to New York, doll,” he grinned at me. “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

It took fourteen days.

Fourteen days for me to stop aching, fourteen days for Bucky to trust that I had healed enough. Fourteen days for us to leave.

Fourteen days of waiting.

Fourteen days of forcing myself to sit still while my body mended, when every nerve inside me screamed that we needed to move. That every moment we stayed put was a moment too long.

Every day I had watched the bruises in the mirror as they had faded from a purple so dark it was almost black, first to a grim grey-ish blue, and then to a mottled yellow-green.

Every day, Bucky had re-dressed the wound on my arm, waiting a week before peeling the little white strips off and deeming it no longer necessary to re-wrap the bandage. The scabs had flaked off from my forearms, leaving behind tiny, barely perceptible streaks of pearlescent pink that would no doubt fade into invisibility soon enough.

The fortnight had been… strange. On one hand, I wasn’t sure I’d ever had so much fun.

We fell into a quiet rhythm, days flowing together in a comforting blur. Mornings began with Bucky making breakfast—sometimes simple scrambled eggs, other times an elaborate stack of pancakes that he swore were healthier than they looked. I never believed him, but I never argued either.

One rainy Sunday morning, I had somehow convinced him to give the different flavours of Pop Tarts a go. He’d pulled faces at most of them but deemed Unfrosted Blueberry ‘edible’.

Afternoons were often spent sprawled across the sofa, books in hand. Sometimes we read in comfortable silence, Bucky engrossed in some non-fiction deep dives into the Watergate Scandal or Princess Diana or some other major event he’d missed. I tore through the few books I’d bought, resorting to borrowing his after a while.

I should have felt restless, trapped.

But instead, I felt… home. And wasn’t that the most dangerous thing of all?

“So,” I started, peering over the top of Midnight in Chernobyl to watch him close The Story of 9/11. “Reckon it was an inside job, yet?”

To my surprise, he looked genuinely thoughtful. “You’d be surprised how much is an inside job,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Speaking from experience.”

We were sat on either ends of the sofa, our legs slotting together like puzzle pieces where they met.

“You should do a Black Widow.”

He cracked a smile and waggled his eyebrows at me. “You say that like I haven’t already.”

I sighed, rolling my eyes as I felt my cheeks heat. “That’s not what I meant.”

His grin grew, and his fingers tickled at the exposed skin between the top of my sock and the bottom of my leggings. “What did you mean?”

I swatted his hand away with my foot. “You know, when Natasha Romanoff posted all that stuff online about how corrupt SHIELD was.”

The smile slowly slipped from his face, his eyes distant. “Yeah. I remember.”

“I’d be willing to bet that a lot of journalists would be interested in you, and who would be willing to pay a lot of money to be the ones to break your story.” I nudged his knee with mine, “Speaking from experience.”

“Are you speaking as my Campaign Manager or as the journalist who wants to break my story?” He teased, squeezing my knee between his.

I gasped, over-exaggerating my expression into something horrified and offended. “I am not a journalist.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You worked for a press agency.”

“Doesn’t make me a journalist,” I argued. “And I didn’t even write the press releases.”

“Po-tay-to, po-tar-to.”

I stuck my tongue out at him, and he threw a pillow in my face.

We spent our evenings watching films, taking it in turns to choose; sometimes they were our favourites, something we wanted to share. Other times they were chosen at random, and on more than one occasion we’d found ourselves glued to some terrible Hallmark romcom.

We cooked together. Ate together. Spent nearly every waking hour together, and I still couldn’t get enough of him.

But beneath that happiness, was a lingering dread. Time was ticking away, faster and faster each day, the deadline looming.

Fourteen days went by in a blink.

“Where’d you learn how to plait hair?” I asked on the morning of the fourteenth day, as he deftly twisted the strands together behind me. “And how do you do it with a metal arm?”

I fought the urge to close my eyes, to melt into the warmth of his fingers. It was too much. Too easy to sink into. I needed to say something—anything—to keep from getting lost in the feeling.

He laughed gently. “I’ve got a lot to thank the women in my life for. I’ve got a little sister, and the metal arm was designed and made by a woman.”

“What’s your sister like?” I wondered.

“She’s an old lady now,” he said, sounding rather distant. “But still as stubborn and tenacious as she always was.”

I smiled sadly, imagining how strange it must be for Rebecca, to have lost her older brother, and then for him to come back somehow younger than she was.

The hair tie snapped around the end of the braid, and he placed his hands on my shoulders, twisting in a silent request for me to turn. “Looks good,” he said, proudly.

I looked up at him and rolled my eyes.

“Have you got everything you need?” He asked, wearing his best serious face.

We had already been over this, first as I’d packed the borrowed black rucksack, with the last of my stuff. And then again, as he’d dithered by the front door.

Bucky had already moved the rest of our belongings, having them delivered by courier.

“Yes,” I sighed.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, okay!” He held his hands up in surrender. “We’d better get going before we hit the rush hour traffic.”

Five minutes, and much dithering, later, I understood why Bucky had insisted on braiding my hair. And why I’d been given a backpack.

“I am not getting on that.”

Before, I had admired the vehicle for all of its graceful, shiny sex appeal. Before, I had wished I was cool enough to sit on it.

Now I knew I wasn’t just not cool enough, I wasn’t coordinated enough.

I knew if I were to sit on that thing, I’d go flying off the back of it. Even when it wasn’t moving.

I crossed my arms over my chest as he held the black leather jacket out to me.

His thin-lipped smile seemed a little tense. “Come on, doll. What’re you worrying about?”

I raised a brow. “You’re a super solider with a body part made out of Vibranium. I’m... very much neither of those things.”

The smile disappeared entirely. “You think I’d let anything happen to you?”

“I think you’re perfectly capable of protecting me against Valentina, or the CIA, or whoever else.” I gestured to the ground with both hands, “But even you can’t fight gravity!”

“It’s this or you can drive yourself. In the car. Without a back window. And covered in bullet holes. And then when the police flag you down and they hand you over to Valentina it’ll be nobody’s fault but your own.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I’ll take my chances.”

Still, he held the jacket.

“If I’d known you were going to be such a pain in the ass I would’ve taken you out for a ride sooner.” There was just the faintest hint of his impatience in the muscle twitching in his jaw.

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t have gone then, either.”

His arms dropped; the jacket clenched tightly in his right fist. “I won’t let you get hurt,” he promised, making an effort to keep his voice gentle. “I’ll look after you the whole time.”

“I’m still not getting on.”

His eyes narrowed. “Don’t be such a little coward.”

“I don’t care if I’m a coward. It’s not happening.”

“Yes. It is.” He was speaking through gritted teeth now.

“No,” I said, matter of fact. “It isn’t.”

“Yes,” he growled, taking a step forward as I stepped back. “It,” another step. “Is.”

My back hit the wall, and I gasped.

Something dangerous glittered in his eyes.

“You’re going to be brave,” He instructed, voice so stern that it left no room for arguments. “You’re going to put the god damn jacket on, and you’re going to get that lovely ass on that god damn bike and we’re going to get out of this fucking house.”

Heat tingled, low in my belly, my thighs clenching.

I raised my chin, the image of defiance as I smiled.

I opened my mouth to fire back, to keep up the fight, but then he moved—fast, lethal, unstoppable—and all my thoughts were gone.

The only warning of what I had provoked was his hand slamming against the wall next to my head, and the brief glimpse of a self-satisfied smirk.

The shock of cold metal on the burning skin of my cheek, the coolness sliding down my jaw, wrapping around the side of my neck. The searing heat of his mouth on mine.

This was not the gentle romance of a black and white film.

This was rough, impatient, almost animalistic. Tongues and teeth and a grip so tight I couldn’t escape it if I’d wanted to.

I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

I couldn’t get enough.

When I pulled away, gasping as if I’d been under water, Bucky’s lips did not leave my skin. Instead, he kissed the curve of my jaw, slowly kissed down my neck to sink his teeth into the sensitive skin at the junction of my shoulder.

The noise that came out of me was humiliating. Somewhere between a gasp and a moan and a plea.

I couldn’t find it in me to care.

His teeth grazed my earlobe, and I had to hold on to his shoulders to stop myself from falling.

“Put the jacket on.” He whispered against my ear. It was not a request.

“Okay.” I whimpered.

He pulled away far enough to retrieve the jacket, holding it out to me once more.

Something dark and dangerous and delicious glimmered in his eyes, and for a moment an image of long dark hair and gleaming silver flickered in my memory.

It should’ve scared me. It did, in some deep, distant part of my brain, but more than that… I found I liked it.

I slipped my arms through the sleeves. Held still as he zipped it up and leaned in to press his lips softly against the throbbing spot where his teeth had been.  “Good girl,” he murmured softly. Pinching my chin between metal fingers as he pressed a kiss to my lips, quick and gentle and almost innocent.

His smile was anything but innocent, the curve to his lips spoke of nothing but promise and sin and damnation.

“At least now all the leather makes sense,” My voice was husky. “I was starting to think you just had some kind of fetish.”

“Maybe I do,” he teased, lifting a bulky helmet onto my head. “Don’t be difficult, please.”

“If it is a fetish,” I grumbled, my voice muffled by my squished cheeks, “I’d like it known that I’ve never felt less sexy.”

He laughed, wheeling the bike out of the garage. “You look very sexy and, more importantly, very safe.”

I glared at him, the effect somewhat lost behind the helmet.

He swung a leg over the seat, settling himself with absolute confidence, clearly comfortable. His leather jacket clung to him, and as he pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, grinning at me.

Nobody had ever looked sexier.

“This is incredibly unfair.”

He reached up to flick the visor on my helmet down. “Come on,” he said, nodding to the space on the seat behind him.

Despite my earlier protestations, my absolute insistence that I would not get on, I went quite willingly.

I shifted and wiggled, unable to quite get comfy until Bucky grabbed my arms and pulled, wrapping them around his torso, my front flush against his back.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, after all.

The bike roared to life under us, and fear spiked in my veins. My grip tightened and Bucky turned just enough, raising his voice loud enough for me to hear. “You better hold on tight, spider monkey!”

“For fuck’s sake!” I yelped. “I knew showing you Twilight was a terrible idea.”

For the first fifteen minutes, I was too scared to look anywhere other than at Bucky’s back, and then a flash of red caught my eye, and I looked up as we sped past the Target we had gone to the second week I’d been here.

From then on, I watched.

We passed through countryside and trees, very much in the full throes of autumn, but very beautiful.

We passed through little towns, quaint little houses flying stars and stripes. And we passed over so many bridges that, after seven, I stopped counting.

And after a while, I forgot to be scared.

For about an hour, neither of us spoke. Too difficult with the wind whipping around us so quickly, and the silence was comfortable.

Until yet another bridge, when the trees and buildings either side of us had disappeared and the sky widened to a broader horizon.

A horizon punctuated beyond the greenery and the river by hundreds of rising buildings. I let out a noise of complete and utter delight; something between a laugh and a gasp and a squeal.

Bucky’s hand pressed over mine, still wrapped tightly around him, acknowledging my excitement.

“Look!” I said uselessly, “It’s New York!”

I could feel his laughter.

The building got taller, more densely packed. As did the traffic. Our pace had slowed right down as we weaved between the cars.

We passed through a tunnel, streets so straight the Romans’ would’ve marvelled, and then-

“The Brooklyn Bridge!” I tapped my hand against Bucky’s chest in my complete and utter glee. “It’s huge!” I wanted to repeat the facts I’d leaned from the book he’d left me. Tell him that the granite came from Maine, or that the massive, pointed arches were built in the Gothic Revival style. But I didn’t, I was stunned into silence, peering out through the tangle of cables to stare up the East River, marvelling at sights I’d only seen on TV or in films, or had read about in books.

When we’d crossed the bridge, we drove for another ten minutes before dropping into some underground car park where Bucky stashed the bike and I could, at long last, take off the helmet.

The city was loud.

Not just car horns and engines, but voices; shouting, laughing, arguing, all blending into a symphony of movement. After two weeks of silence, it was almost deafening.

“Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” He drawled, an eyebrow raised.

“Oh Bucky, it was wonderful! A bit scary but not in a bad way, you know?”

His eyebrows raised and he nodded once, an amused smile pulling his cheeks up despite himself.

“And the city is exactly like I imagined,” I rambled on as his fingers twined with mine and we made our way out of the parking garage. “It’s bigger. I’m always amazed by the skyscrapers in London but it’s a whole other kettle of fish here. I know they say everything’s bigger in America but blimey! The Brooklyn Bridge was huge! Makes Tower Bridge look pathetic. And I had no idea there was so much water here, so many rivers.”

“Some of them were canals,” He interjected briefly, holding the door to an old-ish looking building open for me.

I could hear myself talking… so much, too much, but I couldn’t seem to stop.

Every street, every turn, every tiny detail felt like a revelation. I’d been here for five minutes and already, I was obsessed.

“See! I had no idea there were canals in New York. I’m just surprised by how familiar it feels. It feels like I’ve been here before.” I kept on talking, seemingly unable to stop myself as we climbed up two flights of stairs, nearly bumping into a little old lady at the top.

“Oh, look at you two in your matching jackets,” The old lady gushed, hands fluttering in our direction. “A lady friend at last, James? I’m so pleased for you, son.”

Bucky cleared his throat, shifting awkwardly, and I got the distinct impression that this wasn’t a common occurrence, that neighbours didn’t usually see him bringing girls home. That only made the warmth in Madge’s voice all the sweeter.

 “This is Madge, lives across the hall next to Yori who I’m sure you’ll meet soon enough.”

I held out my free hand, “It’s so lovely to meet you.” My cheeks were almost hurting with how much I’d been smiling, after all the time spent squished in the helmet.

Her eyes widened as she placed her soft, wrinkled hand in mine. “You’re English?”

I nodded, “Yes indeed.”

“Well, I hope you enjoy New York, hun. Make sure this one treats you right.” She gave Bucky a glare full of affection and I laughed.

“Thank you so much,” Our hands shook, and then she was shuffling off down the stairs.

 “Is this one of those pre-war apartments? I read somewhere that they market themselves as being historic but back home pre-war would probably not even meet the criteria for a listed building.” I continued as Bucky led the way to his door, extracting his hand from mine to unlock the door.

I didn’t have a chance to see the inside of Bucky’s apartment.

The door shut behind us, the helmet under Bucky’s arm was thrown somewhere, landing with a dull thump.

His smile was predatory as he turned on me, his hands on the backs of my thighs, lifting. My back hitting the door as his lips found mine.

Our kisses before had felt hurried. Something desperate or impatient about them.

There was no rush this time. No breathless desperation, no frantic edge. Just slow, deliberate intent. As if we had all the time in the world.

Bucky pulled away just enough to whisper playfully, “I thought you’d never shut up.”

My answering retort was lost, caught by his lips.

I got lost in that kiss. Forgot about New York, forgot about the worry of defying the CIA, forgot about the Brookyln Bridge and pre-war apartments.

By the time we finally parted, I was fairly certain I’d forgotten my own name.

“Welcome to New York, doll,” he grinned at me, “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

My head fell back against the door as I laughed, “I really hope you’re right.”

Notes:

🤭 Thanks for sticking with me! Loads of love xoxo ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Chapter 12: Impossibly Tangled Harmony

Summary:

I had no idea what I was searching for in that impossibly tangled harmony. Time seemed to have stopped. A sensation of waiting, patient and still as stone.

“What do you mean you don’t even sleep in it?” I asked, my hands on hips as we both stared at his bed. Roomy, comfy-looking, dressed in blue.

Bucky huffed. “It’s too... soft.”

I turned to him, a look of bewildered, frustrated confusion on my face. “There where the fuck do you sleep?”

He looked sheepish, a hand absentmindedly rubbing at the back of his neck as he thought about what to say.

“Sam says it’s really common for vets not to sleep in their beds once they come back from action,” he said defensively. “When I wasn’t sleeping on a roll mat or a camp bed in a tent, I was in a HYDRA P.O.W. camp.”

“And then,” he added, “after trapsing around Europe with the Commandos, when we were lucky if we could pitch a tent, I spent eighty god damn years in a cryo chamber.”

I folded my arms across my chest, sighing. “Just answer the question, Bucky.”

“On the floor,” he mumbled.

I blinked at him, and for a moment we stared at one another. He looked resigned, frustrated and… sad. I wrapped my arms around his neck, reaching up on tip toes to kiss his cheek.

I pulled back, putting my best serious face on. “You’re telling me that you had the audacity to have a go at me for falling asleep on the sofa - when I was hellishly jetlagged, I might add - when the whole time you’ve been sleeping on the gosh darn floor?!”

I could feel him relax, all of the tight, tense muscles loosened, and his arms wrapped around me as he laughed. “That’s different!” He insisted. “You’re used to sleeping in a bed and you were gonna get a crick in your neck.”

I shook my head. “You’re a filthy hypocrite,” I scolded playfully, “If I have to sleep in a bed, so you do.”

He huffed, “But-” I stopped him with a finger pressed against his lips.

“Don’t argue with me,” I narrowed my eyes at him. “You got used to not sleeping in a bed, you can re-get used to sleeping in one.”

Something wicked gleamed in his eyes, and then he bit me.

I gasped and he grinned around my finger before letting me go.

“I’ve tried it, doll. I just can’t.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I waved a hand dismissively before turning and walking out of the room, leaning on the kitchen counter and taking in the sparse furnishings. It was a gorgeous apartment, well decorated with exposed brick, but it was nearly empty. A sofa, a TV, a side table, a single chair, a single bit of art of the wall.

“What is that even supposed to be?” I asked, tilting my head as I tried to discern the mishmash of shapes and colours.

“Wish I knew. You hungry?”

“Yeah, I am,” I realised.

He smiled, tilting my chin up with his fingers to press a chase kiss to my lips. “Any requests?”

I bit my lip. “I can think of one.” I waggled my eyebrows suggestively before my stomach grumbled loudly. He pulled away, laughing.

“I won’t be long,” It was a promise, “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.” He slipped his shoes on, pocketing wallet and keys.

“That would be rather difficult,” I said as he opened the door, he paused, turning to look at me in confusion. “All the stupid is going with you.”

Surprise flickered across his features before he broke into a wide grin, shaking his head as he shut the door behind him.

I hadn’t been alone in months.

Not properly, in the CIA house the cameras had watched nearly every move, and Bucky was never more than a super solider second away.

I didn’t know what to do with myself, and for a moment I wandered aimlessly from room to room. I unpacked my bag, which took all of five minutes (most of those spent piling books on the bedside table).

When I had explored all there was to explore, I flopped on the sofa and listened to the noise of New York. Such a stark contrast to the silence of the safe house, I could hear so much. Traffic and talking, laughter and shouts.

True to his word, Bucky was not gone long.

“Thanks for not burning the place down while I was gone,” he called, placing a white bag on the kitchen counter.

I sat up and shrugged, “Just waiting for the right moment.”

He threw a little white paper package at me, which glanced off my hand and landed in my lap. “Think you can manage chopsticks, clutz?”

“You don’t want to see what I can manage with chopsticks,” I glared at him as I ripped open the package, tearing the two sticks apart and pinching them at him.

He just laughed, moving to sit next to me with a large container of sushi.

“Oooh,” I squeaked, excitedly. “I haven’t had sushi in forever!”

As we ate, we continued Bucky’s twenty first century film education.

“You ever get a paper cut from opening presents?”

I glared at him. “No.” A pause. “But one time I got a paper cut from an eco-friendly Christmas cracker so deep I swear it was worse than getting shot.” I was only partially joking. That paper cut was savage. “Still didn’t bleed as much as she does though.”

Bucky was laughing. “An eco-friendly Christmas cracker?”

“You know, tube thing, you hold one end, someone else holds the other, pull it and some crap falls out along with a paper hat and a really shit joke.”

He shook his head. “You Brits are so weird.”

I rolled my eyes. “You yanks are philistines.”

It was almost ridiculous, how simple and easy it all was. Sitting on his sofa, flicking bits of rice at him, arguing about paper cuts. Like we hadn’t just fled from a government agency that wanted to turn me into a weapon. Like we were just… normal.

As evening turned to night, I started to yawn. “You should go to bed, doll.” Bucky said in a gentle, coaxing voice.

“Only if you do,” I countered to a disapproving glare.

During the next film, my eyes started to get heavy, and I fought to keep them open. Bucky watched me as much as he did the film, a sort of smug patience on his face.

At this point, it more a battle of wills than anything else. Both of us refusing to back down, and I was sure Bucky was refusing to go to bed not because he couldn’t sleep in it, but because he wanted to prove me wrong.

During the third film, my body let me down.

It was still dark when I woke, tucked in to the incredibly comfortable bed.

I made a noise somewhere between a yawn and a growl as I stalked out of the room, blanket in one hand, pillow in the other.

Bucky was asleep, on the floor, tangled in a blanket in front of the still-playing television. Of all things, it was set to some sports channel, an oddly familiar game football played.

English football, set to mute.

I stepped over his legs, dropped my pillow next to his as silently as I could, and laid down next to him. If he wasn’t going to sleep in the bed, nor was I.

I’d meant what I said.

To my surprise, I fell asleep quickly.

When I woke the next time, the light was streaming in through the window. A hefty metal arm was slung around my middle, a face buried in my hair. Even through our respective blankets, the heat radiating from him was like a furnace.

He shifted behind me, pulling me flush against him, holding me close and tight as his lips found my neck.

I twisted my head, allowing him better access, the ache radiating through my neck forgotten in an instant as the rough scratch of stubble against my sensitive skin made me gasp.

I was practically panting when his teeth grazed my ear.

“If this is part of your plan for getting me into bed,” he whispered, low and husky, “You’re going to have to do better.”

I rolled over to face him, ignoring the flash of pain as my still-healing arm pressed against the hard floor.  I stroked my fingers through his hair, grinning when his smirk faltered.

“I can be very persuasive,” I told him, pressing my mouth against his before he could argue back.

We stayed like that for so long that I lost all sense of time, not caring if it was morning or afternoon, if we’d been kissing for minutes or hours or days. I could have stayed there forever, pain in my arm and my neck be damned.

Bucky, however, had other ideas. He pulled away, nipping at my lower lip with a chuckle when I pouted. “As much as I’d love for nothing more to stay here and be persuaded by you all day,” I interrupted him with another brief, greedy kiss, which only made him smile more. “We have work to do.”

I wasn’t sure if it was an effort to tire me out, or if he was determined to show Valentina that his way was more effective than hers, but work we did.

That first full day in Brooklyn, we walked so much that my feet bled.

I hadn’t cared, much too interested in all of the sights and sounds and smells and tastes. Oh my god, the food. If the walking didn’t exhaust me, the sheet amount that I ate certainly did.

I fell asleep on the sofa ten minutes after I sat down.

The next day the actual work began, thought it felt much too fun to genuinely be considered work.

“Are you sure you haven’t done this before?” Bucky asked as I hit the ring just outside the centre of the target.

“Only an air pistol on some activity holiday we went on,” I said, aiming up my next shot and firing. “I was good at archery too, but the arm guard slipped, and the string of the bow gave me this gnarly injury and I was a bit freaked out after that.” I still had the scar.

Just to make sure my ego didn’t get too big; Bucky’s shots were perfect. Exact, clean through the bullseye.

“Is that your super solider skills or have you always been a show off,” I grumbled.

He was grinning, “It’s the only thing I could still do better than Steve after he took the serum, we all had our talents in the Commandos.”

“And yours was shooting?” I guessed.

“That and looking good while doing it.” He waggled his brows at me, and I giggled. “They took so much footage. Turned it into propaganda to show everyone how well we were doin’. I was Captain America’s right-hand man.”

I looked down, eyes darting between his arms. “I’d say you still are, but that feels... questionable, considering the hand situation.”

He pressed his lips together to stop himself laughing.

Just like the nights before, I fell asleep on the sofa and woke in the early hours of the morning to relocate myself to the floor next to Bucky.

The pattern continued; days full of working, nights sleeping on the floor, mornings started with kisses and temptation. Neither of us played fair, neither of us relenting.

We were on our way to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens when I noticed the decorations in the shop window. Snowflakes, glittering in the late morning sun.

“What’s wrong?” Bucky asked, his face full of concern.

“What date is it?”

“November 12^th.” His voice was confused. “Why?”

“We missed Halloween!” I groaned, his concern immediately turning to an amused relief.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he promised.

The Botanical Gardens were lovely, and we took turns to point out our favourites of the few things that flowered.

“So, you’ve never tried to make something grow? Intentionally?” He asked as we wandered along the path lined by bare trees.

“We grew sunflowers in a biology lesson once.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, “You know that’s not what I mean.”

“Like the bluebells and the buttercups? Not like that, no. I’ve always just put my success with plants down having a green thumb, you know?”

“Why don’t you want to try?” He said, looking thoughtful.

I considered my answer. “I’ve never had a reason to, for starters. It’s only in the last few months that my magical powers have come to light,” I teased, nudging him with my hip.

He snickered. “Literally.”

This time, I pushed him. He didn’t so much as wobble. “And even knowing that it’s not luck or a green thumb I still feel a bit weird about it,” I continued. “It feels a bit... frivolous, I guess? Like I’d be doing it just for the sake of doing it.”

“What’s wrong with that?” He asked.

I didn’t have an answer to that. Not a good one, anyway.

He inclined his head towards an empty flower bed, at a sign in a bare patch of dirt. “Daffodils are your favourite, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, wary.

“Try,” he said softly. “Just for the sake of it. Not for Val, not for the CIA, not even for me. Try just because you can.”

I wasn’t sure how he convinced me, but I found myself sitting on the cold, damp grass, cross-legged in front of an expanse of empty dirt. Looking over one shoulder, making sure we weren’t being watched, I stretched out my arms and touched my fingers to the earth.

I looked up to see Bucky smirking. “I look like a right twat, don’t I?”

Laughter bubbled out of his mouth before he could stop it, his lips clamping shut. “No. Not at all.”

I scowled at him. “Liar.”

He laughed again. “There’s nobody here but us doll, and you look beautiful.”

I felt my cheeks heat.

It was quiet. Early afternoon, mid-week, and not many tourists were interested in seeing bare trees. I huffed, turned back to the mud, and closed my eyes.

The mud beneath my fingers was so damp it was bordering on wet and uncomfortably cold. With my eyes closed, though I knew the only eyes on me were his, I felt even more vulnerable. I moved to stand, but Bucky’s hand on the top of my back stopped me. “Just try.” His voice edged on imploring and made me feel guilty enough to do just that.

It took a few more long moments of awkward fidgeting, and increasingly frustrated sighs, before I let go, and surrendered to it.

One by one, my thoughts fell into silence, and my senses sharpened. Behind my closed eyelids, I could see the light of the sun, soft and yellow. I could hear the birds, the distant roar of the traffic, my own heart beating, slow and steady. I could taste the first hints of winter on the breeze; cold and sharp and vaguely reminiscent of mint. I could smell it too; the heady, damp musk of autumn was fading, the air cleaner and crisper. I could feel the mud beneath my fingertips, sinking under my nails, sticking to the palm of my hand as it sank deeper into the wet dirt.

I imagined that I could see it, in my mind’s eye. All of the roots, the bulbs, the webs of mycelium. Entangled and intwined. Harmonious. And so incredibly peaceful that my eyelids grew heavier.

I had no idea what I was searching for in that impossibly tangled harmony. Time seemed to have stopped. A sensation of waiting, patient and still as stone.

I could no longer feel the cold, wet earth, or smell the fresh, clean air. There was only me and the nature. I could hear only my own heartbeat, slow and steady.

Something pulsed back.

Not a heartbeat; not something animal. Something else. Something soft and curious.

Something... waking. Wondering. Calling to the blood in my veins, calling to the beat of my heart, calling to something that went deeper than all of that; my very soul.

I grabbed onto it with all of my might, and for a moment I was back on the city streets, in an alleyway with a man who smelled like alcohol and excitement. My heart stumbled, my breaths coming far too quickly. Fingers squeezed my shoulder.

You are in Brooklyn. My own voice, barely audible, voice called from the distant reaches of my mind. You are with Bucky.

The something sensation grew, drawn to me like a magnet. It almost tickled, like spider legs or dandelion fluff. Closer and closer it seemed to come, until my whole self was vibrating with it, and I could take no more. 

It didn’t feel like something I was doing, it felt like something I was answering. And that terrified me more than anything else.

Something had started to scream in my ears.

My eyelids fluttered, and through the small gap of light I could see a flash of colour. Green and yellow, blurred against the brown.

And then, black, creeping in from the edges. I tried to blink, but my eyelids felt too heavy. My head felt stuffed full of cotton, a nagging pain throbbing in my temples.

I was the vaguest possible definition of conscious. Just awake enough to shuffle one foot in front of the other, Bucky supporting all of my weight with an arm slung around my waist

There were no arguments about either of us getting into the bed.

He climbed in with me, pressing a cold metal hand against my forehead, and read out loud from the book on Greek mythology.

“One day, while the young girl was playing and picking flowers along with her friends in a valley, she beheld the most enchanting narcissus she had ever seen. As she stooped down to pick the flower, the earth beneath her feet suddenly cleaved open-”.

Somewhere, in the space between waking and dreaming, I felt a ghost of that sensation. That whispering, waiting presence in the dirt. And just before sleep pulled me under, I wondered if it had felt me, too.

Notes:

I am so excited for you to read the next couple of chapters omgggg!
Coming soon, promise. Lots of love ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Chapter 13: Flesh and Blood and Scars

Summary:

“Flesh and blood and scars, doll,” he said softly, “Just like you.”

The headache had gone by the time I’d woken. Bucky however, had stayed, his hand still draped over my forehead, fingertips pressing just slightly into my temple.

“How you feelin’?” He asked, voice coming from somewhere above me.

I rolled onto my back. Bucky was sat up, back against the headboard, an open book in his free hand.

“You’re welcome to borrow my books, by the way.” I said in a bland voice.

He grinned down at me. “Figured you wouldn’t mind.”

I cleared my throat, moving gingerly to sit up. His hand left my head. “You have been waiting rather a while to read that one,” He glanced at me from the sides of his eyes, feigning innocence. “I saw you,” I teased in a sing song voice, “In Target, eyeing up the smutty fantasy.”

His eyes crinkled. “It really is complete and utter filth,” he said, giving me a look of amused disbelief. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

I grinned. “They say it’s always the quiet ones.” I winked at him as he laughed softly. “It’s good though, right?”

He exhaled through his nose, “Annoyingly so.”

“Just like you then,” I teased, leaning in to press a kiss against his offended face before hopping out of the bed in search of food.

“Do the headaches happen every time?” He asked as we ate.

I considered it. “Every time the weird nature magic happens?” He nodded.

“I guess so?” I considered for a moment; my headaches had happened after the weird plant stuff had happened. “I get them pretty often though, without making flowers grow or unrotting fruit.”

His brow was furrowed, his expression thoughtful. “And are you always so hungry after a headache?”

I laughed, as much out of embarrassment as anything else. “God yeah, for some reason as soon as the pain goes, I’m like a feral animal.”

“Maybe it’s ‘cause you’re running on empty.”

I stopped, mid chew, “What?”

“Thermodynamics, right?” I blinked at him, the confusion plain on my face. “Energy can’t be created or destroyed.” He explained.

I frowned. “I didn’t realise you were so well versed in the laws of thermodynamics.”

He stared blankly at me; mouth set in a firm line of impatience. “Some of us read more than just filthy fiction.”

“Alright, Isaac Newton,” I rolled my eyes, gesturing with my spoon at him to continue, “Kindly elaborate on your theory.”

He huffed, a noise as frustrated as it was amused. “When you’re the one making the plants grow, the energy isn’t coming from the sun, it’s coming from you.”

“Huh,” I made a noise of interest, resuming my chewing. “Makes sense.”

And it did. It made a lot of sense.

Except when it came to exploding in a ball of flame.

“But what about the fire?” I asked, frowning. “That didn’t come from me.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t it?”

Something cold curled in my stomach.

I said nothing as he continued to explain his thoughts on thermodynamics and how physics and logic could be applied to something that was completely illogical. Or would have been, had I not been sat listening to a man who was technically over a hundred years old, who had fought against both Nazis and aliens from other timelines.

We lazed on the sofa, my head on his chest, both of us horizontal and entwined as the news rolled in the background. Neither of us were paying much attention, as Bucky traced the freckles on the backs of my shoulder like a game of dot-to-dot with a cool metal finger.  

I shivered with the sensation as his fingers trailed down the length of my left arm. “Does it hurt?” He asked randomly.

It reminded me of the first time I’d seen his arm, when I asked if it hurt. “Does what hurt?”  

He answered by drawing soft circles around each of the scars that decorated my skin. “You must’ve broken it pretty badly if it needed surgery,” he said by way of explanation. “And you got shot.”

“This doesn’t hurt at all,” I said, gesturing to the pink puckered skin where the bullet had grazed me, already fading. “But the bones hurt sometimes. I’m more accurate than any meteorologist for knowing when it’s going to rain because it aches like fuck.”

He huffed a quiet laugh.

“And the nerve damage is annoying. Painful and sometimes it just, stops my hand from working.”

I turned to look at him, and he looked thoughtful. “Makes me almost grateful I don’t have to deal with that. At least my hand does what I tell it to as long as it’s attached to my body.”

I wasn’t sure why, but between his pensive expression and the bizarre words, I laughed. “It’s a good thing we’re both right-handed or we’d be a really unbalanced pair.”

He snorted.

"And now for something a little unusual. Visitors to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden were left stunned today when bright yellow daffodils mysteriously bloomed seemingly overnight—entirely out of season.”

My stomach dropped before my brain even caught up. A tight, twisting feeling, like I’d just missed the last step on a staircase.

Simultaneously, we stiffened, our heads snapping up to the TV screen where the camera was panning across a mass of cheerful yellow.

“The flowers, typically a springtime favourite, appear to be thriving despite the crisp November weather, leaving botanists scratching their heads. Officials are investigating this strange phenomenon, with some speculating that the unseasonably sunny weather might be a factor. Garden-goers are advised to enjoy the rare sight while it lasts, as experts say the flowers could wither as the temperatures drop. In other news..."

We had sat up, my mouth open, Bucky’s eyes wide.

“Shit.”

“Did I do that?” I asked in a whisper.

A sort of choked laugh came out of Bucky. “There was one, yesterday. And that was impressive enough. Fuck.”

“Fuck.” I agreed.

Grinning, he turned to me. “How’s your head? You didn’t actually answer last time.”

“It’s fine now,” I answered, wary. “Why?”

Instead of answering, he pulled us both from the sofa, a wicked gleam in his eye.

Apparently, it was time to learn self-defence.

“I just don’t understand why I need to,” I argued, shifting my weight from leg to leg, clenching and unclenching the fists I was supposed to be throwing at him.

“Because you just made a rather impressive spectacle of yourself. Better to be prepared.” He gave me a slightly sardonic smile, “Now just throw the punch, sweetheart.” He sounded exasperated. “You won’t hurt me.”

I dropped my hands from where my fists had been held, clenched in front of me. “I’m not worried about hurting you,” I grumbled.

“Then what?”

“I’m worried about hurting myself, duh. Are you sure the rest of you isn’t made of metal?”

He frowned at me, as much thoughtful as frustrated, before he yanked his shirt over his head in one fluid motion.

No, he was not made of metal.

His tanned skin stretched over the dips and swells of muscle, the pinnacle of perfect proportions. The sort of figure Renaissance artists sketched into notebooks, painted onto ceilings, carved into marble.

Flawless, except for the scars that radiated out from his left shoulder. They stretched from under the smooth lines of the metal, where it fit so neatly around the joint. They almost shimmered, like ice against the warmth of his sun kissed skin. Mesmerised, I reached out with a finger to trace the raised scars that curved around his pectoral.

“Flesh and blood and scars, doll,” he said softly, “Just like you.”

I shook my head, trying to find my voice.

“Nothing at all like me,” I sounded strangely sad. “I am the human equivalent of a dough ball. You are…” I fumbled for the word. “Perfection.”

Metal fingers wrapped around my wrist, gently moving my hand to rest above his heart. I could feel it beating, slow and strong. My own heart raced in response, my eyes travelling up over the shine of his dog tags, over the dark stubble that decorated his jaw, into the glimmering blue of his eyes.

“You’re procrastinating.” He accused.

I cleared my throat, my fingers flexing ever so slightly against him. “It’s not my fault you distracted me.”

He was smirking now. “You really think you can punch hard enough to hurt either of us?” He asked, taunting, “With those little hands?”

I could feel my eyes narrowing. “Oh, I can do plenty with these little hands,” I promised in a low voice.

His eyes sparkled. “Prove it.”

I stepped closer to him, my head tilting as I appraised him. Slowly, so slowly, I let my fingers drift down. I traced each and every line, each dip and curve of the definition of his muscles. I could feel them shifting, tensing under my touch. His smirk dropped as mine grew. My fingertips explored lower still, barely brushing against his skin as I ran them along the edge of his trousers.

When his smirk had disappeared entirely from his face, and I could hear a barely audible intake breath pull shakily through his parted lips, I pulled away.

And then when his face twisted from a look of want and need to disappointment and confusion, I punched him.

The fleshy thwack when my fist connected with his chest seemed to almost echo around the almost empty room.

I had been right; it was kind of painful. Made of flesh and blood he might be, but Bucky was still firm enough that a dull ache radiated up through to my shoulder, and the skin of my fingers hummed with a sort of hot stinging sensation.

Bucky grinned, wrapping his fingers around my wrist and pulling my still closed fist to his lips. “You’re not nearly that delicate.” His voice was gentle, teasing.

I rolled my eyes.

“You’ve got good form,” he said genuinely as his hand brushed up my arm. “And you are deceptively strong.”

“Then what more do I need to do?” I asked, slightly exasperated.

“Stop doubting yourself,” he said, as if the answer was obvious and easily solved.

I frowned at him, the response of ‘easier said than done’ on the tip of my tongue as he tugged on my arm, pulling me flush against the bare skin of his chest. I gasped, any retorts stolen as Bucky’s mouth found mine, teeth nipping at my lower lip. “And stop letting yourself be distracted.”

I laughed, and he swallowed the sound as he kissed me deeply.

When my breathing became ragged, his lips found my jaw. “You should practice what you preach, Barnes.” I taunted weakly.

I had just long enough to see his expression darken before he twirled me, an arm wrapping around my neck, my cheek pressed against the hot skin of his bicep and my whole body lifting from the floor, my weight balancing on the tips of my toes.

“Wha-“ I started to ask, confused, shifting. The arm around my neck tensed reflexively and my hands wrapped around the muscles of his forearm.

“Distractions can cost you your life, doll,” he whispered into my ear, and I could feel the goosebumps raising. I was sure he intended it as a warning, a threat to be taken seriously.

My body took it in an entirely different way.

My back was pressed tight against his front, and I could feel each and every line of him through the layer of fabric that separated us.

Every line. A hardness that pressed unmistakably against the soft curves of my backside.

I clenched my legs together, heat pooling between them.

“If you can get out of this in three minutes, I’ll get you ice cream.” His voice was softer now, though no less tempting.

I laughed, the sound weak and breathless. “What if I don’t want to get out of this?” I whispered.

His arm tightened, squeezing just enough against my throat that my breath now came in ragged gasps, my toes barely brushing against the wooden floors as I struggled for purchase.

“Trust me, you do.” He promised.

For a moment, we stayed in that impasse. Me, dangling from Bucky’s arm, feet scrabbling, gasping for breaths that were harder and harder to catch. Bucky did not yield, and I wished I could see his face, to know if he was playful or angry.

Only when my toes started to tingle, and the edges of my vision blurred and dulled, did I make a move to escape. It was instinct, the very strongest urge to simply stay alive, that turned my grasping to clawing and my wriggling to desperate, frantic, scrambling.

Bucky let me struggle. Whether he was using this as a genuine learning experience or was just enjoying my difficulty I couldn’t quite tell.

I twisted and turned, clawed and grabbed and pulled, and, in a final desperate attempt, I leaned my head forward and bit into the bulge of muscle just below his elbow.

Immediately, his arm disappeared, and my feet hit the floor with a soft thud, the air gasped noisily into my lungs, and Bucky’s face – still a little blurred at the edges – appeared in front of me.

I should’ve felt embarrassed. I should’ve been mortified that my first instinct was to bite him like some feral animal.

But Bucky was grinning. Like he was impressed. Like I’d surprised him.

“You bit me!” He sounded strangely delighted.

I cleared my aching throat. “Yeah well, you weren’t fighting fair so why should I?”

A sound I could only describe as a growl came out of him, and his hands fisted in my shirt, pulling me to him as he crushed his mouth against mine.

“The things I wanna do to you, doll…” he shook his head, grinning,  

“No time like the present,” I crooned against his lips, tasting his responding laughter.

“Nu-uh,” he was still grinning.

I pulled back confused and pouting. “Why not?” I was well aware I was whining, but I didn’t have it in me to care.

He leaned in to kiss me again, his stubble scratching deliciously against my too-hot face. “Because” he spoke between kisses. “I promised you ice cream if you could get out of that in less than three minutes.” Another kiss. “And that only took two.”

At that, I was smiling. “Did you underestimate me, Bucky Barnes?”

His eyes gleamed, pride and amusement shining. “Oh, in so many ways.”

Notes:

Thank you so much for sticking with me!! Things will be heating up next chapter eeeeek! ❤️‍🔥
Lots of love! 💕💕

Chapter 14: Delayed Gratification

Summary:

He tutted playfully, the sound loud with how close his lips were to my ear. “Haven’t you ever heard of delayed gratification, sweetheart?”

Notes:

❤️‍🔥Smut warning! 🍆

I was sat, cross legged, in the middle of the bed that nobody slept in, glaring at the bathroom door.

I had all but pleaded with Bucky that it wasn’t ice cream I wanted as a reward, but he was having none of it. I’d thought myself successful when he’d carried me, one-armed, to the bedroom, the butterflies dancing in my tummy and an ache between my thighs.

But he’d dumped me on the bed, where I’d landed with a bounce, and he’d smiled at me with that infuriating self-satisfied smirk and sauntered off into the bathroom with a wink at my glaring face.

I had barely moved, and the furrow in my brows had gone nowhere. After what felt like forever, the sound of the water shut off. I had some scathing remark on the tip of my tongue, ready to be thrown at him the minute he opened the door but the moment the door did open, all and any words were suddenly nowhere to be found.

I watched as a bead of water, almost in slow motion, rolled down his neck, followed the dips between muscles all the way down until it disappeared into the towel tucked around his waist.

I swallowed, my mouth opening and closing as I tried to remember how to speak.

He chuckled gently, leaning across the bed to press his cool lips against the overheating skin of my cheek.

I recovered myself enough to reaffix my glare, and to shut myself in the bathroom before the prospect of Bucky clad in nothing but a towel could drive me crazy. I rushed through the motions of undressing and turning the shower on, flinching when the spray caught my arm and was alarmingly cold.

The thought of Bucky having to take a cold shower because of me had my frown fading, and my own self-satisfied smirk spreading across my still-burning face.

It did not take me long to get myself washed and dressed, and when I emerged from the bedroom looking a little less flustered, Bucky was waiting, one of his jackets draped over his arm.

“Have you forgiven me yet?” He asked as he held it out for me to slip my arms through.

I gave him a sarcastic smile, my eyes narrowed. “Not even a little bit,” I told him in my best cheerful voice.

He tutted, took my hand in his own, pocket his keys and all but pulled me out of the building. The sun had just started to set, tinging everything in a gold that looked a lot warmer than it felt. I still hadn’t quite adjusted to the chaos of the city, still found myself staring upwards at the huge buildings or pointing out something that Bucky had seen a hundred times that to me was still new and interesting.

“I’m not sure how I feel about chocolate and mint,” he mused, leaning over to dig his spoon into my bowl for the third time.

“Then maybe you should stick to one of the six flavours that you ordered,” I grumbled, looking pointedly at the ice cream in front of him.

While I was now pretty sure that James Bucky Barnes was not a vanilla kind of guy, I had been surprised by the utter glee with which he’d ordered the six neat scoots of ice cream. He hadn’t so much as flinched at ‘ooey gooey butter cake’ or ‘snap, mallow, pop’.

“I gotta lot of catchin’ up to do!” He looked as defensive as he sounded, all wide eyes tinged with indignation.

 “Doesn’t mean you can steal mine,” I grumbled, narrowing my eyes at him. “This is my hard-earned winnings, thanks very much!”

His face fell, but his eyes were still sparkling. “But yours has chocolate sauce...” He stared forlornly as he spoke, “and brownies!”

I pointed my spoon at him, “Which you could have chosen, but you chose sprinkles instead. Remind me how old you are?”

“One hundred and seven.” He mumbled around a mouthful of ice cream.

I raised an eyebrow at him, watching as his tongue darted out to catch a stray sprinkle that had stuck to the edge of his lip. The blush crept up my neck as the heat crept lower, and I glared down at my ice cream, hoping Bucky wouldn’t notice.

Of course, he did, and I ignored his almost taunting laughter by staring pointedly out of the window at the flurry of people heading home from work.

My eyes locked with a face across the street.

His walk was slower, his face as tired as the rest of the people filtering past but strangely thoughtful as he stared into the shop, watching us, and then, as he realised that I was looking at him, scared.

I smiled on instinct, trying to look reassuring, and the stranger’s eyes flitted between Bucky and I before his head dropped and he hurried off.

“People are starting at you,” I teased as I watched the man disappear around a corner.

“I get that sometimes. People recognise me from the news or somethin’.”

I turned back to him. “I’m fairly certain they’re staring because you’re a grown man eating a big bowl of ice cream with sprinkles.” He gave me a sardonic smile before shovelling more ice cream into his mouth.

“I thought you looked familiar, when I first saw you. Couldn’t figure it out though, it was more like you’d been in one of my dreams rather than knowing you from anywhere.”

He waggled his brows at me. “You thought I was dreamy, huh sweetheart?”

I huffed. “No, I thought you were a grumpy, moody, surly jerk.”

At that, he laughed loud and unashamed, even as more heads turned to stare. “Wanna know what I thought of you?” He asked when he’d finished laughing.

“Do I?”

He flashed me a wide, terrifying grin. “The door was open just enough so that I could see your back, but I could tell from how tense your muscles were that you were staring down Valentina with more balls than anyone would give you credit for. And then you turned, and I was stunned by your face. You have the most expressive face of anyone I’ve ever met, and I could read you like a goddamn book, doll. You were scared, sure. Wary, nervous, worried, all the things I expected you to be. But more than all that you were angry. For one second, as you turned to look at me, there was this rage, this fury that rolled off of you, and I knew I’d made the right decision to be there.”

His face softened, and he placed his spoon down. “You looked at me, and everything just… disappeared. Your cheeks went all pink and your eyes had this thoughtful look to them and your heart was going a mile a minute and for a second, I forgot all about why we were there. You were this beautiful, blushing girl. Something so inviting about you that drew me in like a goddamn magnet. And then the reality of the situation hit me like a tonne of bricks and I had to remind myself that I was there to look out for you, not to take you out for chocolate sodas and dancin’.”

There was a wistful smile on his face, his eyes so far away that he must have been looking at something in the forties. “And yet look where we are now,” I told him gently. “Self-defence and ice cream.”

His eyes refocused on me, his smile stretching into a grin. “Can’t say I’m complaining about the way things turned out.” He winked.

“You finished?” He asked, looking at my empty sundae bowl. When I nodded, he asked, “Ready to go home?”

Something warm fluttered in my chest.

Home.

Something I thought I’d never feel again, a word I thought would forevermore be unattainable and distant. A word said so casually, that hit me like a brick wall.

Home. It really was starting to feel like it.

“Yes please.”

The walk home was slow, my fingers twined with his metal ones, our joined hands swinging slightly with each step. Bucky pointed out places he and Steve had frequented as young men, the place he’d had his first kiss, the place Steve had landed his first punch, the place that used to serve the best chocolate sodas.

As we turned onto the road that led to Bucky’s apartment, a familiar face caught my attention. Stood next to a news stand, peeking over an unfolded newspaper, eyes fixed on us. Those eyes went wide again, that same deer-in-headlights look he’d had when he realised I’d seen him from the ice cream shop.

I laughed softly, leaning in and lowering my voice. “It’s that guy who was judging your sprinkles” I teased, “I don’t think he’s recovered quite yet.”

Bucky’s head turned in the same direction as mine, and the man immediately folded his paper and rushed off in the opposite direction, not so much daring to glance back towards us.

“Weird,” Bucky mumbled, frowning.

I shrugged. “Not as weird as you.”

He nudged me with his hip, nearly sending me into a shop window before he gently yanked on my arm to stop me falling. “Punk.”

“Arse,” I retorted, trying to shove him. I could’ve been pushing a concrete pillar for all the good it was doing me.

We stopped fighting as we ascended the stairs to his apartment, mostly for fear of upsetting the neighbours. Gloves and jackets and shoes were shed, keys dumped unceremoniously on the kitchen counter. All of the easy motions of coming home.

Bucky relaxed into the sofa, sipping from a glass of neat whisky as he stared at me.

The tension that had been between us before we’d left had come back with a vengeance. Thrumming between us, almost electric, despite the distance I’d put between us by sitting on the lone chair next to the kitchen.

“You wanna watch something?” He asked, a tiny smirk tugging on one corner of his lips.

I frowned. “No thanks.”

“Wanna play chess?”

“Nope.”

“Ticket to Ride?”

“No.”

“Scrabble? Bet you’re really good at Scrabble.”

“I am, but no.”

“Monopoly?”

I fought against a smile of my own. “Is it the English version?”

He was grinning now. “No.”

“Then no.”

“Pinochle?”

“What the fuck is pinochle?”

“Card game,” he said, shrugging. “Old people love it.”

I did smile at that, “Bet you’re really good at that then.”

He took another sip and nodded. “Yeah, I am.”

“No pinochle.”

He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Well then, what do you wanna do?”

I let him stare at me some more, enjoying the way his gaze felt. His eyes were gleaming, his posture totally at ease. “You’re cute when you’re flustered.”

I could feel it humming between us. A wire stretched so tight, just waiting to snap. He knew what I wanted. He was just waiting for me to say it.

And I hated that he was making me work for it.

So, I stopped thinking. And I took.

I was out of my seat before I could overthink what I was about to do. I kept my eyes on him as I crossed the room, plucking the glass from his fingers and smiling at the look of surprise as I downed the remaining whiskey in one go, throwing the glass carefully into the cushions. I straddled him, my knees pressing into the sofa on either side of his thighs as I settled myself on his lap. I ran the fingers of one hand through his hair, gripping hard enough to tilt his head up so that I could kiss him.

I wasn’t sure if the whisky I could taste was from my tongue, or his. Couldn’t tell if the burn was from the alcohol or the unique brand of intoxication that was entirely his own. Regardless, I relished in it, let the sparks catch and burn into my very blood.

His hands curled around my thighs, just under the hem of the skirt that I’d changed into after my shower. The chill of the metal sank immediately through the sheer fabric of my tights and I gasped ever so softly into his mouth.

The grip of his hands tightened. “So that’s what you want to do,” he said, pulling back to look at me, my hands falling against his chest, my breathing ragged and my heart racing.

“Are you really that oblivious or are you actually trying to kill me, Bucky?”

He gave me a megawatt grin before dropping his head to kiss up my neck, teeth grazing, tongue swiping. He tutted playfully, the sound loud with how close his lips were to my ear. “Haven’t you ever heard of delayed gratification, sweetheart?” His lips skimmed across my jaw. “I wanted to be absolutely certain this was what you wanted.”

I made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a moan. “Are you certain now?”

“Hmm,” I could feel the sound rumble through his chest, and my legs clenched against him. “I could do with a little more convincing.”

I let out a frustrated laugh. “If I have to wait much longer, I think I might actually spontaneously combust.”

“Don’t let Val hear you say that.”

I shook my head, laughing with him, my arms threading around his neck, my head tilting down to his, his tilting up to meet mine.

I shifted impatiently, the movement pressing the hard length of his cock against me, the denim rough in the most delightful way through the thin layers of my tights and underwear. He hissed as I whimpered, and I moved again, losing any remaining shreds of self-consciousness as the pleasured began to spread slowly from my centre.

“What about now?” I managed to stutter out, breathless.

“Nu-uh,” His voice was ever so slightly strained behind the sing-song teasing. “I want to hear you say it.”

At that, my head dropped to his shoulder, and I groaned, both in pleasure and frustration and embarrassment.

“Oh now you’re all shy?” The grip of his hands tightened against my thighs, his hips tilting upwards in a way that made me cry out. “C’mon, darlin’. Tell me what you want.”

I pulled back to glare at his grinning face. “I swear to God, if you don’t take me to bed right. Fucking. Now. I will burn this entire apartment block to the ground.”

He pulled a face of faux indignation. “What happened to those exceptional manners of yours, little lady?”

“Please?” I spat through gritted teeth.

“Since you asked so nicely,” his hands shifted under my thighs, and he stood, effortlessly carrying me into the bedroom, throwing me onto the bed where I landed on my back with a bounce.

Before I could right myself, his hands wrapped around my ankles.

He kept his eyes on mine as his fingers crept, so painfully slowly, up my legs. I flinched at the startle of cold against my overheated skin as they curled into the waistband of my tights and peeled them from my legs, my skin erupting into goosebumps in the cool air.

He took such care, removing my skirt and my jumper with a patient gentleness that made me mad, and I squirmed against the bed covers.

“I have waited so long to do this,” he told me, seriously, “I am going to enjoy every single second.” He leaned down to press his lips against mine briefly. “And so are you.”

Next to come off was my vest top, and he paused to kiss the still-healing scar on the top of my arm before reaching around to undo the clasp of my bra. When that came off too, Bucky paused. His hands clenched into fists and his eyes closed as he took a slow, steading breath.

There was no hint of teasing in his voice, or his face. Nothing but admiration and awe and a reverence that I was entirely undeserving of.

Slowly, so slowly, he pulled my underwear down my legs, dropping them to the floor with the rest of my discarded clothes.

He stared at me, his eyes travelling from where my feet dangled off the end of the bed, up my legs, over every curve and dip and dimple of me, until our eyes met.

He crawled on to the bed, his still-clothed body covering mine, until our faces were level.

“You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

My breath hitched, and all of a sudden I was overcome with emotion.

And then, he was kissing me again, our tongues tangling. I reached for him, trying to get rid of some of the maddening layers that separated us, and he gently pulled my hands from his shirt, pressing them into the mattress as our fingers locked together.

He kissed down my neck, biting into the soft skin of my shoulder hard enough that I cried out, my hips lifting from the bed in a desperate search for friction.

He kissed every freckle and every scar on my arms. He licked a stripe from my belly button up to my sternum, pressing a kiss against the skin between my breasts.

He gently traced the shimmer of the stretch marks on my hips, and I gigged when he touched particularly ticklish spot.

He even flipped me over, and made sure that his lips touched every single inch of my back.

There was not a part of me that he had not kissed or licked or caressed, except the places I most wanted him to touch. He would come close, a hand stretching up my ribs only to stop. His stubble, scratching deliciously against the sensitive skin on the insides of my thighs, so close that I could feel his breath on my most sensitive parts before he nipped at my leg, and moved on to somewhere else.

Only when I was a panting, writhing mess, only when a single word slipped from between my lips, did that change.

“Please.”

Something in him snapped. That careful, patient, gentleness disappeared in an instant and he looked down at me with a flicker of something almost feral.

One hand pressed into the mattress next to my head, reflections shifting with the almost imperceptible movements of the metal. The other slipped between my legs, his fingers sliding through the wetness. Testing. Teasing.

The air rushed into my lungs, my breathing shaky, every muscle in my body tensed in anticipation. For a moment, I wondered if he was going to drive me to the brink of insanity again. See how far he could wind me up before I did, indeed, explode.

But his fingers sank between my folds, slowly at first. Just enough to keep me on the right side of sanity. I bit my lip against my moans, scrunched my fists in the bed covers.

I could feel his eyes on me, watching each shift in my expression, knew that he was fine tuning his ministrations to my reactions until I was panting beneath him, snippets of words lost to pleas and prayers.

The pleasure reached a peak, radiating out from under his fingers, rushing heat through to the very tips of my fingers and toes. My hips lifting to press harder against his fingers, my hands raising to clutch at him in some desperate attempt to keep myself grounded. Stars burst behind my eyelids and the pleasure just kept coming, and coming, and coming until I was practically sobbing.

As the sensations slowed, as the overwhelming rush of my orgasm began to fade, my eyes fluttered open and Bucky was grinning down at me.

Before I could protest, before I could so much as catch my breath to say anything at all, he was gone, his head between my legs, stubble brushing against the crease where my thighs met my hip, and his fingers were replaced with his tongue.

My hand fisted in his hair as my head fell back against the bed, my whole body arching. He gave no mind to my over-sensitive nerves, he held my hips still, his fingers sinking into the plushness of my flesh so hard I was sure he’d leave bruises.

The though had me writhing, my grip on his hair tightening as if scared he might pull away and take the almost overwhelming pleasure with him.

I could almost feel the curve of his lips against me.

The edge of another orgasm loomed, so close I could almost taste it, the heat and the electricity building and growing and-

Gone. A grinning face, licking his lips almost wolfishly.

My chest was heaving as I glared at him.

“Look at you,” he crooned, taking a step back as if admiring a painting in a gallery.

“Who the hell said you could stop?” I panted.

He pulled his shirt over his head, and my glare turned to a stare. I wasn’t sure I would ever get used to that sight. Before I could have the chance, his fingers were at his belt, working at his zipper, and his trousers fell to the floor.

There was no hint of shyness on Bucky’s face as he hooked his thumbs into his underwear and let those fall to the floor too.

I could see why.

I knew Bucky was strong. I knew he was built like a Greek statue, all broad shoulders and sculpted muscle.

But when I finally saw all of him, every inch, I realised just how much trouble I was in.

Good God, he was beautiful.

“Look at you,” I whispered, my eyes slowly dragging down his body, taking in each glorious inch. As if drawn by some invisible magnetic force, I sat up, my hands reaching for him, pressing first against the defined muscles of his stomach before dropping lower, lower, until my fingertips brushed against the length of him.

His fingers caught my wrist, cool against my overheated skin, and I looked up in question.

“Later.” A promise.

For a moment, we stayed like that. Him stood, looking down at me like he was ravenous, and I was the tastiest meal in the world. Me, sat on the edge of the bed, looking up at him with a mixture of awe and anticipation and the smallest, most delicious little frisson of fear.

"James Bucky Barnes,” I said softly, “If you don’t get down here right now I swear to God-“

The rest of my threat was lost to his lips, his mouth claiming mine in a kiss that was open and deep, clashing teeth and tongues.

His knees nudged my legs apart, the tip of him brushing against me in a way that had my legs wrapping around his waist. Our fingers twined together, the palms of his hands flush against mine. Not for one second did he stop kissing me. Not as he pushed in to me, not as I gasped and moaned into his mouth, not even when he had sunk so deep that his hips were flush against mine. Our breathing mingled. Our foreheads touched. We were so entwined that had he not been made of muscle and metal, it would have been difficult to tell where I stopped, and he began.

He stayed there for a long moment, sheathed in me, as if relishing in the sensation.

Everything around us faded into insignificance. The threat of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, our training, trying to figure out all of the strange things going on with me, the Winter Solider.

None of that mattered.

Nothing mattered except me and him and this moment.

He pulled out, just slightly, and thrust back in so slowly that I thought I might go insane. The room seemed to spin, gravity slipping away from me. The kiss broke at that point, the space needed for gasps and moans and half-mumbled prayers as those thrusts grew faster, deeper. Our hands gripping tighter, muscles tensing, my heart beating so fast that I thought it might explode.

In a way, I did explode. The pleasure tearing through me until stars burst behind my closed eyes and all I could sense and smell and hear and taste was James Bucky Barnes. Cinnamon and cedar and soap and frost and old books and black and white films.

Bucky’s hands slipped from mine as he came, his head dropping, his groan muffled as his teeth sank into my shoulder. I dragged my palms down his sculpted back, slick with sweat.

Our breathing slowed and a quiet kind of calm seemed to settle in the room. Bucky pulled out of my slowly, almost reluctantly, but he stayed close as he pulled the covers around us.

His head against my chest, my fingers running though his damp, dark hair, he relaxed so completely that in a few deep breaths, he’d fallen asleep.

If I had known that all I’d needed to do to get Bucky to sleep in a bed was to fuck him, I would’ve done it sooner.

Notes:

🫣
Thank you for reading! I appreciate you so much! 💖💖💖

Chapter 15: Half Dead and Notoriously Difficult

Summary:

“You want the one that’s half dead and notoriously difficult to grow?”

Sleeping in the same bad as a super soldier with a Vibranium arm was an adjustment, to say the least. The cold metal against my skin had startled me awake at least four times, and I could feel the bruise forming on my ribs from where Bucky had slung his arm over me to pull me close in his sleep.

I didn’t mind at all.

For a start, it was a hell of a lot comfier than sleeping on the floor had been. There was no crick in my neck that morning, no dull ache along one side of my body from the cold, hard floor. Despite the ever-cooling temperature outside, sleeping under the same covers as Bucky kept me toasty warm.

And best of all, was the waking up.

Though every morning had started with Bucky’s arm curved around my waist and his lips on my neck, before we’d been separated by our blankets, our pyjamas, the inevitable wince or hiss as I’d moved in a way that angered my aching body.

Nothing separated us now, not a single centimetre of space between us with our ankles tangled together, the backs of my legs flush against the front of his, the plushness of my behind pressing into his hardness.

I ached this morning too, a delicious ache between my thighs, quickly fading into insignificance as Bucky’s mouth traced along the curve of my shoulder and the heat began to build.

There was no rush, no hurry to his movements. They were sleepy, uncharacteristically clumsy with what I hoped was the dregs of a good night’s sleep clinging to him.

With a softness that belied the strength it was capable of, the cold metal of his hand slipped over the swell of my belly, and through the wetness that had built between my legs.

Before, he had touched me with his right hand. The warmth and relative softness had been familiar, if only in those two aspects.

This felt very, very different. The temperature, the unyielding hardness, the mechanical precision.

After my second orgasm, Bucky moved. Shifting out from behind me to a position better suited to slide two cool fingers inside me. My hands fisted in the covers, my groan muffled by the pillow that I’d buried my face into.

Warm fingers grabbed my chin, turning my face towards him.

My eyes opened, and he grinned at me.

“You’re so beautiful,” I managed to say between gasped breaths.

He was staring at me, taking in my flushed skin, my heaving chest, his eyes widening slightly as they followed the movement of his fingers between my legs. I couldn’t quite pinpoint his expression. There was still the cocky male smugness pulling at the corners of his mouth, but his eyes were gleaming with something else. Something like wonder, or surprise.

And then he crooked his fingers inside me, my whole body arching off the bed, my eyes screwing shut.

It took a long time for us to get out of bed that morning.

I lost count of how many times Bucky had made me come with his fingers. I felt as if my bones had turned to jelly, my fingers and toes numb like all of the sensation had been pulled into my core.

His hands hooked under my legs, and he scooped me from the bed, my arms wrapping limply around his neck as he carried me into the bathroom. I was only vaguely aware of him shifting me into one arm, and the sudden whole-body shock of cold water made me scream, my arms and legs locking around Bucky, his answering laughter vibrating through me.

“You’re a jerk, Bucky Barnes!” I yelled, my voice echoing.

He smirked. “’S not what you were saying five minutes ago, sweetheart.”

“You were being a lot nicer to me five minutes ago,” I pouted, clutching myself closer to him as I tried to escape the chill.

He took a step forward, my back pressing against cold tile.

“As much as I’d love to keep you in bed all day, Princess, we’ve got work to do.”

My skin slipped against the water-slick wall, bringing us to a much more interesting angle.

I shifted my hips, my over-sensitive clit brushing against his cock.

“Yeah,” I said in a sigh, “We do.”

His laughter this time made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The glint in his eyes was darker, the curve of his mouth a threat as much as I was a promise.

There was no mercy in his kiss this time. No sweetness. Nothing clumsy or sleepy or soft about it.

It was hard, as much teeth as tongue, and when his mouth left mine to find my neck it was not with soft, sensual kisses, but to bite down so hard that my skin bruised beneath his teeth.

His hands, still wrapped around the backs of my thighs, pulled my legs apart so far apart that the ache made me whimper. The sudden thrust of his cock inside me turned the whimper into a moan. The throbbing stretch, the sudden fullness, was almost painful.

It was all too much; his teeth biting down into the soft skin of my shoulder, the sting of cold spray on my face, the chill seeping into my bones, the comparatively scorching heat of him inside me.

Too much, and not nearly enough.

“Bucky,” I mumbled. “Please.”

He lifted his head from my shoulder, the spot where his mouth had been throbbing in time with my heartbeat.

His hips stayed still, flush against mine.

I tried to shift, to wiggle, to calm the raging need in me. Bucky’s hands gripped impossibly tighter.

“Please what, doll?”

I huffed, impatient and annoyed and God damn desperate.

“Stop wriggling and use your words.”

I glared at him, pleading silently for him to take mercy on me. I could feel the heat growing in my cheeks.

He didn’t. “Don’t play all coy now. Not when I just heard you use language that would make a sailor blush.”

“Oh fuck off,” I grumbled.

His smirk grew. “You’re so close, honey.”

“Have my orgasms turned my brain to mush or did you say that five minutes ago?”

Despite himself, he laughed. “C’mon,” he kissed me once, gentle, teasing, “Please what?”

I narrowed my eyes at him briefly, enjoying the way his crinkled in return. “Please fuck me-“

The rest of my sentence was cut off, interrupted by the sharp intake of air as his cock slid slowly, so slowly, almost out of me.

I didn’t have time to finish the rest of the sentence. ‘-before I die of hypothermia’.

He thrust back into me so quicky, so entirely, that all words were lost to me.

All but one, which I moaned over and over, in shouts and whispers and then in pleas.

“Fuck.”

 

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚─── ┘

 

I was clean (though I felt anything but after that shower), and dressed, and good for absolutely nothing.

I’d never seen anyone cook eggs so smugly.

“It’s not fair,” I whined as I watched him.

He glanced up at me. “What’s not fair?”

“I can barely walk from one room to the other and sit down without my whole body screaming at me in protest, and you look like you could still run a goddamn marathon without so much as breaking a sweat.”

He huffed a laugh.

“I think you’re actually going to be the death of me,” I said through gritted teeth as I tried to get comfy.

He plated up the food, walking over with all of his usual swagger and offering me the plate of bacon and eggs. “I’ll be gentle with you next time.”

I took the plate from him, narrowing my eyes. “Don’t you dare.”

He laughed, leaning over as he sat to kiss my temple. “Then shut up whinging.”

After a few moments of eating in near silence, I blurted, “Can we buy a plant?”

Bucky chewed, swallowed, furrowed his brows at me and then, eventually, laughed. “A plant?”

“Yeah, I want to test your theory.”

His amusement turned to thoughtfulness. “Sure, we can buy a plant.”

The little garden centre was only a few blocks from Bucky’s apartment, but the short walk had turned the ache in my legs to burning. The sun and the clouds were fighting for dominance in the sky.

The shop was overflowing with greenery. It flowed over the windows, out of the door, hung from above the shop façade. It was everywhere, even in the depths of autumn as we were. I imagined that in the spring, the whole place would be overwhelmingly vibrant, practically alive with the sheer volume of plant in such a small space.  There were big, round, orange pumpkins on display, sat with smaller, quirkier squash in a palette of autumnal colours. Inside, one wall of the shop was full, floor to ceiling, with pots. Everything else was plants. Succulents and cacti, air plants, water plants, and more house plants that I could begin to get my head around.

Bucky held up an aloe, “This says it’s good for burns. Might come in handy.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “That feels like a dig at either my cooking skills or my…” I paused, trying to find an appropriate word for the public setting, “Extracurricular talents. And I do not appreciate it, thanks.”

He shrugged, eyes glittering, “You never know.”

I pointed at a cactus, small and rounded and entirely phallic. “Look, it’s you.?”

He blinked at me, waiting.

“A little prick.”

He sighed, long and loud. I giggled, a smug smile pulling up my cheeks.

We searched in silence after that, occasionally holding up a plant for the other to appraise, and despite the ridiculous amount on offer, finding nothing.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, I just knew that I hadn’t found it yet.

Until, leaves browned and curling, stem flaccid and drooping, I saw it.

Bucky tugged at the label, “’This cold-sensitive rainforest native needs just the right conditions to thrive indoors’” he read aloud, “You want the one that’s half dead and notoriously difficult to grow?”

I picked up the pot, holding it close to my chest. “I do.”

And that’s what we picked. Ignoring the shop keeper’s warnings or offers to sell us fertiliser and all sorts of things we would absolutely need, he waved us off with a half-hearted “Good luck!”

Bucky tucked the fiddle leaf fig under one arm, his other hand grabbing at my own and half-pulling me along as I tried to keep up with his long strides.

As we turned a corner, my eyes caught on a familiar face. The guy I’d seen outside the ice cream shop. I smiled widely at him, feeling strangely proud that I’d been able to remember someone’s face in the masses I saw most days.

He did not return my smile, but rather quickly ducked his head and disappeared into the steady flow of pedestrians. “Well, that was rude.” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“I just saw a guy I recognised from the ice cream shop.” I said nonchalantly, something tugging insistently in the back of my head.

Bucky huffed, a confused laugh. “What?”

“His is the first face I’ve actually recognised that isn’t yours or someone else from the apartment and in a city as completely unhinged as this one,” He started laughing at that, “I’m pretty impressed with myself, y’know. But he didn’t even smile back! Do you people not smile over here? Maybe it’s a city thing, I didn’t spend that much time in the city but back home everyone smiled at each other in the street.”

When I turned to look at him, Bucky was still smiling but there was a pull at his eyebrows, just a hint of a frown. Like the same thing tugging at my instincts were tugging at his.

“Why do you look like that?” I asked, still looking at him out of the corner of my eye.

He nudged my hip with his. “Why do you look like that?”

I sighed. “It’s weird, isn’t it? Being as bothered as I am.”

“Not at all, you Limeys are all about politeness and etiquette and manners.” I gave him a playful glare at his surprisingly decent imitation of an English accent. “What is weird is that you’ve seen the same face over the last couple of days to recognise them.”

I was quiet for a long moment. “You don’t think he’s with the guys we uh… met at the bookstore?”

He shrugged. “Could be nothin’, doll. Try not to worry about it.” He glanced at me, eyes scanning over my furrowed eyebrows, the teeth that were worrying my bottom lip. “If you start recognising more faces we’ll start worrying.”

“Why?” I asked, slightly panicked.

“’Cause then you’re starting to be a real New Yorker.” He teased, grinning.

I rolled my eyes.

I didn’t see any more familiar faces on the rest of the way back to the apartment. Coats and gloves were removed, and the fiddle leaf fig placed on the kitchen counter.

I was leaned over on folded arms, staring at it so hard my eyes were starting to cross. My fingers were starting to go numb, my elbows aching with the weight of my upper body having been resting on them for so long.

I could feel Bucky staring at me, could feel the confusion and amusement almost radiating off of him.

After another ten minutes or so, he finally asked, “What are you doing?”

“Trying to fix it.” I said without looking away.

“You’re trying too hard.”

I looked up, blinking the blur away from my vision.

“Think about it,” He said, redundantly, because I had thought of little else since we’d gotten home. “With the dead plants in the pots, and the bluebells and the daisies, and the raspberries. You weren’t trying, were you?”

I shook my head.

“Even with the daffodils you were mostly daydreaming.”

“Excuse you, I was reciting poetry.” I could feel myself flushing. “It helps me concentrate.” I said, defensively.

“Yeah but, you weren’t doing… whatever this is,” He gestured to my awkward posture. “You made about ten thousand flowers bloom, and you were reciting poetry. Stop trying so hard.”

I rubbed at the lines that had formed on my forehead. “Reckon the start of a headache is a good sign or a bad one?”

“I reckon it’s eye strain from staring at a plant for god knows how long.” He gave me a soft smile before placing a glass of water and two pills in front of me. “Give it a rest, darlin’. You’re gonna drive yourself crazy trying to figure it out.”

I took a sip and chucked back the pills.

“What if that was it?” My voice was small, quiet. “What if there’s nothing more to figure out? I can’t feel anything, Bucky. What if that was it? Some berries, some flowers, one last hurrah and I’m done?”

He frowned at me, his blue eyes narrowing slightly as he moved closer, his hands finding my face. "That’s not you talking, doll. That’s the doubt."

I looked at the fig plant again, its sad, drooping leaves mocking my efforts. The frustration burned low in my stomach. “They’re not going to wait around forever for us, you know? We’ve hardly been inconspicuous. Valentina knows where we are.”

Bucky’s expression darkened. "You let me handle Val. Right now, it’s about you getting in control, not them." His eyes softened. He leaned in, lips pressing against mine, soft and gentle and reassuring. “What’ve I told you about trusting yourself?”

I sighed, flopping against him as his arms wrapped around me.

"We’ll figure it out," he promised.

But something in his posture, his voice, told me he was worried too. I just couldn’t place what, exactly, he was worrying about.

Notes:

Thank you for sticking with me, I'm so grateful to have you.
A reminder that this story has a playlist! 🎶https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5fpTzAfqFMKzTy5u2csPh4?si=KpPysZgKSlm9Of-C7jkaOg (May contain hints for future chapters! 🤭)

Lots of love ❤️‍🔥💖💕

Chapter 16: Burning and Consuming

Summary:

I wasn’t burning now, I was melting.

"I gotta admit, I’m impressed,” he confessed as we emerged into the too-bright sunshine.

“I’m not sure why,” I turned to look at him, noticing the wary look to the side-glance he gave me. “London did it first. I bet I’ve been on the Tube more than you’ve been on the subway.”

He gave a quiet laugh. “Probably. Steve and I used to just walk everywhere.”

I raised an eyebrow in question and Bucky’s grin widened. “The subway made him sick. And I’d always lose him in the crowd.”

At that, I snorted, dissolving into giggles and shaking my head. “Bless him.”

“Don’t bless him!” His voice was indignant. “God, he was an absolute nightmare. Always getting into fights, always in some predicament or another. Looking out for Steve was a full time job, I swear.”

I smiled up at him. “And then when you both got all...” I gestured to the mass of muscle, “beefcaked, it was his turn to look out for you. How will you stay out of trouble now?”

He gave a laugh, running a hand through his hair. “No chance of me staying outta trouble.”

“Oh?”

“Trouble seems to gravitate towards me. First I’ve got Steve with his little dog syndrome,” I giggled again, “then there’s the God forsaken Winter Solider programme and HYDRA and SHIELD, even. That’s before we even start on the whole alien invasion thing, turnin’ into dust and re-materialising right back into the alien invasion. And just when I thought things were calming down, I’ve got Sam and his Captain America bullshit to deal with, the Flag Smashers and fuckin’ Zemo.”

His arm slipped around my waist, pulling me against him. “And then finally, finally, I’m not fighting or running or hiding, when this little English lady turns my world upside down.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, and he smirked at me. “Are you calling me trouble?”

He winked. “World works in funny ways, doll. Who would’a thought that both Steve and I would both end up with an English broad to keep us on our toes?”

“Oh my god,” I groaned. “You sound like you’re back in the forties.”

“You make it easy to forget.” He gave my hip a gentle squeeze.

“Don’t try and flatter me, Barnes. You called be a broad.”

We bickered all the way down the street. My voice died in my throat when we rounded a corner.

I blinked. One, twice, three times. As if the image in front of me was some kind of mirage, some trick of the light, some strange hallucination.

It wasn’t.

“There’s a forest in the middle of the city.” My voice was strangely hollow.

Bucky laughed. “You’re usually so observant. Not like we weren’t just up the road a few days ago.”

My head swivelled, up and down the massive stretch of road in front of the trees. Mentally, I flicked through the memories, trying to recall buildings or road signs or any other identifying features. None of it was familiar. Nothing, except the trees.

A lightbulb turned on in my head. “Are these the trees we saw from the botanic gardens?”

“Not the exact same, but yeah. Welcome to Prospect Park.”

The open-mouthed, gawping stare did not leave my face for a long while, as we ambled through the tree-lined paths, leaves crunching underfoot. Every few steps something would catch my attention; a little patch of mushrooms, fallen acorns still in their caps, a leaf that perfectly encapsulated the sunset colours of autumn.

Bucky was patient, watching my intrigue with a small, secret smile tugging at his lips.

I wanted to ask him about the look on his face, but when the trees thinned to reveal a large, glistening body of water, I understood. A lake, the water a cold blue as it reflected the sky, quiet and still.

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered.

“So are you,” Bucky teased.

I rolled my eyes at him, plonking myself down on a nearby bench, breathing in the fresh, chilled air and letting the sun kiss my face. It wasn’t warm any more, but there was some memory of warmth to it. The buttery-yellow glow felt, healing somehow. Restorative. As live-giving to me as it was the trees and the plants around me.

Bucky sat down next to me, wrapping one arm around my shoulders to protect me from the cold, and said nothing.

We stayed that way for a long while, enjoying the peace and the quiet and the tranquillity. 

“I’ve been thinking,” I said at last, as the sun lowered towards the treetops.

“Uh oh.”

I gave his knee a playful slap.

“About what?” He asked.

“A lot of things,” I stalled, trying to build the courage to confess what had been playing on my mind for a while now.

He waited for me to continue.

“Remember when you said about thermodynamics, and how I can make the plants grow?”

He made a hum of agreement.

“I think you’re right,” I said, slowly. He huffed, and I could tell he was about to smugly proclaim that of course he was right, so I held up a hand to stop him. “Plants get their energy to grow through the sun. Photosynthesis.”

“Didn’t know you were a biologist, doll.” He joked and I pulled back to fix him with a frown.

“Sunlight turns into energy, they use that energy to grow. When I, uh, influence things, the energy comes from me instead.”

He nodded, a slight frown pulling his brows together. He’d said all this before.

“But what if it’s not just that?” I asked.

He stared at me. “Go on.”

“What if I’m like them, and my energy comes from the sun, too?”

His stare didn’t change, still confused, still frowning.

“I can feel it,” I said quietly, as the light around us turned golden with the start of the sunset. “It’s hard to describe but, I can feel it. Some people get that S.A.D, right? Where their bodies miss the sun, and it makes them depressed. This is like that but to the nth degree. When I’m inside too long, or it’s rained non-stop for months, I feel... drained. Tired on this extra level, deeper than my bones even. Like I’m tired in my soul.”

“And then I sit in the sun like this, and it feels so… restorative. Healing. The aches and pains fade, I feel brighter.”

Bucky was smiling. “Like a tree. Getting all bald and droopy in the winter and then spring comes and,” he made a blossoming motion with his hands.

“Exactly,” I grinned.

He sighed. “I suppose it makes sense. Fire ruled by the sun.”

“It explains everything.” I said with a shrug.

He hummed, a non-committal, unconvinced sort of sound. “Prove it,” he said, the tone of his voice goading. “Put your money where your mouth is, sweetheart.”

I laughed quietly, shifting on the bench to press myself closer to him, shutting my eyes against the golden light. “I don’t think that’d be a very good idea,” I said softly. “Even if I could.”

The gentle sound that came out of him this time was one of agreement.

We were still and quiet, wrapped in one another, my eyes closed as the sun filled all of the dark cracks and crevices in my soul.

“Do you think you could?” He asked as the golden light began to fade and the chilled air began to sting.

My eyes fluttered open and I turned to look at him.

“The fire thing,” he clarified. “Could you do it again?” I heard the unspoken part of his question. Without the threat, without the fear, or the rage.

“I’m not sure,” I answered honestly, “But I think it’s about time I tried. That’s the whole reason I’m here, isn’t it? I didn’t come all this way to just grow a few plants.”

Bucky smiled, but something sad swam in his eyes. “You’ve done a whole lot more than that, doll.”

 

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚  ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚───┘

 

It was a VW Beetle. Blue, behind the dust.

I turned to Bucky, a thousand questions on the tip of my tongue.

“Sam might’ve got the shield,” he said, amusement dancing in his eyes. “But I got the car.”

I pressed my lips together to stop myself from laughing. I nodded. “It’s uh, very cute.”

“It’s low profile!” He insisted.

“Sure,” I agreed.

“If you promise not to diss the car,” A set of keys were plucked from his pocket, dangled from a gloved finger. “I’ll let you drive.”

The delighted surprise was written all over my face. “What’s the catch?” I asked, the surprise shifting to wariness. “You’re being far too nice to me this morning.”

Nice didn’t even begin to cover it. I couldn’t be sure what had woken me up that morning, the faint glow kissing my face, or the softness of Bucky’s lips kissing the curve of my shoulder. He hadn’t stopped kissing me; my neck, my jaw, my cheeks, my closed eyelids and, as he’d slowly, lazily thrust into me, he kissed my lips as if he’d had all the time in the world.

I jolted back into the present, staring at his mouth with my thoughts written as plainly on my face as if they’d been projected across my forehead. His tongue darted out to wet his lips before he gave me a wicked grin.

“How’s that battery of yours doing?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Really?”

He raised one shoulder in a shrug. “You said it yourself. ‘Bout time you tried.”

I huffed as I held my hand out, palm up. “Oh come on then.”

He made to drop the keys in my outstretched hand, and then paused. “Wait- you know how to drive a stick shift, right?”

I rolled my eyes, snatching the keys from him and making for the driver’s seat. “Of course I do.”

Before he could bicker back or make some lame comment about driving on the wrong side of the road, I slid in to the driver’s seat, the smell of old leather and a hint of engine oil tickling my nose as I settled behind the wheel.

Bucky climbed into the passenger seat, his weight making the seat creak slightly as he buckled up.

"So, where are we going?" I asked, the leather of the steering wheel creaking as my hands gripped it almost too tightly in the sudden rush of nervousness that was seeping through me.

He leaned back, resting one arm along the windowsill, the perfect image of relaxed confidence in contrast to my nerves. "There’s a place about an hour out of the city. Secluded. Quiet. Nothing to accidentally fry."

I let out a shaky breath. "You think I’m gonna set something on fire?"

He smirked, but there was a hint of seriousness behind his playful tone. "Better safe than sorry."

At that, I scoffed, twisting the key in the ignition until the Beetle grumbled to life, its engine sputtering before it evened out.

The car rumbled beneath us as I put it into gear, easing out of the tight parking spot.

“Does it feel weird?” Bucky asked, his eyes roaming over my posture. “The stick might not be a problem but, driving on the right side of the road? Is that gonna be a problem?”

I lifted my hand from where it had rested on the gear stick to gesture at the road in front of us, a seemingly never-ending line of traffic. “Does it look like it’s going to be a problem?”

He shrugged, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “We’ll be outta the city before you know it.”

I chose not to dignify his doubt with an answer.

Sure enough, after half an hour of calf-cramping clutch control stuck in traffic, we hit the open road and the city began to fade behind us, skyscrapers replaced by trees and long stretches of highway.

I stole a glance at him. He was slightly turned in my direction, a small smile on his lips and when he caught my eyes, his widened in a look that said, ‘are you going to explain yourself?’

I smiled.

“What?” I asked, looking back at the road in front of us.

“You are good driver.” He said, his tone accusing, daring me to chastise him for underestimating me again.

I wiggled my eyebrows at him. “Told you so.”

“Will you ever stop surprising me?” He wondered aloud.

“I’ll choose not to be offended that you’re surprised, but I hope not.” I joked.

After a while, Bucky directed me off the main road, down a narrow, winding lane lined with trees, their leaves a riot of fiery orange and deep red. It was beautiful, in that quiet, autumnal way—the kind of beauty that made me forget, just for a second, about why we were here. What I was about to attempt.

Finally, we pulled into a clearing. Meadow-like in all but size. Vast, surrounded by trees. I turned off the engine, the sudden silence almost jarring.

For a moment, we sat there, neither of us moving.

"This is it?" I asked, glancing over at him.

He nodded. "Yeah,” a hand wrapped around me knee, his touch warm and reassuring. “You ready?”

I exhaled, suddenly nervous. “Not even a little bit.”

There was a creaking of metal and leather as he moved, his hand lifting from my knee to turn my face towards him.

His eyes searched in mine, his brow furrowing. “I wish we had more time.”

My hands dropped from the steering wheel to my lap, my eyes dropping from his. “It’s so easy to forget,” I mumbled. “The path that led me here, to you. The terrible thing that triggered all of this wonder. So easy to forget that I don’t have all the time in the world.”

His fingers wrapped around me cheek. “I’m sorry.”

My eyes lifted back up to his. “What do you think will happen? If I do master it? If Valentina finds out that I can control it?”

I wondered if he could hear the strange mixture of things in my voice. The hope mingled with the dread.

I missed my family and my friends and my job. I missed the quaint, cosy, familiarity of my homeland.

But I would miss him more.

“I don’t know.”

Our eyes locked, and a thousand things went unsaid between us.

And then he patted my cheek with enough force that it stung, before he leaned in to press a quick peck on my lips. “C’mon, doll. Let’s do this.”

He was out of the car before I could argue.

Despite the ever-increasing thudding of my heart, I joined him. The crunch of leaves beneath my boots was loud in the stillness. The air smelled crisp, the faint scent of pine mixing with the earthy aroma of damp soil.

Bucky gestured for me to walk into the clearing, though he made no move to follow. 

I turned to face him, putting on my best brave smile. “You scared, Barnes?” I tried to tease, my voice coming out weak.

“Of you?” He taunted. “Never.”

Even with a decent distance between us, about ten metres or so, I could see the challenge sparkling in his eyes.

"So… how do I even start?" I asked, arms hanging awkwardly at my sides.

He crossed his arms, leaning back against the car, his eyes never leaving mine. "Don’t think too hard about it."

"Right, because that’s so easy." I muttered under my breath.

“Stop whining and get on with it!” He called, and I flipped a middle finger at him.

“You shouldn’t have been able to hear!”

He pointed a finger at his ear. “Super senses.”

I groaned, rubbing at my face with both hands before I shook out my arms, shifting on my feet until I was as comfortable as I could’ve been.

I closed my eyes, trying to remember the warmth of the sun on my skin, the way it had felt back in the city. Tried to dive down to the same place I’d pulled from when I’d made those daffodils bloom.

I imagined the heat of it, the golden light filling me from the inside out.

I remembered.

My nose twitched with the memory of the stale stench of alcohol and sweat. My tongue tingled, the ghost of the ferrous tang of blood mixing with an almost electric fizz. Phantom fingers, tearing and ripping into me.

Before, I’d been holding on to it so tightly. I’d been losing control, unleashing something.

This time, I was grappling. Reaching into that luminous void inside of me with a strain that I was sure I could feel in my muscles. Pulling and stretching and reaching so deep I worried for a moment that I’d lose myself in it.

I had no idea how long I searched for it, that something burning.

It stirred so slowly. Like roots emerging from a seed, like petals unfolding.

When I found it, I was surprised to realise that it was still soft and gentle and comfortable. There was no rage or fury to harden it now, no fear with which to forge it.

Not even those phantom memories could compete with the man that stood mere metres from me.

The scent of cedar, cinnamon, and soap—books and black-and-white films—that was real. The fading taste of mint from Bucky’s toothpaste, when he’d kissed me fresh from the shower.

The threat of Valentina? It was nothing. As much as it worried me, I knew deep in my heart that between us, there was very little Bucky and I couldn’t overcome.

I wasn’t losing control, this time. I wasn’t dancing on the edge of sanity. I wasn’t sure I had ever been quite so lucid, so clear of thought.

The warmth that spread through me wasn’t burning, not hot or smoking or acrid or crackling. The electricity hummed through me, making my fingers and toes tingle with anticipation.

No screaming, no roaring.

It bloomed, slow and quiet. It was the first rays of light peeking through the clouds after weeks of rain. It was the first kiss of warmth in the air after a long, cold winter. The first hint of gold on the eastern horizon, on the dawn of the day that followed the longest night.

Not a weapon. Not heat and flames and screaming.

Radiance. Light. Life.

With it came a realisation, a revelation.

The fire inside me, the energy that thrummed through my veins, was not something to be tamed or wielded. Trying to hold on too tightly, trying to force it into submission, was what lead to chaos, to destruction.

Valentina had hoped that Bucky would teach me how to control the weapon inside me. And, in some miraculous way, he had. He’d shown me something far more powerful.

I didn’t need to control it. I needed to trust it.

To trust myself.

It was a part of me, as natural and integral as my heartbeat. The potential for destruction would always be a part of me too, but it would never be the whole story.

I thought of Bucky. Of the shadows in his past and the weight he carried. He had every reason to see himself as a weapon, to let the world define him by the destruction he had been forced to bring. But he hadn’t. He had chosen to shape that part of himself into something good, something meaningful. Instead of wallowing in his guilt, in the darkness of those shadows, he had chosen to take his pain, his potential for devastation, and turned it into strength, into compassion, into bravery.

Just as the Winter Soldier was an indelible part of Bucky, the fire was an indelible part of me. It wasn’t a weapon unless I made it one. It wasn’t destruction unless I let it be.

Like Bucky, I could choose what to do with my potential.

I chose to stop fighting, and let it burn.

It was hard, to separate my senses from what was going on inside, and what was going on around me. To figure out if the warmth I could feel was the imagined sensation inside my head, or if the air really had heated. Was the roaring in my ears just the rush of my blood, or was it something else? Could I really see light behind my eyelids, or was my mind playing tricks on me?

Slowly, I cracked one eye open, peeking.

It was offensively bright.

So bright that my eyes scrunched up in protest, and there was no question as to whether or not that light was real.

I forced my eyes to open, strained them against the defensive aching, and tried to see.

It was like trying to look through a sunbeam. Like trying to peer through a curtain of fire.

Through the brightness, through the growing pain in my head, through the flames, my eyes  locked on to the brightest blue, wide with wonder.

Bucky had taken a step forward, his right-hand hovering somewhere in front of him, waist-high, as if reaching for me. My hand mirrored his movement, drawn as if by some irresistible magnetic force.

He did not flinch away.

I blinked, and my focus dropped. Like someone had flicked a switch, the light was gone. The temperature dropped, the roaring in my ears stopped, and time, for that brief moment, seemed to stand still.

And then Bucky was moving, crossing the distance between us with all of his usual swagger. His eyes never left mine, his gaze unwavering. Not an ounce of fear in him, as his arms wrapped around me. He felt warm, warmer than his usual enhanced body heat and the metal of his arm did not hold the same chill it usually did.

It was hot, like it’d been sitting in the sun on a summer’s day.

It was bizarrely comforting.

I melted into him, my own arms winding around his back, holding him as tightly as I dared, afraid that if I let go, I would shatter.

Our foreheads touched, and the world faded away. Our breathing synced, his heartbeat thudding steadily against my chest, mine tripping over itself in response.

My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt as his hand cupped the back of my neck, holding me close.

We hovered in that space, suspended in time, our lips a breath apart.

It wasn’t a decision. It wasn’t a revelation.

It was the easiest truth I’d ever known. “I love you.”

Our lips brushed as we spoke the words in sync, even our smiles seemed to match. The kiss was not urgent, wasn’t demanding.

I wasn’t burning now, I was melting.

His tongue brushed against mine, and I could feel his laughter vibrate through his chest into mine.

“You really do taste like sunshine,” he whispered, his lips barely leaving mine.

A laugh of my own got caught in my throat as Bucky kissed me deeper. The heat in my veins seemed to flare in response.

For all I was aware of my surroundings, the forest could have been on fire and I didn’t care.

I’d let the world burn if it meant Bucky would keep kissing me like this.

When we finally pulled apart, our foreheads rested against each other, our breathing slow and shared. Bucky’s thumb traced a gentle line along my jaw, his eyes still closed, his smile soft and content. “You’re incredible,” he murmured.

I leaned into him, pressing my lips to his cheek, a quiet promise of more. “You’re not too bad yourself, Barnes.”

We stayed like that for a moment longer, holding onto the quiet before the world would come crashing back in. But for now, it was just us—no fears, no powers spiralling out of control, no threats lurking in the shadows.

Just us.

Notes:

Something a little softer and fluffier 🥰 Thank you for sticking with me. Lots of love as always! ❤️‍🔥

Chapter 17: With Guns and Good Luck

Summary:

Not with guns and good luck, and not with Bucky goddamn Barnes.

I woke to the sound of a click. The modern recreation of an old-fashioned camera.

I jolted, the seatbelt across my lap pulling taught as I choked on my own spit.

Bucky was shameless, his phone in his hand, pointed right at me.

“Did you take a photo of me sleeping?!” I accused when I’d stopped coughing.

“You looked so adorable, I couldn’t help myself,” he teased.

I wiped the corner of my mouth with the back of my hand, feeling the crusting line of drying drool. “I’m dribbling, for fuck’s sake!”

“Yeah,” he said, grinning at his phone, “You do that a lot.”

“Such a jerk,” I grumbled, clumsily undoing my seatbelt and almost falling out of the car.

Bucky was there in a heartbeat, one arm wrapped around me, holding me up. “So grumpy when you’re sleepy.”

My retort died in my mouth, coming out as a giant yawn.

I didn’t remember making it up the stairs, or into the apartment, or, indeed, into bed. There was nothing but a whole lot of blank blackness between leaving the car and waking up the next morning.

I was alone when I woke, the sunlight streaming in from the window. Part of me was tempted to roll over and go back to sleep, but the scent of coffee tickled my nose, and the faint sounds of Bucky in the kitchen had me rising, the cold air calling out goosebumps on my exposed legs and arms. I smiled down at myself, dressed only in my underwear and one of Bucky’s t-shirts.

“Did you take my clothes off while I was unconscious?” I accused from the doorway, watching him potter around the kitchen dressed in jeans and a vest.

He paused, turning to face me, a tea towel clenched in his metal hand. “Is that a problem?” He asked, one brow raised.

I padded over on cold, bare feet, leaning against the counter opposite him. “I’m just sorry I missed it.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone so tired,” there was concern in his eyes as they traced over my face. “You fell asleep standing up. And you didn’t move, all night.” One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Normally you toss and turn and move so much I wonder if you’re getting any rest at all. But you were so still.” He closed the distance between us, his fingers curling around my face, “It scared me.”

“I’m sorry I scared you,” I said softly. “How long was I out?”

“Seventeen hours.”

I sucked in air through clenched teeth, “Blimey.”

He hummed his agreement, leaning in to press his lips against mine, not shying away from any morning breath I might have had. “I missed you.”

I smiled against his lips, the growl of my stomach interrupting me. “What’s for breakfast?”

I heard the soft flump of fabric hitting the floor, and then Bucky’s hand was gone from my face, his fingers curving around the backs of my thighs as he lifted me on to the countertop.

I gasped, the hard surface cold on my bare skin. Bucky’s eyes were gleaming, the smirk on his mouth entirely sinful.

And then those smirking lips were on mine, my legs hooking around his back as his hands stroked down the ticklish skin behind my knees. His tongue caressed mine, teeth nipping at my lips.

His fingers made a reverse journey up my legs, one side almost burning hot, the other chilled enough to make me shudder. They disappeared under the hem of his shirt, following the curve of my hips and the dip of my waist before cupping my breasts. My legs wrapped tighter around him, bringing his hips flush to mine. His hardness strained against the denim, pressing against the growing heat at my centre with a friction that was as delicious as it was infuriating.

I groaned into his mouth, and I could feel the sound snap something inside him. His fingers clenched, sinking into the soft flesh so hard it almost hurt.

His teeth were on my neck, biting bruises into the places he knew would turn me to putty in his hands.

He ripped the shirt over my head, discarding it on the floor before his hands were back on me. His lips and tongue and teeth trailed slowly, so slowly, down my neck, over the swell of my breasts.

His tongue flicked against my nipple, my hips bucking against him and my head falling back as I moaned.

His mouth was so hot it almost felt like I was burning where he touched me, my overly sensitive skin throbbing as his tongue switched sides, the cold air catching on the dampness and making my nerves sing.

Fingers hooked in the waistband of my underwear, peeled them down my legs. He pulled back just enough to look at me, completely naked and sprawled before him, my chest heaving, my skin flushed and bruising and goose pimpled.

He reached for my ankles, bringing my legs up to rest against his shoulders. His head turned, his lips pressing gently against the insides of my shins before he bent to bury his head between my thighs.

There was no teasing, this time. He tasted me as if he were starving, and I was ambrosia beneath his tongue.

I collapsed against the worktop, my back bowing off the table as he feasted upon me, his metal arm stretching across my hips to hold me in place as I writhed. One of my hands found his hair, gripping so tightly it should have been painful.

Instead, Bucky groaned against me, the sound making all sorts of wonderful sensations. The scratch of his beard against my sensitive skin had my head spinning, and when his fingers sank into me, I made a sound so loud that it echoed against the tiles.

His fingers pumped in and out of me, curling and making me see stars behind my closed eyes.

I was on fire. I was burning so hot the apartment must be nothing more than cinders around us.

I didn’t care. I couldn’t. There was nothing in the world that mattered except for Bucky’s face between my thighs, bringing me to a climax that turned the stars to supernovae.

On and on it went, his metal hand pinning me to the countertop, his mouth and fingers not letting up for a moment, not giving me a single second of respite from the pleasure that threatened to consume me until my legs were trembling, and my moans had turned to a sound almost like a sob.

It was only then that his tongue slowed, his lips pressing against my inner thighs so softly.

He stepped back, withdrawing his fingers from me, his eyes holding mine as he raised them to his lips and licked them clean like he’d just eaten the most delicious meal of his life.

I sat up on my elbows, my bones feeling like jelly, and let my breathing slowly calm.

“Best breakfast I ever had,” he teased.

I laughed, “’s alright for you,” I mumbled. “I’m still starving.”

He grinned, leaning down to press his lips briefly against mine before pulling away to find me food. He paused, the expression on his face shifting into something between amusement and amazement.

“I can’t believe it,” he said quietly, shaking his head.

“What?”

He raised a finger, pointing at something on the opposite side of the counter I was still perched on.

He was pointing at the fiddle leaf fig, which before had still been limp and still slightly brown -not quite as dead as it’d looked in the shop, but by no means healthy.

Now it looked the very picture of health. The leaves tall and proud and so verdantly green.

I sat up straight, running a hand through my tangled hair, frowning at the plant. “Well I never.” I shook my head, annoyed. “I’ve been pandering to that thing for weeks and that’s what gets it to perk up?!”

Bucky looked between my scowl, and the perfect-looking plant, and then erupted into laughter.

After a breakfast cobbled from what was left in the fridge, we decided a walk to the farmer’s market would be a good idea.

The street was bustling with all sorts of people; tech pros in too-tight navy suits, despite it being the weekend; young people in trendy clothes, canvas bags slung over shoulders; old ladies with bags on wheels watching the rest of us with a frustrated sort of amusement. The sky was grey, dark with the threat of rain.

Bucky’s hand was solid in mine, Vibranium fingers twined with mine as if it were second nature. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed almost relaxed. Not quite at ease, his eyes still darted over each person who crossed our path, but he wasn’t tense.

He chatted to the vendor on the fruit stall, an alarmingly in-depth conversation about plums. For a moment, I could see the Bucky that he’d been eighty years ago; easy-going, friendly, a charisma that was almost magnetic. I looked around as they talked, an easy smile stuck to my face. I wondered where the New York honey came from, imagined what the bees would’ve thought of the flower stall right next to the honey. I found myself drawn to those flowers, as the bees would be, wanted to see if they smelled as pretty as they looked. “I’m just gonna-” I murmured, untangling my fingers from Bucky’s and gesturing over to the flowers.

His head turned, eyes narrowing just slightly as he made a split-second assessment of the safety before smiling and nodding.

The lady on the flower stall smiled at me as I approached. “Hello,” I said softly, feeling slightly out of place.

“Now you don’t sound like you’re from around here,” she teased with a smile.

I laughed, only slightly awkwardly. “Maybe I could pass for a New Yorker if I kept my mouth shut?”

She assessed me for one long moment. “Nah, you look far too polite.”

“I’ll choose to take that as a compliment,” I grinned, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck prickle as I sensed eyes on me. I assumed Bucky was watching me the same way I’d watched him. “These are beautiful,” I said, putting the feeling to the back of my mind as I gestured to the array of autumnal-coloured blooms before us.

I looked over my shoulder as the lady gave me the brief history of her business, watching Bucky pick through the plums, handing the ones deemed good enough to the vendor who in turn placed them in a paper bag, his eyes focused.

If not him then-

I turned back, the flower lady’s brow had furrowed, her eyes touched with a hint of confusion and her voice faltered just slightly before she picked back up.

Behind her, my eyes locked with a pair that were surprisingly familiar. This time, he did not run. He stayed, staring at me from the edge of an alleyway, raising one hand to gesture for me to follow.

I blinked, focusing back on the vendor who had moved to hold a perfect red rose out to me. “A rose for an English rose,” she said, friendly smile still on her face.

I took the flower from her, a thorn pricking at my finger. “Thank you,” I said absentmindedly.

My instincts were at war with one another. Curiosity pulled me towards the alleyway, strangely intense. Self-preservation pulled me back, to Bucky, to safety.

I was an arm’s reach from the alleyway before I realised what I’d been doing. The man had retreated further into the alleyway, as if sheltering from the chill and the start of the rain.

I shook my head, coming to my senses as I turned away, making to rush back to Bucky.

I couldn’t see him anywhere.

A hand wrapped around my wrist, the cold, damp air uncomfortable against the suddenly exposed skin of my forearm.

There was a sharp, stinging scratch and I wondered for a moment if I’d pricked myself again.

My vision blurred; my voice caught in my throat. The stem slipped from my hand and fell to the ground, red petals vibrant against the grey before everything went black.

 

╒══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╕

Valentina

Valentina glanced at the man in the passenger seat, willing the scant few braincells he had to pick up on what she was putting down.

She huffed. “Who better to hide it, right? Cap’s left-hand man, an English agent. It’s almost too obvious.”

The man frowned at her, confusion still plastered across his face.

 “Are you sayin’ we steal his arm?” He balked, the idea seemingly so abhorrent he didn’t even want to think about it.

Valentina sighed again. “No, you big idiot. Her. She’s the one you want, he’s just a glorified bodyguard. Get her away from him and it’ll be a breeze.”

In Val’s eyes, it was the perfect solution. Two birds, one stone.

Take down the criminal group that’d been a thorn in her side for months and use her to do so.

It was getting embarrassing now.

She’d been following the same leads on the Vibranium that they had following, somehow always one step behind even if nothing had come to fruition. There had been whispers of shipments, scant amounts of the metal used for experiments so secret even she didn’t know about it. She knew it was nonsense, but she needed it. Wanted it so badly she would follow every dead end, every ridiculous lead.

The girl was embarrassing her too. Every day they questioned her about it. Had their gamble paid off? Had she, at last, proved herself to be worth the investment? The time, the money, the resources.

Val had managed to get them off her back for a while. The daffodils in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden had done that. “How wonderful,” she’d told them, “that she’s capable of more than we even imagined.” And for a while the talk had shifted, from her use as a weapon to something more resourceful. With power like that, she could safeguard crops, feed a country, end goddamn world hunger.

But it wasn’t enough.

They knew what she was capable of. And they couldn’t forget that kind of potential.

This was her last chance. Barnes and the girl had played them good, leaving nothing at the safehouse but the contract, an obnoxious yellow note stuck to the page that gave them every legal right to leave.

Valentina was just surprised they hadn’t done so earlier. She could only assume the girl had been hurt in the chase.

And what a disappointment that had been. Getting the girl into a situation threatening enough to try and coax out that power with Barnes around had been a logistical nightmare.

She hadn’t for one second considered that the Brit would know how to shoot a gun.

That error in judgement had cost her weeks of work. Months, now, actually.

And desperate times called for desperate measures.

She would plant a lead of her own. Lead the criminals to her, let them try and get the information they so desperately sought out of her and let her destroy them.

Not with guns and good luck, and not with Bucky goddamn Barnes.

╘══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╛

Notes:

I am so grateful that you're still here. We're coming towards the end of the story and it is bittersweet!!

Lots of love as always ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Chapter 18: A Different Perspective

Summary:

“Thought I’d get a different perspective on the situation,” I grumbled as they heaved the chair upright.

Consciousness came slowly.

Slowly and painfully. Each thought was sluggish, bringing with it a pounding throb to the back of my skull.

It was raining. I could smell the deep, earthy petrichor beyond the nose-wrinkling stench of rust.

After a moment, I could hear it too. The sound was off—between the metallic plinks of raindrops on metal, there were strange pauses—not an absence of sound, but a cottony sort of flump.

Sleet, I realised eventually, through the treacle of my thoughts.

The realisation seeped into me with a chill, and my body shuddered. Something scratched at my wrists and elbows, the wrong-side of comfort to tickle but with a similarly frustrating insistence.

It was cold. The air was biting, seeping through my exposed skin into my very bones, settling alongside the dread.

It took a long time for my eyes to open, even as my other senses stirred. My eyelids were leaden, the effort of lifting them too much to face when everything else was already so overwhelming.

The first thing I saw through the thin gap between my eyelids was grey. Blurred shades of grey that, with a few heavy blinks, started to take form. A concrete floor. Corrugated metal walls, dull and dented, flecked with rust, parting here and there to reveal cracks of clouded sky. Strange hunks of twisted metal, vaguely mechanical, smelling of oil.

There was a desk, covered in rusted tools. Overhead, a single bare lightbulb swung in the draft, buzzing just within hearing range. Three chairs—one at the desk, one against the far wall, and one that I was tied to.

The rope binding me chafed at the delicate, exposed skin of my wrists and elbows. I wriggled my hands, unsure if the tingle in my fingers was from the tightness of my bindings or the lack of clothing I was wearing.

My shoes were haphazardly thrown in one corner, the white stark against the grey. My socks were already smudged with greasy dust. My jumper and coat were gone, leaving me awkwardly sat in my vest, the skin of my arms and chest mottled and pink.

I pushed against the floor, trying to shift my weight, but the ropes held fast, biting into my skin. The chair’s metal frame pressed into my back, rusted corners digging into my jeans.

Outside, the sound of boots. The clanking of chains. The groan of ageing metal as the warehouse door opened.

I blinked against the dull light streaming in from the door before they quickly closed it.

Three men. One of them familiar.

“What is going on?” I groaned, my voice hoarse. There was no indication that they’d heard me.

The man whose face I’d seen all over Brooklyn the past few weeks sat on the chair across the room. Another man; small and fair, hairline receding, eyes bloodshot, perched on the edge of the desk and fixed me with a glare.

The third man, the biggest and burliest by far, pulled the remaining chair across the concrete. The scraping and screeching of the metal hurt my ears, making my head throb. I cringed, trying to tuck an ear into my shoulder.

“What the fuck is going on?” I said again, my voice marginally stronger.

There was too much clouding my brain for me to feel the fear that should have been paralysing me. Too confused, too curious, too full of whatever drug they’d pumped into me.

The burly man leaned forward, flexing his fingers like he was imagining wrapping them around my throat. “Look, lady, just tell us what we wanna know, and we’ll let you go.”

I blinked, my eyelids still heavy and slow to open. “What d’you want to know?”

He was still smiling. “All about you, of course.”

“Nothing to tell,” I mumbled, my words slurring slightly. “Where are we? Who are you?”

The attempt at a smile dropped, his jaw setting in a look of impatient anger. “A better question is, who are you?”

The cold air constricted my airways, catching in my lungs and making me cough. “I’m nobody,” I said, in all sincerity. “I don’t know who you think I am, or why you’ve brought me here, but you’ve got the wrong person.”

The two men in front of me looked at each other, their expressions plainly saying can you believe this? The smaller man glanced back at the familiar one, who nodded.

“You’re exactly who we think you are, sweetheart,” the bigger man sneered.

The smaller man smirked, tapping a rhythm on the rusted desk with one chewed-up fingernail. “The newest obsession of the CIA,” he added, eyes gleaming. “And what an honour for you to be assigned their biggest, baddest bodyguard.”

“The Winter Soldier.” The burly man’s voice held a strange mixture of adoration and fear. “You must be special.”

The cloud of drugs and unconsciousness cleared in an instant, giving way to a cold, all-consuming terror.

Bucky and I had thought we’d figured it all out—the people following us at the bookstore, the car chase. We’d assumed it had all been Val’s work, a scheme to get me to play my hand.

We’d miscalculated. We’d been so much more right than we could ever have realised.

Or rather, Bucky had.

“You’d become a conspiracy theory,” he’d joked. “A secret government weapon.”

It was painfully, explicitly obvious to me now that Bucky’s assessment had been spot-fucking-on.

“What a hot commodity you are,” the smaller man said, unrestrained greed in his eyes. “Not just for what you can do, but for who we’d screw over by taking it.”

“You’ve got the wrong person,” I tried to sound certain, confident, calm.

I failed. The panic leached into my voice, making my words wobble.

Two matching, sickening grins stretched across their faces. “No, we don’t.”

“We’ve got exactly the right person.”

“The only thing we don’t know,” one said.

“Is how to get it out of you,” the other finished.

“You can’t,” I whimpered, my voice perilously close to pleading.

“We can,” one man said.

“And we will,” the other promised.

The bigger man leaned in, just enough to make his presence loom larger, his voice a low, knowing murmur. “Hope you’re ready, sweetheart.”

Then they walked out, leaving the space heavy with their words. The familiar ferret-faced man hesitated, his gaze flicking to mine—less hostile than his colleagues—before he, too, disappeared through the door.

And I was abruptly alone. Alone with the fear and the dread and the goddamn anticipation.

I swallowed hard, the fear crawling up my spine. I had to think. I had to do something.

But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t fight.

The fear grew, colder and deeper inside me, countered only by the rock-solid certainty that Bucky was coming. That, I did not doubt. Not for a second.

But what would he find when he did?

Shit.

Shit.

I tried, desperately, to get free. I yanked and pulled and twisted at the ropes that bound me, the fibres cutting into my raw skin. The friction burned, my wrists slick with blood and sweat. I tried to brace my feet against the cold concrete, to push up, to shift in any way that might loosen my bindings—but the knots held firm, biting deeper with every movement.

The desperation made me clumsy. With one particularly energetic tug, the chair tipped, wobbled on two legs for one heart-sinking moment before I toppled me to the concrete with a thud. The impact reverberated through my body, first into the muscles and bones of my upper arm, and then through the right side of my body. My neck snapped to the side, my teeth clashing against each other.

My leg, the side of my knee, my hip. All now pulsing with a deep, throbbing ache.

A tiny, pathetic whimper, lost to the cold and the concrete. “Fuck.”

I took a few slow, deep breaths before I tried again, attempting to wiggle out of the bindings that held me and when that didn’t work, tried to right myself.

I even tried to inch my way towards the door like some kind of deformed beetle, but it was useless.

The energy drained out of me as the warmth did, leeching into the concrete.

It would be so easy for the fear to take over. So simple to give in to hopelessness.

For a second, the fear was stronger than the certainty. Maybe Bucky wasn’t coming. Maybe he had given up, maybe Val had gotten to him first, convinced him that I wasn’t worth the time or the effort.

The thought clawed at my throat, threatening to take root.

But no. No. Bucky was coming. That, I refused to doubt.

To pass the hours, in a horizontal heap on the cold concrete floor, I imagined it.

The three men face-to-face with the weapon they so desperately wanted, regretting every moment they spent seeking it. Bucky looking like some God of retribution that would put the Winter Solider to shame.

The violence and gore that would follow.

I was done. Done with men trying to take what wasn’t theirs, with fear and with force. Done with being made to feel helpless, hopeless. Done with people wanting things from me that weren’t mine to give.

The fire inside me sparked, a tiny little glimmer in the deep, dark depths.

And that fire fuelled the realisation.

This was what they wanted. This was what the men in the car had been after. The power and potential. The weapon.

They thought I could control it, they thought the CIA could control it. Could control us.

Yeah, we had been right. Far more than we thought.  It had been someone else, but behind that was her.

The first time hadn’t been enough—just a test, a spark. She needed a fire.

So she rewrote the script.

And so she had cut and pasted and edited the story with the most perfect precision, framing me as the CIA’s latest human-shaped weapon. One that was protected by perhaps the world’s most notorious human-shaped weapon. And anyone with a handful of braincells knew that the Winter Solider was coveted by many. Zemo had tried it. Madripoor, too. On the right market, to the right people, Bucky was worth billions.

But he was all but untouchable.

I was smaller, softer, weaker. Vulnerable. Get me away from him and I was easy.

Valentina had sold them the perfect weapon.

The flames flared, in protest or in rage or in the bone-deep need to protect. They sang to me, kept me company in the dark and made me promises of freedom and revenge and power. It coiled around my ribs, pressing against my skin like it was desperate to break free. My fingertips ached, tingling with the need to burn. It would be so easy.

Just a breath, just a thought.

But if I let go, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to stop.

I could still feel that smoulder, deep in my soul, the magic singing to the darker parts of my mind that wanted to burn everyone and everything keeping me chained here to ashes.

I was tempted, I was so very tempted. And the longer I waited, the less sure I was that if I let go I’d ever be able to stop.

But I couldn’t.

I wouldn’t.

 

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚─── ┘

 

The cracks of grey sky I could see through the walls were getting darker, closer to charcoal now.

Footsteps. Chains. Keys in locks.

The protest of rusted hinges.

Three pairs of eyes staring down at me, a mixture of annoyance, confusion and amusement on their faces. “The fuck you doin’ down there?”

“Thought I’d get a different perspective on the situation,” I grumbled as they heaved the chair upright.

They looked at each other. No words, just flickers of something between them. Hesitation. Maybe even reluctance.

A beat too long passed.

Then, like a decision had finally been made, they moved. The bald man and the one with the weepy, bloodshot eyes were rummaging in their pockets.

The man who had been following me around New York looked a little green around the gills as he set a large, dark rectangular object in front of me. It looked heavy. Unfamiliar. Wires twisted out of it like veins, some snaking towards the floor, others curling up onto the desk like they were waiting.

I had no idea what it was. But I knew it wasn’t good.

The man with the receding hairline dropped a rather mangled manila folder on the rickety desk. It was tattered, the edges bent and torn and ragged.

And from the pocket of the biggest man came a horseshoe-shaped chunk of what looked like curved, black rubber, which he held out towards my face, as if in offering.

I stared blankly at it, frowning as I tried to figure out exactly what it was, and what he wanted me to do with it.

My eyes flickered up to him, the frown still very much present.

The big man exhaled sharply, clearly losing patience.

“To bite down on,” he said as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.

I blinked.

There was another beat of silence, with that bit of black rubber hovering in the air between us.

And then, with a frustrated huff, he threw it across the room. “Break your teeth then. See if I care.”

Before I could even begin to ask what the fuck was going on, he turned away from me, a disgusted glare mangling on his face.

They moved with purpose, faces set in varying expressions of determination.

The biggest man leaned against the wall next to the desk, kicking the mouth guard away with a sneer. The smaller man was flipping through the creased paper in the file, occasionally holding a sheet out for the bigger man’s inspection.

The familiar man was fumbling with the wires on the floor in front of me, his movements clumsy. For a moment, I wondered why, until I noticed that his hands were shaking.

My blood ran cold.

No one spoke. The silence stretched, tightening around my throat.

The smaller man at the desk straightened suddenly, turning the paper towards his burly colleague. For a fraction of a second, I caught a glimpse of what was on the paper.

A human-shaped diagram.

The big man gave a curt not, his jaw and fists clenching.

My eyes dropped to the desk—a chaotic mess of redacted text, blurry photos, and crude, hand-drawn diagrams.

The smaller man lifted another piece of paper from the table, leaving another blurred black-and-white photo on the top of the pile. This one had been annotated, seemed to have been copied so many times that it was really rather hard to distinguish.

I could make out the shape of a man, tied to a chair in a way not dissimilar to my position now. His head was thrown back, his face scrunched in agony.  There were wires stuck to his temples, to the bare skin of his chest, the inside of one elbow.

Only the one, because he didn’t have a left arm.

Recognition sank into my bones like ice.

I knew that face. I knew it now almost as well as I knew my own. I’d traced the curve of his jaw, brushed my fingers over the tiny creased that lined his eyes and forehead.

Bucky.

My lungs stopped working.

"Let’s get started," the big man grunted.

 My body jerked as hands clamped onto me—two sets—one gripping my arm, the other fisting my hair and wrenching my head back.

I thrashed, my wrists burning against the ropes. “Wait—”

A cold press of metal at my temple. The snap of a wire being secured. Another against my collarbone, just above my hammering pulse.

“Wait.” My voice came out thinner this time. “Please—”

The bloodshot man flicked a switch.

A second passed. A heartbeat. Not enough time to breathe, but enough to know it was coming.

Fire tore through me.

Nothing could have prepared me for that moment. Not the midnight alleyway or the sun-soaked forest clearing.

There was a race going on inside my body, a fight between an immovable object and an unstoppable force. Electricity, flooding me from the outside in, filling my veins, creeping in to each and every god damn atom of my being until it was almost all I knew.

The fire, which I had been so desperately searching for earlier, responded with the force of an atomic bomb.

I had the tiniest fraction of a second to respond. A moment that paused in the space between my heartbeats, allowing me just the barest thought of deliberation. Only because I had been here before, on the precipice of fire and destruction, did I have enough time to decide.

Before, in the city streets, I had met this moment with screaming, with a fierce fear-fuelled anger, and I had let it go.

In the forest, I had met the fire with acceptance. I had surrendered myself to trusting it and letting go had been a declaration of love.

Now, in some dank, cold warehouse somewhere outside of New York City, I held on tight.

It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do; physically, mentally, some strange part of my existence that was simultaneously both. To endure the pain, to sit with the power flooding through every part of my body, mind and soul and to just hold on.

It took every ounce of self-control. Every fraction of focus. Every last, burning drop of willpower.

It would be so easy, to let go.

In an instant I would be free, and everything and everyone in my path would be ash.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t. I knew, with increasing certainty, that I could control the power; not without effort, not without sacrifice, but I could.

I wouldn’t.

I was no longer tied to the stake; I was gripping it, forcing myself into the fire willingly, without letting it consume me.

I managed only because of him.

We had worked too hard, for too long, for me to give in now.

Bucky had promised that he wouldn’t let them turn me into a weapon. I’d promised myself the same. And I wasn’t going to let anyone break that promise.

And so I let the electricity pulse through me, as hot as any flame. I let them shake the marrow from my bones, let them shatter me.

And I did not let go.

Notes:

Ooft! Sometimes the only way out is through.
Better things are coming soon, promise. 💕
Thank you so so so much from the bottom of my heart for sticking with me and my silly little story. Lots of love ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Chapter 19: So Much More Than a Weapon

Summary:

It was so much more than a weapon.
Just like Bucky.
Just like me.

It was dark. It was cold.

It hurt.

There were moments when I felt nothing. Saw nothing, heard nothing. In those moments, I was numb, consumed by a blackness so thick it overtook every part of me.

In the other moments, I felt everything. The pain was a multi-faceted thing. Layered and complex and I could feel each part of it with such precision. A dull sort of ache in my arm from my shoulder to my elbow, the raw warmth at my wrists where the rope had burned and chafe the skin to bleeding flesh, an itching at my ankles that was almost as bad as the pain.

Electricity, like lightning, the ghost of the path it had taken through skin and muscle and bone, through veins and capillaries, until it had consumed me. It was a strange sort of pain; unlike anything I had ever known. Vibrant, bright, white-hot.

And the fire, still smouldering over the embers of my self-control.

I could still smell the oil, mixed with the damp, tangy scent of drying vomit and the metallic earthiness of blood as it crusted on the concrete.

Time lurched. Stalled. Stretched. Collapsed.

I couldn't be sure if the streaks of light from the floor had passed over hours or days. 

There was nothing I could do but wait, and in those sun lit moments, I daydreamed.

Not a flicker of doubt, not a single shadowed second. Bucky was coming.

 I played the mental images of him over and over. He would wear the rage so well.

I wondered if they’d realised yet, that Valentina had been playing them, hoping that I’d be pushed into killing them. It wasn’t them I was angry at, not really.

These were desperate men, following a lead that they hoped would lead to their salvation. I pitied them.

I was going to fucking kill her.

Every single bit of this was her fault: that I was here in the first place, that I’d buried my only way of escaping, that blood would be on Bucky’s hands.

Time passed. Streaks of sunlight moved. The light faded; the temperature dropped. I stopped the subconscious tugging at the ropes that bound me, stopped fidgeting. I even stopped shivering, my muscles settling into a rigid shape of determination.

Beneath my stillness, my tenuous grip on my sanity was fraying. Part of me knew how dangerous that was, slipping sanity had been the very thing to get me into trouble in the first place.

My thoughts swam and stilled and then swirled – a mixed carousel of nonsense; flashes of childhood memories, of gardens and flowers and sunshine. Fragments of sentences I wasn’t sure I had heard or dreamed or imagined. Sections of song lyrics I hadn’t heard in years, perhaps something my mum had sung to me, a lullaby, or a hymn we’d sung at church.

The pain persisted, and I was oddly grateful for its company. It reminded me I was still here, still tethered to my body despite the best efforts of the men. My fingers, curled in tight fists, had long since gone numb. My shoulders ached from the awkward angle I’d slipped into in the chair, in a kind of bone-deep ache that made the rest of me feel like I was melting out of my skin.

But it didn’t matter. Not the pain, not my slipping grip on my sanity.

Because Bucky would be here soon.

It wasn’t a hope, it was the truth. As real and solid and certain as gravity. It didn’t matter where I was or what they’d done to me, he would find me, and everything would be okay.

I let my eyes slip closed, just for a few moments at the time, and tried to picture his face. Not the hard, sharp line of his jaw or the myriad of colours in his eyes but the little things that maybe only I knew. The exact curve of his lips when he was trying not to laugh. The little quirk to his brow when he said something particularly salacious. The look somewhere between smugness and hunger he wore when he made me blush.

When my eyes next opened, the streaks of sunlight had disappeared, the cracks in the walls now the colour of dusk.

I bounced between my resigned, determined waiting and drifting into some semblance of sleep for a few seconds at a time; my chin bouncing off my chest every few moments, my neck aching with the jarred movements.

At first, I thought it was a dream, bleeding into the strange half-consciousness I’d settled into. A rumble, faint and distant, vaguely like thunder.

The noise stayed. It didn’t fade like a dream should have. It pressed at the edges of my mind, insistent.

The slow realisation that this wasn’t a creation of my subconscious.

It was real.

Real and growing louder with each passing second.

Clearly a man-made sound now, not thunder but something mechanical. An engine.

Reality snapped me back to wakefulness like a rubber band.

Other sounds followed: frantic feet pounding on the concrete outside, a sort of rustling that made me think of grass or leaves, groans and creaks and thuds that seemed to come from the walls themselves.

All at once, there was movement. Noise and light and movement and complete chaos.

The familiar man literally fell through the door, scrabbling in the dust with a frantic desperation that made him clumsy. With two shaking hands, he forced the door closed and was dragging the desk in a desperate attempt at a barricade.

All the while, I watched him. He scrambled to his feet, wiping his dirt-caked hands on his jeans and turning to me with wide eyes in a pale, green-tinged face.

“Why do you always look like you’re on the verge of vomiting?” My voice was quiet, hoarse from screaming, I guessed. I tried to clear my throat.

He blinked. “It’s him.”

I laughed at that. Behind the overwhelming fear, I could hear just a touch of surprise in his voice.

“Of course it is,” I said. To me, this was the inevitable moment I had been waiting for. Had it really not occurred to them? Had they thought they’d hidden well enough that the super solider, ex-hydra assassin wouldn’t find them?

He gawped at me, mouth open, panting. He wiped his hands on his trousers again.

Faintly, I could hear my name being called. A slow smile spread across my face, I opened my mouth, filling my lungs with air.

The man lunged at me, dirty hands reaching for my mouth.

I twisted my head away, trying as best I could I keep his hands off me. “Do you really think,” I said around the fingers that were trying to cover my words, “if he finds your hands on me, that it will end well for you?”

He froze. His hands fell from my face, leaving a clammy, earthy scent in their wake.

Rather than waste my voice on words, I tilted my head back and I shouted for him with every last ounce of strength I had in me.

The man had enough time to stumble back to the floor, to crawl into a corner with his hands thrown over his head before the door exploded.

The metal around the door curled inwards, the whole building itself shook and shrieked with the force of it. The desk shattered into a million tiny pieces, reduced to splinters and kindling.

My imagination had not done him justice. No image my fear-addled brain had conjured could compare to the man that stood before us now.

The last drops of sunset were glowing against the metal of his arm, streaking it in red that glowed like flames.

The blue of Bucky’s eye was ice, cold and hard and sharp as he took in my surroundings. The vomit on my shoes, the man whimpering in the corner, the wires still stuck to my skin, the blood crusted around my wrists. I watched the emotions flicker across his face; disgust, rage, confusion, horror, and, as his eyes settled on my face, relief.

He breathed my name, his eyes glistening.

I felt my bottom lip wobble. My knees buckled, though I had nowhere to fall. My breath caught and then shuddered loose in a sob.

“I didn’t do it,” I gasped, the air suddenly too thick. “She couldn’t make me do it.”

He crossed the distance between us in a heartbeat, falling to his knees in front of me, the gun he’d been holding discarded on the floor as his hands cupped my face oh so softly, as if I were made of glass.

In the forest clearing, when my magic had shone through me, Bucky had looked at me with awe. Now, in a dingy warehouse, covered in dust and sweat and overflowing tears, he looked at me with reverence.

There was movement in my peripheral vision, a barely audible mumbling that sounded like a mixture of prayers and gratitude before silence fell, and we were alone.

“You are absolutely incredible,” he whispered.

The sobs bubbled out of me, uncontrollable and all consuming. My head dropped to his shoulder, my tears soaking into his shirt. After a moment, the ever-present tension around my wrists was gone, one-by-one the wires disappeared, and his arms were around me. Gentle, delicate, barely touching me.

I wanted to crush myself against him, with no care for the aches or the pains or the shattered splinters of my radius. But my arms wouldn’t work. They were too heavy, too fragile, too overwhelmed with the sudden rush of blood to my fingertips for function.

By the time my tears had finally slowed, the sun had well and truly set. Bucky’s arms were still around me as he helped me stand, my legs almost as fragile as my arms. 

I made him stop before we reached the door, and I bent to retrieve the manilla folder, quickly tucking the pages away before Bucky could see what they were.

The only thing keeping me upright was Bucky’s arm, wrapped securely around my waist. My feet shuffled along the dirty floor, my toes so cold that they were numb.

 When concrete became grass, when I could see the shadow silhouettes of the trees against the dusky sky, it felt as if my soul sighed in relief.

I hadn’t realised how entwined with nature I was.

Even in the city, I hadn’t gone more than a few hours without seeing a trees or something.  I knew that nature was one of those things humans needed to be happy, that was by no means exclusive to me, but this was different.

It was almost as if a part of me had been missing. Not the burning, shining, glorious part. This was quiet and gentle; this was peaceful and calm. A bit I couldn’t quite describe, because it transcended words, went beyond human concepts and philosophy.

The minute my feet met the grass, frost melting through and dampening my socks, it flooded back into me. My senses seemed to sing with it; the smell of the earth, the sound of the breeze against the evergreen leaves, the twinkle of ice against gleaming green.

Perhaps it was just my imagination, my over-tired brain feeling things that weren’t real, but it was as if my soul was reaching for it, and in turn it was reaching for me. Beneath the cold, frozen ground, something was stirring.

It overwhelmed me. It drowned out the pain and the tiredness and the anger, if only for a moment.

The sound of tyres brought reality crushing back down. The obnoxious glare of headlights filled my vision with white, my head twinging with it, spots clouding my vision each time I blinked.

“What’s going on?” I mumbled, cringing closer into Bucky.

“Took her long enough,” He grumbled, his jaw clenched tight, his eyes pinched at the corners in clear annoyance.

Through my spotted vision, through the glare still assaulting my eyeballs, I watched a pair of high-heeled feet appear out of one of the car doors. Dressed in a smart, boring, corporate trouser suit. I wasn’t sure if the streak in her hair was white or if my bleached vision was just perceiving it as such.

Valentina.

The sight of her sparked something inside me.

The magic of nature was calm and peaceful and quiet. This was none of those things. It roared, it screamed, it tore through every fibre of my consciousness like wildfire. It took my anger, fed on it, and turned it into something deadly.

The very thing Valentina had wanted from me.

Filling up the very darkest of my thoughts with a tantalisingly tempting light.

The fire was in my veins, and it would be oh so easy to let it go. Let the flaming beast of whatever weird magic this was go and watch Valentina burn.

Every lick of flame, every spark and crackle, would be intentional. Painfully precise. She wanted me to control this power, to weaponise it, and what poetic justice it would be to use that weapon to destroy her.

I wanted to, so badly.

I couldn’t deny that I was tempted, not even to myself. I knew how good it would feel; the exhilarating, intoxicating rush of pure power, the burning heat of it, the satisfaction of burning that smug look right off Valentina’s face.

It would be so easy.

The frost around us was melting with a gentle hiss as the ice bypassed water and turned straight to steam. I watched Valentina’s eyes fall from my face to her feet, watched them widen as they took in the fleeing frost.

The air had warmed, now. From freezing to balmy in the blink of an eye.

Tiny green shoots had begun to sprout from the cracks in the frozen earth, defiant and unexpected, small but anything but insignificant.

She swallowed.

For a moment or two, or even ten, it would be one of the greatest feelings in the world.   

I had to close my eyes. Cut out the sight of her, no longer smug or smirking but scared.

It took three slow, deep breaths for the temptation to ease.

It would feel good, for that moment or two. One of the greatest feelings in the world; exhilarating and intoxicating and undeniably wonderful.

And then it would feel terrible. The guilt, the shame, the disappointment.

It wouldn’t be worth it. I’d be a criminal. Bucky too, probably. The CIA would be in turmoil, international relations thrown into a tizz.

And more than that, the effort that I’d gone to not to be a weapon. The effort Bucky had gone too. The time, and care and love that had gone into it.

Those were greater feelings. To be loved. To be cared for. To be with him.

The fire was still roaring and screaming, thrashing and tearing at me with a ferocity that should have scared me.

I was not scared.

I remembered that this magic too, could be soft.

In a forest somewhere just outside of New York, this magic had been gentle. Not violent and consuming, not a weapon of fear and fury. A part of my self, a part of my soul. Harmonious.

Just as the blazing glory of the sun was ultimately the most destructive force in the solar system, it too was life. It was warmth and light. It was days spent on beaches, it was sunflowers raising their faces to the sky, it was the spectacle of a spectrum through raindrops.

It was so much more than a weapon.

Just like Bucky. Just like me.

Seconds passed.

They were still glaring at one another.

“Can you two please stop the staring and take me home?” I sighed. Valentina's expression did not change as she turned her glare to me.

She shook her head. “You really didn’t do anything?”

“I really didn’t.” I confirmed, a sleepy sort of pride in my voice.

“That is so.... disappointing." She was almost pouting, her expression reminding me of a petulant toddler who had been told no.

“I’d be careful what you wish for, Val,” Bucky said, taunting. I looked at him, at his curved lips, the ice of his eyes.

I couldn’t be sure if Bucky knew, or whether he meant that in a more figurative sense.

But both literally and figuratively, it was true.

Valentina scoffed. “I mean this, sincerely.” She smiled at me, a saccharine, seething sort of thing. “I’d like to see her try.”

It took a second.

For me to loosen my grip on the leash that held that devastating potential, oh so slightly.

For the fragile, delicate, flammable handful of paper to catch.

For the tiny shoots, for the delicate roots, for the fragile whisps of plants to grow. Creeping and twisting around her ankles.

Just one second.

Light brighter than headlights burned in vision, no longer painful. The frost melted from the grass around me with a satisfying hiss as solid became liquid became gas. The heat against my cold, aching, broken body felt incredible. Like sinking into a bath, but better. So much better.

A heartbeat of silence passed between the three of us before I threw the folder at her feet, flaming pages fanning out on the grass for a moment before they curled into ash and dust.

Bucky’s hand tightened on my arm, and I knew he was watching the same thing I was; the photograph of him, in a position so similar to the one he had just pulled me from.

We would discuss it later, when the memory wasn’t quite so fresh, and the broken skin had scabbed over.

When I wasn’t on the verge of incinerating the Director of the CIA.

She looked up at me, her eyes wide, her skin pale.

I knew the fear in her eyes wasn’t because I had set fire to a handful of paper. That would have been ridiculous, when we all knew exactly how far the fire in me could spread, how completely it could consume. It wasn’t the flames themselves that sent that flicker of horror through her—it was what they represented.

It was because she was realising the extent of my control.

Complete. Unshaken. Absolute.

She had planned for an unpredictable wildfire, for an uncontrollable force that could be weaponised, guided, but never truly directed.

She had never considered this.

For me, standing before her, calm and composed, the fire bending to my will instead of the other way around.

For the power she thought she could claim to be something I had already mastered.

I watched it dawn on her face, the exact moment she realised her mistake.

She hadn’t created a weapon.

She had created something worse.

There was nothing more dangerous than power that refused to be held.

The power wasn’t just the fire, or the strange pull I had to the earth beneath me. It wasn’t a separate force to be tamed or studied or owned.

I was the power. Of life. Of death. Of both, simultaneously.

And I would never belong to her.

“That,” I said, nodding to the smouldering ashes at her feet, knowing full well she had been the one responsible for that information falling into those hands, “Is so disappointing.”

Bucky pulled me into him, a smile on his face despite the still-haunted look in his eyes. His lips found my hair.

“God, I love you.” He murmured against the top of my head.

I was too tired to feel the satisfaction of it. Instead, I yawned. “Can we go home now please?”

As he pulled me away, time slowed to a crawl. In what felt like slow-motion, just as I was turning away from Valentina, I watched as something shifted in the ashes. Green shoots, buds, leaves unfurling – unfazed by the smouldering heat. Death and life, hand in hand. A contradiction, thriving from coexistence.

Hope.

Notes:

I didn't want to drag it out too much for too long! Forgive me!
Thanks for sticking with me, as always. More coming soon. Only two chapters left now... 🥺
Lots of love ❤️‍🔥🌻❤️‍🔥🌻❤️‍🔥🌻

Chapter 20: Winning

Summary:

My mood had only improved by the smallest fraction, because now I was winning.

We did not, in fact, go home.

I couldn’t remember the journey, but when I next opened my eyes, I was in a hospital bed.

Bucky was staring at me.

“I thought we were going home?” I grumbled, my voice barely more than a squeak.

He had the sense to look guilty. “Doll, you were dehydrated, hypothermic, bleeding, bruised and had been electrocuted for god knows how long.”

I wasn’t happy about it, but I supposed he had a point.

I still glared at him.

He ignored that. “How you feeling?”

I thought about it for a bit, considered the myriad of aches and pains that had settled into my muscles and joints, felt the scratchy prickle in the back of my throat, the bone-deep tiredness that still clung to me despite being awake.

“I’m okay,” I decided. “Relieved.”

His eyes settled on my face, a crease between his eyebrows as he watched me, wary.

“Really, I’m okay.” I promised. “The look on Valentina’s face was worth it.”

He let out a sound somewhere between a frustrated huff and a laugh. “She’s here, you know.”

That quickly turned my blood to ice. “What? Why?”

“I think she wants to apologise.”

I stared at him, face blank.

“No, really,” He insisted. “I think you scared some sense into her.”

I raised an eyebrow, too tired to argue. I wanted to talk about it; what had been in that folder, what we would do next, what I should say to Valentina, but I couldn’t.

My body would barely stay awake.

I wasn’t sure how long I stayed there, drifting in and out of almost-sleep but the moment the door opened I was awake, every nerve alert.

Valentina’s footsteps were slow and quiet as she stepped into the room, deliberate verging on hesitant.

Her hair was up, the white strand swooping into a neat bun. She looked almost immaculate. Almost untouchable.

Only the faint furrow between her eyebrows gave her away.

In my peripheral vision I watched Bucky’s arms cross, his head turned towards me, not bothering to so much as look in Valentina’s direction.

For a second, none of us spoke.

Valentina glanced at my exposed arms, the bandages and the bruises, her gaze flicking to Bucky.

Then her eyes met mine. Her lips parted like she had something ready to say, but she hesitated.

I gave a frustrated huff as I watched her struggle for a moment longer. “You might as well save your breath, I have nothing to say to you.”

She sighed. “But I have something to say to you.”

 “I don’t want to hear it.” My voice was soft, no hint of anger, tired and bored. “I don’t want a bullshit apology, I don’t want your reasons, I just want you to leave me alone.”

There was a pregnant, awkward pause.

“Fair enough.” She said, but made no move to leave.

I let the seconds drag into minutes before I could no longer bear it.

“Why are you still here?”

She took a deep breath. Let it go. And then, she spoke. “It’s not often that I’m impressed. Even less often that I’m scared. But you are impressively terrifying. I find myself imagining what it’d be like if you wanted someone dead. They’d be gone,” she snapped her fingers, “like that. No evidence. No body. You could burn us all to the ground and grow something wonderful from the ashes.”

“And when you factor in that you’ve got the Super Solider to end all Super Soliders devoted to you... It keeps me up at night. And the worst thing is that I underestimated you. I miscalculated. I assumed that what happened back in England was the upper limit of your power, the entirety of your potential, that the fear and the anger had been the fuel to the fire.”

“But it wasn’t, was it?  Not once in the last couple of months had it occurred to me that the fear and the anger were dampening that power. You two getting on like a house on fire I did expect, but this whole strangers-to-lovers perfect match thing? I didn’t know you had it in you, Bucky.”

She turned to him, but he kept drawing, not so much as a glimmer of acknowledgement in him.

She gave a big, frustrated sigh. “Anyway. There’s a job for you. The both of you. If you want it.”

“What sort of job?” I asked.

“I’m putting a team together. A good one. Like the Avengers, but less... preachy.” There was a genuine excitement to her now that piqued my attention.

“But,” she continued, “There’s plenty of office-based jobs. If you didn’t fancy the whole heroics thing.”

I wanted to point blank refuse, if only to spite her. Had to bite my tongue against the urge to do so.

I’d be cutting off my nose to spite my face. Realistically, I knew that I needed a reason to stay. An actual one, that the government would approve of.

And as much as I adored Bucky, neither of us were ready for marriage quite yet.

So my answer was a tentative, “I’ll think about it.”

“Fair enough.” Valentina said again, looking a little more cheerful. “And for what it’s worth, I really do regret underestimating you. I make a lot of difficult decisions in my job, I don’t feel bad about many of them, but... this one I do. And if you can find it in yourself to forgive me well... I could use someone on the team who will call me out on my bullshit.”

Bucky stopped drawing. His head lifted, and he gave Valentina a glare so good that I could see nothing but Winter Solider in his face. “We’ll think about it.”

There was another long, tense moment of silence, Bucky and I wearing matching frowns as Valentina looked between us, her gaze lingering just a beat too long and full of something that almost looked like longing. And then she sighed, shook her head a little, and left without another word.

The tension in the room dissolved immediately, Bucky’s frown switched to a teasing smirk. “’Impressively terrifying’, huh?”

I shrugged. “It’s not the first time I’ve been told that,” I said with a wink.

He snorted.

I raised one eyebrow at him.

He schooled his face into a look of appropriate respect and fear, his eyes still twinkling. “You are very scary and very impressive, and I won’t ever make fun of you ever again for fear of your flowers and flames.”

 I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re lucky I love you.”

One of his brows quirked upwards. “Or what?”

“You’d have stinging nettles growing up your nose right now.”

 A delighted, thoughtful sort of look took over his face. “Please tell me that’s something you could actually do.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

We both laughed softly.

I groaned, flopping back against the pillows. “How long until we can get out of here?” I asked, voice full of impatience.

Bucky laughed. “I’m pretty sure they’ll be round to spring you any minute now. I think they were just waiting for the nod from Val before they felt they could formally discharge you.”

I huffed. “If I’m not out in an hour we’re escaping in a laundry basket or something.”

We didn’t have to wait that long.

Bucky was right, about ten minutes later, a doctor with a clipboard and a stethoscope around his neck came to see me.

I would have another couple of scars, I had struggled against my bindings enough to cut deeply into my wrists. The dressings would need to be changed, we needed to keep an eye out for any seizures or nerve damage or weird heart issues after the exposure to electricity, but apart from that I was free.

Bucky helped me dress in easy, comfortable clothes, and kept a firm grip around my waist as I limped out.

I dozed in and out of consciousness during the taxi ride home and fell asleep before we made it through the door.

Over the next few days, Bucky was almost annoyingly affectionate.

Hell, there was hardly a moment when he wasn’t touching me, in one way or another; his hand on my leg, warm and comforting as we sat on the sofa together, his fingers in my hair as I laid my head on his chest to fall asleep, helping me bathe.

When we were out (as, despite his protestations, I refused to vegetate on the couch for more than a couple of days), he kept one arm around me and glared at anyone who came within a two-metre radius.

But he hadn’t even come close to touching me.

Our kisses were chaste, each time I’d tried to deepen them, each time I had tried for something more, he had gently extracted himself from me, giving me one of his charming smiles, and distracted me with ice cream or pizza or a film or a game.

There was a Scrabble board between us, now.

He’d already destroyed me in chess and Battleship, and I’d been growing increasingly grumpy. My mood had only improved by the smallest fraction, because now I was winning.

“That’s not a word,” I said, frowning at the offending collection of letters he had tagged onto my double-world scoring ‘freaky’.

Bucky raised a brow, his expression the picture of innocence. “Yeah it is.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. "‘Flerb’ is not a word."

"You don’t know that."

"Yes, I do," I huffed. "Because I know words, Barnes. And ‘flerb’ is not one of them."

"It’s an old Brooklyn term," he said smoothly, leaning back against the sofa, arms crossing over his chest. "Means… uh… someone who’s really bad at Scrabble."

"You absolute liar!"

He smirked. "Prove it."

I reached for the tattered dictionary we’d been using to settle these arguments, for this was certainly not the first.

In one fluid motion, Bucky snatched it from out of my hand and held it above his head, where I had no hope of reaching.

I scrambled onto my knees, stretching up, but he only grinned wider, shifting his grip so effortlessly that I was starkly reminded of who, exactly, I was trying to wrestle something from.

"Give it here," I demanded, trying to climb over him.

"Nuh-uh," he teased, holding firm. "Not until you admit I’m better than you at games."

"You were losing!"

"Yeah, but I won chess. And battleship. Multiple times."

I glared at him, making one last, desperate lunge. My hands caught his wrist, but his strength was ridiculous, and I was left hanging off his arm like a particularly grumpy koala. His laughter rumbled through his chest, shaking against me, and the sound was so warm, so full of mischief and light, that I almost forgot to be grumpy.

Almost.

I twisted away from him with a huff, and the unexpected movement sent us both toppling.

The Scrabble board flipped, tiles scattering in every direction.

The dictionary fell to the floor, face up and open somewhere in the Ls.

We landed in a heap, me sprawled half on top of him, both of us wearing matching looks of surprise.

Bucky groaned, tilting his head to look at the mess we’d made. "Now we’ll never know who won."

"I was going to win, and you know it," I shot back, my nose practically touching his.

His hands found my hips, and my heart tripped.

"We’ll never know now, will we?”

There was something different in his voice now, something lower, something rougher. The teasing was still there, but there was something else beneath it. Smouldering, dangerous.

For the first time in days, he didn’t move away. He didn’t extract himself.

He stayed perfectly still, staring up at me like I was something he wanted to consume.

I swallowed hard, my pulse hammering against my ribs. "Bucky…"

His fingers flexing on my hip was the only warning I got before he flipped us.

The air left my lungs in a startled gasp as my back met the cold, hard wood. He was braced above me, the weight of him pressing me into the floor in the most intoxicating way.

The air crackled between us. Electricity pulsed and flared, and set my nerves alight.

His eyes were dark, flickering between my lips and my eyes, as if he were at war with himself.

I lifted a hand, my fingers brushing against the rough stubble covering his jaw.

"I missed you," I whispered.

He exhaled sharply, his forehead dipping to rest against mine. “Me too,” he breathed. "You have no idea."

Before I could argue, finally, finally, he kissed me.

There was nothing chaste about it.

His mouth crashed against mine with a force that stole the air from my lungs and the thoughts from my mind.  There was no teasing, no holding back. His mouth was hot, insistent, demanding.

His stubble scraped deliciously against my skin, igniting something deep and desperate in my core.

My hands curled into his hair, fingers fisting at the nape of his neck, pulling him impossibly closer. A low sound rumbled through his chest, vibrating into me, and the noise sent a flash of heat straight between my thighs.

Bucky shifted, pressing himself against me, and my back arched in response, my body seeking him like a moth to flame.

I could feel every hard line of him, the strength in his arms caging me in, the weight of him pressing me into the floor.

He kept kissing me like that until my breathing became ragged, and even then, his lips simply moved… Along my jaw, behind my ears, down my neck.

His hands were everywhere; fingers tilting my head so he could find exactly the right angle, tracing along dips and curves before gripping at my hips.

And then, slowly, deliberately, he slotted one thigh between mine, pressing his knee right against the aching heat at my core.

Every thought in my brain dissolve into static.

Oh.

The friction was instant, exquisite, devastating. I gasped into his mouth, my hips moving on instinct, seeking more, needing more. He didn’t move - not at first. Just let me squirm, let me grind, let me betray myself with every involuntary motion.

A low noise rumbled in his chest. “Yeah,” he muttered against my throat, “you needed this, didn’t you?”

I could have argued that I had been desperate for this for days, that the only thing that’d stopped me had been his own ridiculous overly cautious consideration.

But I was gone.

My hands clawed at his shirt, trying to get closer, trying to drag him down and into me. His knee shifted, pressed harder, sending sparks through my entire body.

“Oh, I’m almost glad I made us wait this long,” he groaned. “Seein’ you like this. God, if you knew what you do to me, doll.”

I couldn’t answer. Could barely breathe.

The press of him, the way he moved, slow and certain, gave me everything and nothing all at once. I was burning, writhing, the pleasure just shy of unbearable.

 

And he knew exactly what he was doing.

When the fabric of my pyjamas blocked the path of his lips, he tore at them, the fabric ripping, parting and leaving my bare, goosebumped skin exposed to him.

He wasn’t going to waste even so much as the seconds longer it would have taken to pull them off.

His hands were on my breasts, one hot, one cold. My back arched off the floor, pressing myself into him, my hips shifting against his in a movement that made us both gasp.

In the space of a few heartbeats, my pyjamas shorts were gone too, and my legs were draped over his shoulders.

I wasn’t sure I had ever seen him quite so wild, like something feral had been unleashed. His teeth sank into the soft, supple flesh of my inner thigh and my hand dropped to his hair, clenching into a fist.

His responding laughter sent the most delicious vibrations through me that I almost begged him to take mercy on me.

I didn’t need to.

His head was between my thighs and his tongue was moving in ways that made me see stars, feasting on me like an insatiable beast with a supernatural hunger.

Later, I would flush scarlet from my head to my toes with the realisation that there was no way in hell Bucky’s elderly neighbours couldn’t hear what was going on because I was screaming: his name, enough swear words to fill a dictionary of their own, enough blasphemy to send me to hell a dozen times over and enough prayers to get me back.

My fingers had found his, whether in an attempt to keep him there forever or prise him off of me I couldn’t be sure, but our hands had entwined and when I came, I squeezed so hard that there was no way I wouldn’t have bruises.

My thighs clenched around his face and I could feel everything. Cool metal, hot skin, rough stubble, soft hair and a smirk so wide I wondered if he’d ever stop wearing it.

It certainly hadn’t dropped by the time he finally emerged from between my legs.

We were still on the floor, surrounded by scraps of fabric and Scrabble tiles. Bucky still had all of his clothes on – a situation I was trying to immediately remedy with shaking hands between kisses. I only got as far as pushing his shirt over his head and undoing his jeans before he lost what little patience he’d found.

My hands were braced on his shoulders, my fingertips tracing the scars automatically. He wasn’t smirking now, as he settled his legs between mine, his hands still wrapped around my thighs.

I was desperate for him, wanted so badly for him to

But he didn’t. He paused, the head of his cock brushing against my over-sensitive clit, slipping through my wetness. He wasn’t smirking now, his eyes had closed, his lips were slightly parted. He was relishing in the anticipation.

I wasn’t.

I shifted my hips, trying to get him closer, the heels of my feet digging into the small of his back in a not-so-subtle hint.

His eyes opened; a brow quirked. Adrenaline spiked in my veins, like some almost-forgotten part of me recognised the danger in that look.

The rest of me couldn’t get enough of it.

With agonising slowness, he finally pushed into me. All the way. Every inch, every millimetre. He uncurled my legs from around him, pulling me against him until our hips were flush and he was so deep that it took my breath away. My body felt as if it were on some precipice of a breaking point, it was almost too much.

He draped my ankles over his shoulders, watching me with an expression that told me he was about to ruin me.

I wanted to speak; to ask him to take mercy on me, to tell him that I wasn’t sure I could handle him like this. All I could do was whimper, breathing in short little gasps.

He turned, his eyes still fixed on mine, to press a kiss against the inside of my ankle. You can, the gesture told me, and you will.

And then, just as my body was adjusting to the fullness, he moved.

No mercy.

No hesitation.

No fear.

His head was thrown back, the muscles in his arms straining against the shirt he was still wearing. His hands wrapped around my legs, and if I’d been able to focus on anything except the feeling of him, I would’ve marvelled at the sight him.

But I couldn’t. All I could do was scrunch my eyes closed and feel.

I was drowning in him, losing myself to him so completely and utterly that nothing else in the world mattered. It was too much, more than I could bear, and I would never get enough of this – of him.

I clawed at the floorboards, dug my heels into his shoulders, practically wept with the overwhelming unadulterated pleasure.

His teeth grazed the inside of my ankle and my eyes fluttered open. The sight of him was enough to make me come, all dark eyes and danger.

“Don’t you dare look away.”

I couldn’t argue with that voice, though my body so badly wanted to.

I kept my eyes on him through the throws of my orgasm, watched as his muscles clenched, his hips slammed against mine and he fell into an orgasm of his own.

Watched him blink once, twice, three times before his eyes closed and he surrendered to it.

My legs slipped down his body, landing with a muted thud on the floor.

Bucky lowered himself down next to me, his eyes still closed, breathing heavy, our fingers entwining.

We stayed like that for a long while. Until our breathing slowed and the scorching heat cooled.

“You’re a filthy hypocrite,” I said softly, turning to frown at him.

His eyes opened, and he grinned. I felt my heart clench. God, he was so beautiful it took my breath away.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I grumbled. “Telling me to keep my eyes open and then immediately closing yours.”

He leaned in to steal a kiss.

“I can’t help it if you’re so goddamn divine that you feel like heaven.” He kissed a trail down my throat, nipping at my shoulder. He made a sound somewhere between a groan and a laugh. “I have no self control when it comes to you.”

“If only that were actually true,” I mused in a soft, distracted voice as his lips ghosted up my neck.

“Be careful what you wish for, doll.” His voice was low, deadly and right in my ear.

I tipped my head back to expose more of my neck, silently daring him to continue what he’d started.

“What if I don’t want to be careful?”

His laugher brushed against my over-sensitive skin, tickling. “This is a dangerous game you’re playing, sweetheart.”

Cold fingers trailed down my side, his hand settling on the curve of my hip.

I shivered.

“I think I’m winning this one, too.” I whispered, grinning.

His grip tightened; his expression almost predatory. I wondered, in the far reaches in my mind, if the insanely short refractory period was a super solider thing.

I certainly wasn’t complaining.

The room spun, and I found myself suddenly face-to-face with the floorboards.

Bucky’s hands flexed against my hips, holding me firm. “Winning?” He dragged the word out like a challenge. “Is that what you think this is?”

The anticipation thrummed beneath my skin.

“I think…” I gasped, turning my head to catch a glimpse of that wicked smirk. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”

The world blurred, the scrape of Scrabble tiles scattered beneath us, the distant hum of the city through the window.

And then, there was nothing but him, and the fire between us.

 

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚─── ┘

 

In a blink, it was Christmas eve.

The past week had been a flurry of festive chaos.

Bucky had insisted on taking me ice skating, which had inevitably ended with both of us flat on the ice, laughing so hard we couldn’t get up. He was annoyingly graceful on solid ground, but apparently, even a super soldier could be taken down by a rogue patch of ice and the questionable balance of his very human girlfriend.

There had been the Christmas market, too. Mulled wine in gloved hands, the air thick with the scent of roasting chestnuts.

There had even been a night spent driving aimlessly through the suburbs, hunting for the most outrageous Christmas lights. Bucky had gleefully declared victory when we found a house with an inflatable Santa the size of a small car, flanked by glowing reindeer and a questionable amount of fake snow.

But the tree? It hadn’t occurred to either of us that we might want to decorate Bucky’s apartment with more than the frankly unhinged amount of paperchains we’d made while watching dodgy Christmas films, and we had been left with the last, scraggly pine at the nearest lot.

We both stood, heads tilted in opposite directions, staring at the tree.

“What happened to it?” I wondered aloud.

“Looks like it got run over or something.”

I sighed, unfolding my arms and moving towards the tree. “Can’t say I have any idea what I’m doing but nothing ventured nothing gained.” I reached through the balding branches to press my fingers against the trunk. My fingers hit something sticky, and I flinched. “Ugh. It’s bleeding.”

Bucky huffed a laugh as I closed my eyes.

I still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of doing this intentionally. My mind kept wandering, and I had to make a real effort to concentrate. But now that I knew what I was looking for, that little spark of life, I found it quite quickly.

More difficult, was trying to tell if it was working. I threw my best encouraging, growth-mindset vibes into it, visualising them travelling down my arms, into my fingers and towards that tiny little spark.

I gave it a moment before opening my eyes. I knew from Bucky’s smug smile that it’d worked.

“Reminds me of Steve.”

I raised an eyebrow at him, briefly grimacing at the sticky residue on my fingers. “What does?”

He nodded at the tree. “Was a twig, now look at it.”

“It’ll be star-spangled too with a bit of luck,” I teased, pushing the box of thrifted decorations into his hands.

Bucky smirked, but the smugness quickly faded as he lifted the tangled mess of lights from the box. “The hell happened here?”

“You’re telling me you can dismantle a rifle in twelve seconds flat, but Christmas lights are where you draw the line?”

“I could dismantle these in twelve seconds flat,” he muttered, eyeing the knotted strands like they’d personally insulted him. “But that wouldn’t be very festive.”

“Come on, it isn’t Christmas without at least one set of tangled lights.” I grinned at him and he frowned at me, grumbling something about the spirit of Christmas needing an instruction manual, but I noticed the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

We worked together, laughter punctuating the occasional curse as the lights stubbornly refused to cooperate. At one point, Bucky managed to tangle them even further, somehow wrapping one end around his metal arm like an unfortunate Christmas cyborg.

“I’m never living this down, am I?” he drawled, deadpan.

I beamed, slipping my phone out of my pocket to capture the moment. “Never.”

The room was filled with warmth. Not from the fire or the glow of the lamps, but from us. There was no lingering shadow of the past. No fear. Just the quiet joy of building something together.

And as we finally lifted the revitalised tree upright, Bucky smirked down at me, strands of lights still in hand.

“Merry Christmas, doll.”

 

└───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚─────────❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚────────❀*̥˚ ───❀*̥˚───❀*̥˚ ──────❀*̥˚─── ┘

 

Bucky was pacing. 

Up and down the living room, my eyes following him, watching the cogs in his brain turning.

He’d been on edge for the last couple of days. The post-Christmas glow had faded, slowly but surely, and he had been growing increasingly agitated. Never with me, but I could feel him tossing and turning at night, could hear his teeth grinding as his jaw clenched and the frown had become an almost-permanent fixture over the last few hours.

“We need to talk,” Bucky said eventually, hands on hips as he paused in front of me.

I looked up at him, raising an eyebrow. “All of that pacing just to come up with ‘we need to talk’?”

He sighed, lowering to his knees in front of me so that we were eye-level. “Will you be serious for like, ten minutes please?” He was wearing his favourite long-suffering expression, but something soft sparkled in his eyes.

“I’m always serious,” I teased, reaching out to brush my fingers against the taught muscles of his jaw. “Stop clenching, you’re going to give yourself a headache.”

He didn’t relax, his hand lifting to cover mine, holding it against his cheek.

“How are you still so soft and kind and good?” He asked, not an ounce of judgement in his voice, “When you’ve seen so much cruelty?”

What an extraordinarily hard question to answer.

Mostly it was hard because, I wasn’t sure I was all of those things. After all, I had killed someone, and that would stick with me for as long as I lived; a stain I could never remove no matter how much the people I loved would justify it.

But I tried to be good. Tried to be kind. Tried to keep myself soft and open to the wonders the world had to offer rather than close myself up for the sake of safety.

I gave him a half-smile. “Spite, mostly.”

Which was the truth.

His eyes were fixed on mine, searching, a slight frown pulling his eyebrows together.

“It’s a small act of rebellion, remaining soft in a hard world,” I explained slowly, trying to articulate the thoughts. “I think too often softness is equated with weakness… Optimism with naiveite, cheerfulness with ignorance. And I’m sure my life would be so much easier if I closed myself up and let my heart turn to stone but then I wouldn’t have this,” My fingers tightened their grip on his face. 

“There have been so many moments, when it could have gone either way.” I admitted. “But then you showed me softness and kindness and goodness. From the first day I was here you were trying to do right by me, looking out for me in ways I’d never anticipated. You thoughts that I would be more comfortable not in the company of a man. You gave me books when I was lost in a sea of boredom. You didn’t laugh when I told you I fell in the moat. You made me dance and most importantly, you made what could’ve been a prison feel like home.”

“And now I’m pretty sure anywhere you were, would feel like home to me.” My voice had softened, slipped into something closer to a whisper.

His fingers twined with mine, our joined hands dropping into my lap. “I’m not sure I deserve any of that credit,” he said quietly. “I was just… there.”

“Which was the most important thing you could have been. When Valentina wanted to turn me into a weapon, before you knew anything about me than a few select paragraphs in a file, you were there for me. Who knows what would’ve happened without you.”

His jaw clenched again, the blue of his eyes cooling to ice. “You wouldn’t have been taken. They wouldn’t have hurt you. They wouldn’t have tried to use my history to hurt you.”

I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Maybe. But something else would’ve happened. And I know I wouldn’t be anywhere close to soft or kind or good without you. And if I had to do it all again, if I had a choice to change anything, I wouldn’t.”

Bucky's jaw tightened. "You shouldn’t have had to go through any of it." The words were barely above a whisper, but they were heavy, sharp with guilt.

"I mean I would rather not have gone through it," I answered gently. "But it was worth every second of the pain to have this.” I squeezed our joined hands. “And you are not the reason it happened, Bucky. You’re the reason I made it through. You’re the reason I’m still me."

His eyes flicked down to where our hands were clasped, his metal fingers curled carefully around mine like I might break.

"I don’t know how you do it," he murmured.

I gave him a small smile. "I already told you. Spite.”

He huffed a quiet laugh through his nose, but it didn’t reach his eyes. The tension remained, something unsaid lingering on the tip of his tongue.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he finally said, his voice low. “Everything that’s happened. Everything we’ve been through. And I keep coming back to one thing.”

I tilted my head, waiting quietly for him to continue.

“That you deserve more.”

My heart clenched, my mouth drying, a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Bucky…”

“Just listen.” His hands tightened slightly, like he was grounding himself in the touch. “You could’ve gone anywhere. Done anything. You’re free. And you’re choosing this. Choosing me.”

I opened my mouth, but he shook his head, his own words tumbling out before I could respond.

“I know what I am. I’ve done every step of the work. I’ve faced it. The nightmares, the triggers, the endless damn loop of what I’ve done. But every time I think I’ve outrun it, there’s still a part of me waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for the moment you realise you deserve more.”

I held his gaze, unwavering. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He exhaled, like he wanted to believe it but couldn’t quite let himself. The storm behind his eyes was still raging.

“I love you,” I said, the words soft but sure. “And I’ll say it a thousand times over until you believe it. You are not your past, Bucky. You are not the Winter Soldier. You are the man who made me laugh when I thought I’d forgotten how. You are the man who read all of my silly books just so we could share them. You’re the man who untangled a hundred knots of Christmas lights with a metal hand, and didn’t even complain.”

He smiled faintly at that, but the tension hadn’t completely left him.

“I see you,” I whispered, brushing my fingers against his cheek. “Every part of you. And I’m still here. I will always be here.”

His chest rose and fell in a shuddering breath, the weight of it finally cracking under the warmth between us. He leaned forward, his forehead resting against mine, and for a moment we stayed like that, just breathing.

“I love you,” he murmured, the words rough but certain. “I’m terrified of losing you.”

“You won’t.” I tangled my fingers in his hair, holding him close. “You’re stuck with me, Barnes.”

He laughed softly, a genuine sound that sent warmth flooding through me. And in that moment, I knew he believed it, even if it would take time for that belief to settle.

And that was okay.

Because we had time.

Notes:

The penultimate chapter and it is so bittersweet!! Thank you for being here. I am so grateful to you. Lots of love! ❀*̥˚

Chapter 21: Epilogue

Summary:

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. But that certainly hadn’t been it.

Time had passed.

The world had started spinning again, but I hadn’t quite caught up.

Neither had Bucky.

We were trying. Really, trying. We did the things we were supposed to do; cooking meals, taking walks, watching cartoons and cooking shows until we forgot how to think. But Bucky still moved like someone waiting for the next fight, jaw tight, shoulders locked, eyes flicking to every sound. When we were out, he kept one hand on me at all times - not possessive, exactly, just... tethered. Like if he let go, the world would tilt off-axis again.

I didn’t mind. Not even a little.

Time had passed, and kept on passing. And though we hadn’t quite caught up yet, we would. My scars had, for the most part, faded. Sometimes, my muscles would spasm randomly, like a ghost of electric current was passing through them, and sometimes the fire flickered to life in my veins just to remind me that I could still burn.

That I wasn't finished.

Valentina certainly wasn’t. 

As much as she might say she was giving us space, she wasn’t taking no for an answer.

She called. She texted. She emailed. And, recently, had taken to writing me letters on actual CIA letterhead. The job offers got better each time; more pay, a different job title, more paid time off. I wondered if she actually thought any of it would ever be enough, or if her persistence was as much a threat as it was a genuine offer. 

When the CIA hadn’t been enough to tempt me, she’d tried to lure me into some private organisation.

OXE Group, the very same company whose stories I had found buried three-quarters of the way through the newspapers talking about “Contract Irregularities” and “Internal Restructuring.” The same OXE Group with a quiet Department of Energy contract and a not-so-quiet black site. The same OXE Group Valentina kept hinting was her next “exciting endeavour.”

No, she wasn’t gone. She was just biding her time.

I shifted on the sofa, my head in Bucky’s lap as he trailed his fingers through my hair. Absolute bliss.

He wasn’t watching the TVs; he was watching me. Had been, for the last twenty minutes. I stared at the television anyway, pretending I couldn’t feel his eyes or the goosebumps that were covering my skin.

My phone buzzed on the side table; Bucky grabbed it for me, either so he could have a peek first or so I wouldn’t have to get up to read it.

Both, probably. 

“Guess who!” He said without humour, holding it out to me with a frown.

I took the phone from him wordlessly and sighed, thumb hovering over the screen.

“It’s one of her ‘think about the Visa!’ messages,” I muttered, scrolling. “Wouldn’t be surprised if she threatened to revoke whatever she put in place to keep me here.”

Bucky didn’t laugh, but his mouth twisted into something close. “She wouldn’t dare. She wants you close. Wants us close. Leashed.”

He said it so simply. No bitterness, just fact.

I paused for a beat, watching his face.

“Kinky.”

That tipped him over the edge, the almost-smile cracking into a grin as he laughed. “Be careful what you wish for, doll.”

I winked and the fingers that were still tangled in my hair tightened.

I wondered what the world would think if they could see him now. Bucky Barnes certainly had a mixed reputation, but I was fairly sure this version of him nobody would believe. Carefree, relaxed, happy. Unburdened.

Well, nobody but Sam. And Sam’s family. And the wider community of Delacroix.

And me.

After a while, that carefree lightness shifted, and something heavy and foreboding slotted into its place.

I was attuned to him now, I could tell from the minute increase of tension in his muscles, the slightly pauses in his fingers through my hair, even from the pace and depth of his breathing.

Bucky was thinking. Planning. Something big. Something he wasn’t sure about sharing.

“She’s not going to stop,” Bucky said quietly, after a few minutes more.

I turned my head to look at him.

“No,” I said. “She isn’t.”

His hand slid down my arm to wrap around my wrist, thumb brushing the line of faded scars.

I sat up, still keeping tight to him, but position myself so I could properly look him in the eye rather than kind of up his nose.

“So,” Bucky said eventually, low and thoughtful, “we stop her.”

There it was. The thought. He tone too careful, too considered.

I let out a breath. “How?”

He was still for a moment before he moved to brush a strand of hair behind my ear.

“She’s protected,” he said. “Too many connections. Too much insulation.”

“She’s the Director of the CIA,” I pointed out the obvious. “And now whatever-the-hell she is at OXE Group. I’m a nobody from halfway across the world, and you’re—”

“—a former Soviet assassin, yeah,” he said, jaw twitching. “But I’ve been pardoned. And you’re not a nobody. You’re the person she keeps trying to hire.”

I looked at him. Really looked. His eyes were calm. Clear. Calculating.

It clicked, my brain adjusting to his wavelength. “You want us to work for her?” I said slowly.

His nose scrunched in immediate distaste. “No. I want us to go over her head.”

Okay, maybe not. I could feel myself frowning.

“How?”

He was looking for something in my eyes, staring so deeply that I was starting to feel a little dizzy. His calm had evolved into a look I knew to be dangerous.

He was trouble incarnate.

“She’s government,” he said. “We get into the government.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. But that certainly hadn’t been it.

I blinked. “What?” I kept thinking that it’d make sense in a minute. Whatever bizarre plan he’d been concocting would make sense and I’d get it with his next sentence.

“From the inside,” he said, like it was obvious.

“Inside where?!”

His mouth curved.

Oh no.

“You remember when you asked me if I’d ever considered going into politics?”

I stared at him.

No, no.

“You’re serious.”

He said nothing. Just leaned back a little and gave me that look.

“You realise I was joking, right?”

“Maybe in that moment,” he said. “But maybe you were on to something.”

“You don’t even like people.”

“That’s where you come in.”

I groaned, burying my face in my hands. “You are not dragging me into this.”

He pulled my hands gently away from my face, interlacing our fingers.

“It was your idea,” he said. “We made a deal, remember?”

My stomach fluttered. He was close now. So close. The kind of close that made time slow down and my heart race.

“You said,” he continued, his voice low and rough, “that you had extensive experience in making other people look good.”

“I said that sarcastically.”

“You say everything sarcastically.”

He was smiling, but I could see the conviction behind it.

This wasn’t a whim. He’d thought about this.

“You want me to manage your campaign,” I said, deadpan.

“I want to win,” he said. “And I don’t win unless you’re with me.”

It seemed all I could do was stare at him.

It was such a bad idea. A career-ending, reputation-obliterating, absolutely bonkers idea.

But...

God help me.

It was also brilliant.

We could get inside. We could drag Val out into the light. We could kick up a fuss she couldn’t bury.

I pulled back just slightly, curling one leg under me.

“We’d need a strategy,” I murmured. “Messaging. Funding. Outreach. A whole team.”

He looked like he’d already won.

“Did I say how much I hate this idea?” I groaned.

He still looked victorious as he shrugged. “Not as much as I do.”

It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be smooth. I’d already calculated the hundreds of things the opposition would run with, and that wasn’t taking into account the obvious.

And us? I didn’t even want to start on what it might mean for us.

But as he lifted my hand, brushed his lips against the scars and looked at me with such promise, I couldn’t find it in me to worry about any of that.

He was smiling, remembering that sunny autumn morning when we’d danced in the grass just like I was.

“Together we’ll take over the world.”

Notes:

Thank you.

For reading, for commenting, for leaving kudos, for quietly lurking. For being here. Whether you've been following since the first few chapters I posted or found this story yesterday, I am endlessly grateful for every minute you've spent with me and with our guy! 💖

This story has been a joy and, at times, a nightmare. I started writing it over a year ago (!) and had most of it written before I published the start. Parts were written and re-written, and then scrapped entirely. And then re-written again!! Not my first rodeo, but it felt like it 😅

The Coming of Spring playlist is here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5fpTzAfqFMKzTy5u2csPh4?si=PCKCy-k8Qn-Xa1D7J1nHSg if you'd like to hear what was going through my head the whole time!

And while this might (finally) be finished, their story is far from over...
Stay tuned lads, we've got an election to win. James Buchanan Barnes for Congress! 🫡

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope to see you soon.
With all my love and gratitude.
❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥