you cannot keep loving people in your dreams

The incessant ringing that sounds from the locker room makes her pause mid-dry.

It’s two fifty-seven in the morning, and having been wrecked awake by night terrors of her own past, she needed something to quell her racing mind and heart from the adrenaline coursing through her veins. So, with trembling limbs, she replaced sweat-soaked sheets for the waters of her apartment complex’s twenty-four hour pool that had become her solace since she’d started this new life of normalcy after her tenure as an agent with the Avengers.

The water was cool. Not cold like the ocean or the rivers would usually be at this time of year. The frigid winter air freezes most of the shoreline into white ice that stretches anywhere from a few inches to miles off its coast. The pool stays at a moderately cool temperature year around, and it’s what makes it an ideal place for Alahni to drown her racing mind. Even if the stench of chlorine messes with her nose and her hair would faintly smell of it even after a shower.

She doesn’t really mind it, though. As long as it helps to drown away the terrors that plague her mind.

She fully expected that for the rest of the night, she’d find something in the fridge to put together for a quick late night meal, and spend the rest of the early morning hours reading through Tar Baby again. But as she came out of the showers, patting her braids dry with a microfiber towel and a larger one tucked securely around her chest, the plans she had already decided to commit to, might be rewritten.

Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion, feet sounding in soft thuds as she approached the bench which held her fresh, folded pajama, bag of toiletries, and her phone that vibrated against the wooden beams of the seat, screen alight with a caller ID.

Who is calling me at this hour?

When she finally makes it to her phone, and sees the caller ID that is flashing across her screen, her body freezes. BUCKY B stands out in bold white letters against a translucent image of the same man’s confused side profile - an image taken by their mutual friend Sam Wilson sneakily and sent to their little group as a joke, but one she found endearing enough to make his contact photo.

Something between adrenaline and panic rushes through her veins like before. However, unlike before, it’s not her own terror induced anxiety that causes her limbs to go rigid; it’s the thought of what could possibly possess Bucky to call her at three in the morning.

She doesn’t think too much further on it, before her hand drops the towel she’d been using to dry her hair in favor of the phone that had been ringing for far too long already. She swipes the green phone icon to the left before placing the device on her ear to answer.

“Bucky?” she answers, her voice cracking over the receiver. “Is everything okay?”

Silence. Knots turn in her stomach, and to give her free hand something to do, it comes to grasp onto the bundle of cloth that covers her drying body.

The silence soon gives way to breathing - shallow, barely audible, but there. The static is soft, mixed in with the faint sound of rustling. Was he home? Did he wake from a nightmare?

She’s about to speak again, but there’s a sharp intake of breath from the other end of the line that silences her instead.

“Shit, (Y/N)”, the rasp in his voice confirms to her that sleep was somewhere in the entrails of his mind,  but the gravel that trails afterwards tells her that something had ripped him from it. Something harsh, and cold, and cruel, “sorry.”

A nanosecond of silence stretches again, and yet, it feels like hours have passed. Her hand tightens around the towel, and she swallows the dryness in her throat to speak.

“It’s okay,” she assures. She tries to keep her voice level and calm - grounding - because she knows any hint of hesitation could make him spiral more than he probably already has, “I was just a little surprised, is all.”

“Right.”

Silence.

“Did I wake you?”

“No, no; I’ve been awake for a while now. I just finished at the pool.”

She doesn’t know why she mentions the pool - the one place she always seeks in the turmoil of her mind - but maybe if he knows that she, too, was in a similar predicament, he wouldn’t feel as bad. It’s an attempt at comfort, an olive branch that’s rarely exchanged between the pair who have shared a similar past in more ways than one. “Are…are you okay, Buck?”

She doesn’t expect an answer - at least, not a solid one. She’s surprised Bucky even stayed on the phone this long, because she’s sure that it wasn’t a conscious decision to call her of all people. She had half a mind to ask if he’d called her by mistake. Was there a slip of his thumb on the way to pressing Sam’s contact? But she doesn’t want him to feel wrong for doing so. 

“....yeah,” there’s more shuffling on the other end of the line. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other, a slight sting growing in her heel from standing stagnant for too long. He starts to speak again as she pads over to the opposite side of the bench, settling down on the cool wooden surface, “just…ah…you know…”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She didn’t know if she really wanted to be right in that aspect. She knew of the severity of Bucky’s terrors. She’d seen how bad they’d gotten first hand; witnessing the way it rolled in like an unsuspecting storm. The quiet that started it off, the sinking feeling in her gut when she could see the shift in those blue eyes of his. Always alert, always calculating. Cracked and broken and afraid. Struggling between the man of atonement he wanted to be and the monster of death that he was molded into. Never fully forgotten. Never fully rid of it.

The dampness in her skin grew cold, goosebumps forming in its wake. She tries to breathe through rigid muscles, and a slight burn trickled through her veins. What horrors had his brain conjured up tonight to provoke him to call someone?

“....you, too, huh?”

The three-worded question almost catches her off guard. Her toes curl underneath her, and she isn’t sure if it’s because of the cold tile that’s beginning to make her feet ache, or if she’s trying not to remember her own terror that was the drill she was forced to run as a child test subject.

“Yeah,” she says in a breath that could pass for a sigh, but the slight stutter in the raggedness of it gives away the calm facade she tried to maintain, “me, too.”

She doesn’t like to talk about her terrors. She doesn’t like to remember the copper taste in her mouth from brutal training; or the bile that burned her throat after hours of injections and experimentation strapped onto a cold metal table; or the darkness she’d been trapped inside for so long that she became averse to light as a whole. Coffee colored eyes flutter down to the warmed color of her wrist, blotched with ink in the pattern of a barcode. PSW-001 - PROJECT SOLDIER WOMAN - stares back at her hauntingly.

She doesn’t like to give those horrors the honor of voice. She’s thankful that, out of everyone she’s come to know and love and care deeply for, past and present, Bucky understands this the most.

Even if he doesn’t think it can be reciprocated.

“Would you…-” She purses her lips together, forming a line as tight as the knot in her stomach. When did offering comfort become such a daunting task? 

“Do you…want company?” 

Again, the silence stretches for what seems like forever, and she hates it. Not because she regrets asking, but because of the pressure it might imply.

She’d never known Bucky to ask for help. Yet, perhaps, that's why a part of her extended the offer anyway; because even when someone seems to be good at handling their demons, it doesn’t mean they need to do so alone. 

And Bucky had been alone long enough as it was.

She can practically hear the gears turning in his head, trying to conjure up justifications for refusing her offer. “It’s too cold out,” he murmurs through the receiver, “you shouldn’t be outside at this hour on your own,” he mumbles. 

She can’t help but hum, lips tugging upward into an amused grin.

“You know my history, and you’re worried about me alone by myself at night?”

From him, the breath that’s released is something soft; a sigh of amusement, at most.

It’s sweet, endearing, that he worries even in his state where his mind is muddled and grappling for something steady. Yet, her heart tightens a little, as even when steady grounding is offered, he flinches out of instinct.

And she knows why. She knows because she has done the same. She once thought silence and solitude would fix her; that as long as no one saw the cracked and broken pieces, the illusion of her progress would appear better. That the world would see the woman who was trying, instead of the woman who was struggling; because a facade was easier to sport than allowing others to see the blood of years of warfare and manipulation from hands made to kill.

“You can say no,” she reassures him, steadying herself with a breath to try and ease the knots in her stomach, but they don’t go away; only tighten in the silence and the weight, “I wouldn’t feel any kind of way if you did.”

She turns her wrist inward, pressing it against her stomach like somehow the white towel will swallow the black ink from her skin and erase the trauma it holds. It won’t. Nothing will.

“I get it.” 

She genuinely did. 

Bucky’s silence on the other end speaks for him; he knows that she gets it, too.

She gets wanting to be alone. She gets not wanting to be needy.

…she wouldn’t mind it, though. If he needed someone. 

If he needed her.

“But…if you want someone there,” she pulls her wrist back out into view, the stripes of the barcode staring back at her again, “I don’t mind, James. Really.”

And part of her she really hopes he wouldn’t mind, either.

The silence stretches on for minutes again. Goosebumps make her skin look rigid, and her thighs press together for a semblance of warmth. The towel is the only thing keeping her fairly warm, and if it weren’t for the way that the crevices of her body still hold a cool dampness from the lingering traces of water from her shower, she would’ve forgotten the clothes she’d brought to change into. Yet, she waits, with baited breath, leaning forward in anticipation as her ear tries to pick up any trace of sound coming from the other end of the line.

“I wouldn’t wanna bring you any trouble, (Y/N).”

A weak attempt at deflection; his last one, it sounds like.

“It wouldn’t be,” says the woman, “I’ll…bring food. And a book or two. It’ll just be like we’re hanging out. Like old times. No trouble at all; I promise.”

Silence again. She chews at her bottom lip. She doesn’t ever really know if her reassurances ever work with Bucky. He had an interesting way of making a girl’s mind wonder to no end.

Still, she waits….until he speaks again, and the knots in her stomach finally seem to loosen a little.

“....what did you have in mind?”

Bucky wasn’t wrong when he said it was too cold outside.

Even bundled up in her puffer coat and the neck gaiter pulled over her nose, the cold still bites at the apples of her exposed cheeks, and wind howls past her ears and whips at her braids wildly. New York had always been infamous for its frigid temperatures, being surrounded by so many bodies of water which made the wind chill a hazard of its own. And that was just during the day.

She'd only visited Brooklyn Heights twice; the first time was with Steve when he was feeling particularly melancholic in regards to the brunette he had befriended so many decades ago. She’d found him on a park bench, not speaking, but basked in memory of war and companionship. She didn’t pry, then, despite her curiosity as to who held such a grip on his mind that the bright warmth he brought to the others could be dimmed with a longing reverence. She just sat with him, and eventually, the blond would apologize for the worry he’d caused, before opening up about the significance of the neighborhood he’d found himself having wandered into. The second time was when Sam dragged her along to visit Bucky some time after their excursion to Louisiana to make sure he’d settled into his new home. She’d brought him, as a housewarming gift, a copy of THE HOBBIT, because she didn’t want to come empty handed. Cooking had not been a proud skill of hers yet, and she wanted to give him some semblance of joy from a time in his life he undoubtedly missed heavily. She never knew what became of that book - if he ever read it again or if he just stashed it away somewhere out of sight - but she was relieved at the faint grin that she earned from her thoughtfulness.

Now, instead of an all too thick book in her arms and a scratchy scarf around her neck, she instead carried a brown paper bag of take out from a jerk place she often frequented when she visited the city - the only place still open in the wee hours of the morning  - and a buzz of worry thrumming under her skin. Bucky was the kind of man who told you not to worry about him. That only made Alahni worry more.

She remembered the sound of his voice that crackled over the receiver of her phone nearly an hour ago. He sounded tired. The kind of tired that lingered where the restfulness of sleep should have been. The kind of tiredness that comes when sleep evades you for days. The kind of tiredness that weighed heavy on the mind, in the bones, and in the spirit.

She knows that kind of tired all too well.

What she also knows is that Bucky is exceptionally good at hiding things. So despite what she heard over the phone, Alahni truly has no idea what she’s about to walk into.

The soft crunch of powdery snow sounds as she turns the corner on the block which Bucky lives on. A yellow glow is cast upon the streets, and it catches the silhouette of stray snowflakes that fall in wide intervals. There’s a quiet that befalls the streets that makes her breathe in the crisp, thin air to disarm the loom of alarm that always rises when quiet pushes its prominence. 

She is further soothed when she sees the very familiar silhouette of Bucky standing outside his brownstone. His head is tilted back, exposing the apple of his throat to the cold air. His gaze is extended upward, but not to look at the few stars that still shine through the city’s light pollution. It’s to hold his attention to something that can keep his mind from straying away. But he must’ve heard her footsteps, even from the end of the block, because his head tucks into the high collar of his jacket, turning towards her direction.

“Why’re you standing outside?” She calls from the halfway mark, marking a new trail in the fresh layer of snow with her footprints.

His hair is growing out from its short cut. Dark brown locks kiss the creases in the middle of his forehead. It’s ruffled and tousled - he’s been running his hands through it a lot, it seems. 

“It’s dark,” Bucky answers, his voice like thunder pushing through the cold air. It softens the closer she approaches, “was waitin’ on you.”

She has to crane her neck upwards to look at him, his cheeks swell with air to warm from the biting cold, trails of white smoke leaving his lips in a slow, steady stream. He has on sweat pants and his winter boots; the jacket, however, was his leather one, and from what she could see, the only thing underneath was his sleepshirt. Hardly the kind of attire to be waiting outside in the cold for someone. How long had he been waiting?

“You didn’t have to, y’know.” 

Bucky shrugs in response. His tired eyes  flutter closed for a second as he does so. Thin lips stretch into a lazy cheshire grin.

He steps to the side, allowing for her to take the first step up the stairs of the brownstone building. He follows behind - close, guarding, like always. Deft fingers reach from her left side to push the already ajar door further open. He enters when he’s sure that she’s safely inside. Rhythmic thumping of heavy snow boots sound as the pair ascend the stairs to his apartment, bouncing off the walls and filling the silence with presence. 

Bucky’s apartment isn’t that much different from when he first moved in, she sees. There’s still minimal furniture, and decoration is sparse. Though, she does notice that where a small green loveseat once sat against the wall, there is now a longer, almond colored couch in its place. The same console stand hosts the same television screen, which plays an old television show in black and white. Judging from the woman in a long, elegant black gown, and the man in a striped zoot suit and slicked back hair fawning over her, she concludes that it must be the 1964 rendition of The Addams Family.

There’s a fake potted pathos plant in the corner in front of the extended kitchen countertop. Two wooden stools are parked neatly under the ledge of it. The smell of instant coffee lingers; not overwhelming, but homely.

“I can hang your coat up here, (Y/N).” Bucky offers, hand extended out as Alahni is mid-shed of her winter gear. The woman quickly peels off her coat and stuffs her hat, gloves, and neck gaiter into the right sleeve, before handing it to the taller man. “Shoes can go there. Sorry for the mess.”

“It’s fine.” She slips off her boots, arranging them neatly behind the door next to Bucky’s who’s been chucked haphazardly on the mat.

A few paces further into the abode, and she can see the little things strewn about the place that make it more homely for the brunette. There’s a hoodie laying on the back of the couch - grey and worn. On the back kitchen counter, there’s a coffee pot which is the culprit for the warm, roasted scent. On the kitchen’s windowsill, there’s a real pathos plant - with one leaf tipping into a soft yellow color and the bottom feeder plate empty of water. On the counter are some older looking newspaper articles and clippings underneath an open notebook with messy cursive and two books; a copy of THE HOBBIT - her copy she’d gifted him, worn along the corners and edges - and a newer edition of THE TWO TOWERS.

Further into the living room, her eyes find the cluster of blankets on the floor in front of the couch. A pillow is there, too, with a glass of water on the console stand, half-drunk and forgotten.

When a soldier returns from war, it’s hard for him to enjoy the common pleasures of life again. She remembers being told once, but she can't remember from who. Too many military men she'd surrounded herself with in her former days. Even your own bed isn’t comfortable anymore. It’s too soft. Makes you feel too vulnerable.

“Are you watching The Addams Family?”

Bucky makes his way from the foyer of his apartment after hanging up both of his and her outerwear. His dog tags sway across his chest as he moves, glinting in the kitchen lighting. His brows furrow, his head turns towards the television in the living area. He shrugs.

“I was listening to Suspense,”, he says, “but I guess it went off while I was asleep.”

He makes his way into the kitchen, shifting to the side so that he doesn’t brush too harshly against her. Still, the air which surrounds him is charged. There is an ache there, she can tell. For what, she can’t really say.

“Plates?”

“Oh- yeah.” She doesn’t want to think too hard about it, though. If she does, she’ll get the urge to ask, and right now, Bucky doesn’t really need questioning. He gets that enough from the therapist he’s always harping about.

Selfishly, she also doesn’t want to be asked any questions, either.

“What’s this place again?” Bucky asks while fishing for two plates from the cupboard. He sets them down on the countertop - one for each of them - then turns back around to search for silverware in the white drawers.

“Baba Manson’s, over on Montague.” She answers while slipping into one of the stools on the opposite side of the countertop. Her feet find purchase on one of the poles of the stool’s structure, rolling back and forth for rhythm. “He stays open pretty late. I like going to him; he always makes sure to stack his plates high.”

“Yeah?” Bucky opts to stay on the other side of the island. Perhaps it makes him feel a little safer with the distance. Secure. Controlled. He sets out two sets of forks, spoons, and knives. They glint in the kitchen's lighting, too, dull shine and all.

The woman busies herself with taking the styrofoam containers out from the brown paper bag. Both are large plates, steaming from the heat of the food. Jerk chicken, fried plantains, rice and peas, and braised cabbage makes the plates heavy and filling. She places the first container onto Bucky’s plate, careful to try and not make a mess of the food threatening to overspill. Afterwards, she takes her own plate from the bag, then pushes it to the side to be discarded later.

“They can get a little messy, though,” she warns, but Bucky doesn’t seem to mind the rice and kidney beans that fall onto the plate below the styrofoam container the second his spoon dives into the meal. Seeing him eat well brings a bit of relief to her.

“So,” she begins, one hand searching the other wrist for an extra hair tie to use to tie up her braids, “Suspense. Is that a show you like?”

With a mouthful of rice and peas, Bucky glances up. Blue eyes watch as she pulls her hair into a loose ponytail, though wisps of hair from her goddess braids still frame her face like a halo. The lighting brightens her almond skin, and it shines with prominence.

Bucky swallows the bite of food a little too quickly - his throat stretches and burns from the lump of substance he wasn’t ready to take. With a short grunt, he speaks, “Yeah, it’s alright. Was a radio show in the early forties, and it got turned into a television show around uh…forty-nine, I think?”

“Sounds kinda spooky, with a title like Suspense.”

Bucky shrugs. “It’s the kinda ghost stories you tell kids to keep ‘em in line. Hauntings and boogeyman tales and stuff like that.”

Coffee eyes flicker across his face as he speaks. She takes her fork and pokes a piece of plantain with it, raising the savory-sweet piece to her mouth. “You ever get scared by them?”

“Me? Nah.” He brushes it off so casually, the woman almost believes him. “Some of the boys in my unit, though? Probably. But that was back in the day.”

“Sorry, I forget,” the woman hums in response after swallowing the plantain she’d forked into her mouth, “you’re Mr. Tough Guy. Of course you wouldn’t be scared.”

Her teasing is lighthearted, the sound of her laugh like the soft tinkling of bells in the spring. He meets her with an eyeroll, but the air is light and gentle around them. While terrors still linger in the hidden corners, the light from the kitchen’s overhead blesses them with a soft familiarity. One Bucky hasn’t realized how much he wanted. How much he missed.

Being on his own, he thought it would help him deal with things better. He didn’t think the presence of another could be so…impactful.

Bucky thinks this while he busies himself with washing out the utensils used for their extremely late dinner. He catches the other woman standing in his living room, arms crossed over her chest. She holds a scrutinizing gaze towards his television screen where The Addams Family continues to play. Her nose is scrunched up and her eyes squint in the television lighting. Crows' feet tickle the corners of her eyes.

“You’re looking very judgey over there.” He comments from the sink. Brown wisps of hair brush his forehead, his head turned to the side to catch her reaction. He turns the faucet off, grabbing the hand towel hung above the sink to pat his hands dry. Like an animal caught foraging, she startles a little, wide eyes flickering between Bucky and the television.

“What?” She stutters, “I-I’m not judging. Nope. Not at all.”

“You’re totally judging.”

“Am not!”

She pads over to the couch, careful to tip-toe over Bucky’s makeshift sleeping pallet as she makes her way to her bag. She wants to be careful in his space. Even with the evidence of his lack of sleep on display, she doesn’t question it; just acknowledges it in passing. Part of him stalls for a bit; like he expects at some point for her to bring it up. He doesn’t want to lie to her - he really doesn’t want to lie about it - and it makes the lingering pit in his stomach weigh just about as heavy as the exhaustion that runs bone deep. It tugs at him still, even now, with that prickly feeling that makes his eyelids ache every time he blinks. 

Yet, it’s the images that flash behind his eyelids every time they linger closed for too long, that keeps him from finding respite.

The blood. The blood stains his hands crimson. Thunderous orders sound in his ears. There’s an incessant ringing that bleeds into his brain and it won’t go away. There’s a gun in his hand, and the magazine only has one bullet left. Smoke emits from the barrel in a steady stream of white. His eyes are blue, and cold, and they feel nothing. Nothing but the mission. Nothing matters but the missio-

“-uck? Hey, Buck?”

“Huh?”

“You there?”

Bucky blinks back the stinging in his eyes. They aren’t tears. Just remnants of the terror that's plagued his mind for the past week straight.

“Yeah, sorry. What was that?”

She pauses for a moment. She tilts her head a little bit, eyes flickering across his face. Had she seen it? Had she seen the flashes of his past across his face? Had he let his mask slip?

“Was just asking about the bathroom,” she speaks again; it’s calmer, slower, and her eye contact is intentional. It’s to ground him. To tell him that she is there, that she is real, and that his present was in his control, “to change into my sweats?”

His breath is measured by the pounding in his chest. It thrums in his ears underneath the sound of her voice. He takes a deep breath that shudders as he exhales through his nose. The harsh thrumming mellows into a quiet whisper. He still feels it pumping in his veins, faint, yet present.

“Second door, over there,” Bucky finally answers, his fair hand extending to gesture to the second door on the wall behind them. The change of clothes bundled and hugged to her chest catches his eyes. He swallows thickly at the tension that thickens in the air between them.

If she did see anything, or notice the way he zoned out, she didn’t say anything, she merely bid him a tight smile, before stepping away to give him space. When she disappears behind the bathroom door, Bucky releases a shaky breath. The towel in his hand wrinkles from how tight he’d been holding on to it. The metal of his left hand had been long dried.

A sudden frustration bubbles in his sternum. It starts as a low fluttering, but soon he can feel the ache of his tightened jaw and the tautness in the muscles in his face. The towel collides with the countertop with a soft thwap as Bucky huffs exasperatedly. “Fuck.”

His hands, both flesh and metal, brace the edge of the countertop. He screws his eyes shut, as if to will away the flashes that occur at the worst times, but despite best attempts, they never seem to follow his command. The torment he faces at the hands of his past comes in droves he can never escape, and while Bucky should be used to it by now…the hauntings of the killer he used to be never cease to find new ways of reminding him anyway.

He hates that it still gets to him. He hates even more that sometimes the facade he’s so carefully crafted breaks at the worst opportune moments.

. . . he does, however, appreciate that she doesn’t question it. Not right away, at least. He knows she sees it, feels it in a way that others simply couldn’t. She doesn’t urge him to talk. Doesn’t bombard him with an interrogation like his therapist does. She doesn’t treat him like someone who needs figuring out; who needs saving. Because she gets it.

She gets it. 

She’s probably the only one who's gotten it since Steve. Since Sam. 

Since everyone else whose been gone.

Bucky turns his head to look at the bathroom door. Baby blues soften at the thought of the woman on the other side of it. He breathes a sigh into the air before him and tries to shake off the shadows that still loom. Exiting the kitchen area, he gets two paces past the bathroom door before he hears his name being called from the woman inside.

“Buck?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you, uh. . .” 

Bucky pauses mid-step, brows furrowing, before retracing his last two paces to stand in front of the door.

“You good in there, sweetheart?”

Another second of silence passes.

“Do you have an extra sweatshirt I could borrow?”

He blinks once. Twice. Three times for extra measure.

“What was that?”

There’s shuffling on the other side of the door. Bucky tries not to listen too hard, but his curiosity is piqued.

“Do you have another sweatshirt I could use?” The woman reiterates; her voice is a little bit hesitant now. Bashful, even. “I think I forgot to pack mine, and I- uh…I need something long sleeved.”

Thin lips pull into a tight line. There’s a slight pang in his chest that comes with the realization of the reason behind her request.

“Uh, yeah,” Bucky replies, and his feet, now with a newfound purpose, restart their pace towards his room, “gimme a sec to look; I’ll find something.”

His steps are filled with a sense of urgency now. She can hear the difference between when he was first walking past the door and now as he does so again with the intention of going to his room. There’s a light creak that sounds when his bedroom door opens, and as she does not hear the same whining in reverse from the hinges, she deduces that he’s left the door open.

The woman takes a deep breath as her gaze flickers from the bathroom door back at her reflection in the mirror. It’s still something she hasn’t quite gotten used to - seeing her reflection like this. Something calm, controlled, domestic. 

If she’s naive enough, she can believe those things about herself, too. She ties her hair up at night with a satin scarf to protect her hair like other women. She sings songs of sweet love and fun like other women. Sometimes, she’ll see someone attractive, and grow a little hot under the collar if they happen to look her way, like other women.

But then, as her coffee colored eyes trace the patterns of scarring across her skin, the veil of nativity falls from her eyes, and she is reminded of the reason why she could never be any semblance of normal. 

Her hands sooth over the varying bumps and dips and ridges of scarred skin and tissue that litter her arms. Some are lighter than her complexion; no older than a couple of years. Others are darker, having marked her since youth. Each tells its own painful story that she’s reminded of every time she undresses; every time she pulls back a layer of clothing, she reopens memories of a past she’d do anything to forget.

She remembers each one, too. The long, darkened line that runs across her shoulder? A bullet graze from a blocking drill that nearly killed her. Dark dots that cluster together on her bicep? Cigarette burns from a scientist frustrated with her “lack of cooperation”.  The smaller dots that could be mistaken for freckles at the junction of her elbows serve to show the numerous injections she’d suffered through since birth.

And at the end of her right arm is the one that evokes the most violent of reactions. PSW-001 stares back at her, tauntingly. Always there. Always a present reminder of a past she will never escape. The killer she used to be.

Her thumb swipes over the barcode tattooed on her wrist. The longer she stares at it, the harsher her swipes become. Her thumb digs into the light underside of her wrist, rubbing at it like somehow the ink will come off. It never does - she’s tried so many times before.

An incessant stinging creeps into her eyes. She blinks once to chase it away. When she opens them again, her vision is blurred, and crimson paints her wrist red. It drips from her hands, thick and warm and frightening. Her throat goes bone dry as tendrils of the thick substance raise from her fingertips. She tries to will them down again, but they do not respond to her mental call for control. 

The smell of copper is all consuming, invading her senses without remorse. A sudden tightness presses harshly against her ribcage, and she feels like she can’t breathe. A cold, prickly feeling crawls up her spine; the blood sticks to her like a second skin, soaking under the warmth of her skin, and it terrifies her.

Shaky eyes flicker around the sink, spotting a drying towel on a rack above the toilet. Off, get it off, get the blood off- 

She reaches for the towel, nearly stumbling to grasp for it, her other hand grabbing the faucet knob and turning on the hot water. She scrubs frantically at her skin, praying that the blood will come off. Yet, the harder she scrubs, the deeper the blood sinks into her skin. It clings onto her melanin with a vice grip. She can feel it clawing her skin with each scrub. 

You cannot escape us, (Y/N). You cannot escape the blood you’ve bathed in-

“--/N)? (Y/N)?”

She blinks again. Once, twice. Three times for extra measure. The haze in her vision is gone. So is the blood that was supposed to be on her arms. 

“(Y/N)? Everything good in there?”

The water still runs hot from the faucet. The towel she’d used laid balled up in the sink. Her hands and forearm sported blotches of angry pink. She’d scrubbed herself near raw, and the tenderness shot a slight sting up her arms.

“Y-Yeah!” She had to ignore the incessant stinging to hurriedly shut off the running water, as well as the burn from the excess water she hurriedly wrung out from the towel, before hanging it back up in its original place.

With her heart still hammering in her chest and body shaken from the vision she’d had, she slowly took the two paces towards the bathroom door, cracking it ajar just enough for Bucky to peek inside.

“Sorry. Must’ve spaced out.” She speaks again. A weak attempt to avoid suspicion, but Bucky isn’t naive. He sees the wavering in her coffee eyes; he hears the labored breathing. A bubble of worry rises in his throat, forcing him to speak around it.

“You’re good,” he reassures, “found that uh, sweatshirt you wanted. It’s kinda big, though.”

The woman shakes her head - a little too eagerly for Bucky’s comfort - “It’s fine. The bigger, the better.”

A moment passes where silence hangs a little too tensely. Then, Bucky shoves the sweatshirt into the opening of the door. He doesn’t look. He doesn’t peek. He grants privacy while still offering his presence.

She swallows the lump in her throat, carefully taking the sweatshirt from his grasp, muttering a wavering thank you before closing the door again.

She shrugs the sweatshirt on, and not to her surprise, it nearly swallows her. The cotton fleece on the inside makes for cozy material, though, so she doesn’t mind that the sleeves extend past her fingers, or that the collar is a little wide. Instead, she tucks a bit of the fabric in the front of her sweatpants, and adjusts the neck to sit better on her collarbones. There’s a scent to the sweatshirt, too - not unpleasant, but it does give a nod to its owner. Something metallic that lingers on the left side specifically, but overall there’s a warm, spiced scent that sticks to the cotton. Cinnamon, maybe? Cardamom? Paired with something woodsy, like pine, and it evens out the spiced aroma that tickles at her nose a little bit. 

Focusing on the scent of his sweatshirt, her heart rate slows to normal. Her shaking has reduced to a tender tremble that, thankfully, the long sleeves have expertly hidden.

‘I am okay’, she thinks to herself, reciting the words in her head slowly so that every syllable sticks, like her therapist taught her, ‘I am safe. I am here. I am in control. I am okay.’

After she’s repeated the mantra enough times that a part of her believes it to be true, she finally musters the courage to exit the bathroom.

When she reappears, her bundle of outside clothes folded neatly and tucked into her chest, she finds Bucky in the kitchen again. He’s hovering over a space on the back counter, muttering to himself. She raises an eyebrow.

“What’re you doing?”

Bucky turns at the sound of her voice, lifting himself from the counters edge, revealing what was hidden behind his torso. Two clear mugs, an electric tea kettle, and a box of tea with two sachets already pulled out.

The woman tilts her head. She’d never known Bucky to be a tea drinker.

“I forgot I had these.” He finally says. “The shrink once said somethin’ about tea helpin’ with…this.”

She notes how he refuses to give name to the situation at hand. Whether it’s because he simply doesn’t want to, or he can’t bring himself to do so, she isn’t so sure of. She crosses over to the living area to stuff her clothes into her bag. The blankets and the pillow that once made his sleeping pallet had been folded and placed on the opposite end of the couch.

“I’ve never known you to drink tea.” She hums in response, her feet carrying her back towards the kitchen. Instead of taking up residence on the stool like earlier, she rounds the extended counter top to enter the kitchen area.

“I don’t,” he says while pouring the hot water from the electric kettle over the sachet in his mug. The closer she gets, the aroma of sweet plums fill the space with the rising steam from the water, “but I grabbed this a while ago, and never really found the chance to use it ‘til now, I guess.”

Bucky pours hot water over the sachet in the second mug, then pushes the electric kettle to the back of the counter. From his right, he slides over a bag of sugar and a bear-shaped bottle of honey. “Pick your poison.”

She feigns a moment of thought, dramatized by the tapping of her forefinger to her chin and a quirked eyebrow, before reaching for the bottle of honey. She opens the cap and turns the bottle over, squeezing about five seconds worth of it into her mug. While Bucky spoons sugar into his tea, she places the bottle cap closed and upright at the back of the counter. She sees the extra spoon he’s laid out for her to use, but she doesn’t take it.

Instead, she hovers her finger over the reddish-brown liquid with honey floating inside, and moves it in a circular motion. In tune with her movements, the liquid in the mug also begins to swirl around rhythmically. A little whirlpool circles round and round in her mug until she’s deemed the liquid thoroughly mixed, before slowly closing her hand into a fist to bring the whirlpool of tea to a stagnant halt.

“Hey,” Bucky’s voice sounds, a mixture of awe and disbelief, “hey, no fair- that’s cheating, (Y/N).”

“‘Cheating’?” She repeats, a small scoff of amusement leaving her lips, “how is this ‘cheating’?”

Bucky gestures between her hand and his own, which has been busy stirring his chosen sweetener. The sugar is being extremely difficult to dissolve.

“I’m doin’ manual labor over here; and you’re takin’ the easy way out!”

“Oh, my god-“

“That’s not fair, I should take your tea back!”

“Do you want me to do yours?”

The offer catches him a little off guard; but as he attempts to sputter out a response , Alahni’s hands are already reaching. 

With one hand she takes the teaspoon Bucky had been using, placing it down on the now empty wrapper the tea sachets came in. The other hand grasps the unoccupied side of the mug and glides it a little closer to her. Even as her fingers overlap his paler ones, she doesn’t quite falter in her movements. She just becomes a little more intentional with her touch.

She uses the same procedure as before - hovering her finger over the reddish-brown liquid before spinning it in circular motions, allowing for a little whirlpool to form in the middle of the mug. In seconds, the clear little crystals of sugar begin to dissolve obediently; as if the gentle, womanly touch of hers was all it needed to comply.

Grumbling sounds when Alahni finishes the process. Bucky’s blue eyes flicker between her and the tea mug, and if she weren’t mistaken, the entrails of a pout were forming on his lips. “Little show off.”

“I don’t think that’s what you’re supposed to say to someone who just helped you with your tea,” she chimes, tilting her head to the side a little with a knowing look. The one that teases him with the words I’m right without her ever having to say them, “saving you from your poor manual labor.”

Baby blues roll to the back of his head, a subtle sucking of the teeth sounds, too, but he doesn’t bite back. Instead, he takes his loss as graciously as Bucky ever could take a loss - with a little huff and dramatized thank you that makes her voice flutter in the air like sweet chimes in the spring. It’s a sound that’s very refreshing to the ears. 

And he really likes the way it sounds. 

Especially when it’s him who can make it happen.

When she pulls away, it’s like a cold front swoops in. He doesn’t like how the loss of warmth makes him feel. She doesn’t like the loss of contact quite much either, but their grievances are not spoken into existence. 

Even so, it lingers still. The tension; innocent and all-consuming. A tender thought of what would happen if it stayed longer?

The woman returns to her cup, wrapping her sleeve-covered palms around the curve of the mug as she brings it to her lips. As her back meets the edge of the opposite counter Bucky leans on, a hum of satisfaction rises from her throat. The warmth of the tea soothes the trembles from earlier, and while her hands still feel a little raw from the scrubbing, the comfort from the fleece-lined sweatshirt and the warmth from the tea seem to make it a little bit bearable.

“Is this…plum?”

Bucky nods, mid-sip, his bionic arm tucked underneath the other as he drinks. “Yeah. They supposedly help with memory and stuff, so, it seemed fitting, with this tea and all.”

She thinks back to the notebook and newspaper clippings she saw earlier when she came in. Her eyes shift over to where it still sits - packed up and moved off to the side a little bit for cleanliness. 

Her gaze returns to center, passing between the mug at her chest and the man standing across from her. She taps a nail against the glass mug before she speaks; slow, tender, intentional, “Is it still coming back?”

Bucky’s arm shifts from underneath the other, the subtle clink of metal sounding on the marble countertop as he braces himself against it. She watches as his chest rises with a deep breath, and slowly falls with a grounding exhale. His fingers flex around the mug in thought.

“Sometimes…. it-ah, it comes in droves,” his baby blues are averted to the side, unable to meet her gaze, “sometimes, it makes me fish for ‘em. Ain’t really pretty, no matter which way it goes.”

“Yeah?”

Bucky takes another breath; a tired one, strained from vulnerability, “Yeah.”

He takes another sip of his tea. She watches him with soft eyes. For a moment, they flutter down to the reddish-brown liquid in her own mug. Her tinted reflection stares back at her, and her chest grows a little tighter.

With a measured breath, the woman confides. “I get the visions, still.”

She can feel his gaze on her - not hard, or investigative, but patient. “Well, flashes,, mostly, now. They come and go; quiet, but harrowing. The visions, though…they’re always the worst.”

She’s holding onto her mug a little tighter, now. It acts as an anchor for her, as she centers her energy onto the cup at her chest. The warm scent of plum wafts to her nose, giving her something sweet for her mind to anchor on.

“...that what happened in the bathroom?”

The muscles in her throat tighten a little too harshly. She can’t speak, so she nods instead. His hum lets her know that even without eye contact, he’s received the response.

She raises the rim to her lips again, taking another sip of the tea and letting the sweet warmth trickle down her throat. She reclaims her voice again; soft, quiet.

“I don’t always remember them,” she mutters, her hands falter from her chest as she places the half-drunken mug on the countertop. The slightly unsteady clatter marks the return of the trembling in her fingers, “but I will always remember the weight of their blood in my hands. I can never forget that feeling.”

In slow, careful motions, she tugs the sleeves of the sweatshirt upward. The material bunches just in the middle of her forearms as she reveals the tender, blotchy pinkness that litter her hands and wrist. The dryness had begun to set in, making a thin layer of white begin to settle onto her caramel skin. Her hands start to trace over each other, fingers mapping out invisible paths with no end, only retracing. 

“I…swear I had blood on my hands.” She admits with a shaky breath. “Their blood. And I tried to get it off, but I…-”

She doesn’t hear Bucky set his cup down, or the sound of his junk drawer opening at his side. Doesn’t see him take barely a step forward to her, but when his shadow crosses over her own, blocking out the kitchen’s overhead lighting with his height. What she does see is his paler hand carefully extending underneath hers, cradling both of hers hands in his with an unmatched reverence.

The touch stings a little, but the intent behind it emits no ill will. His caress is characteristically tender. Bucky handles her, not like he’s scared she’ll break, but like something precious. And it tugs at her heart so gently.

And he whispers, “I get it,” with a voice that bleeds with knowing.

“....yeah.” Is all she can whisper in return. 

Her fingers curl around his hand, and it is a soft weight to him. Bitterly sweetened by her trembling touch, his skin alights with a warmth that threatens to flush him red. 

He gets it; probably better than anyone.

He gets it; and he wants to help.

So, quietly - because the silence between them was too tender to break, and neither could find words that seemed appropriate to say - he produces the tube of Aquaphor he often kept in the junk drawer of his kitchen for similar situations he found himself in, and helps her apply it to her hands and wrists. The sooth that follows the sting is a lot like the anxiety that comes with allowing someone into one’s world, she thinks, as the coil of unease loosens itself into a loose spool of thread in her stomach. 

Accidentally, his thumb brushes over the ink that stains her right wrist. He’s caught glimpses of it before, but seeing it up close now brings a different reaction; one that makes his stomach tighten. He expects her to pull away from his grasp when his eyes settle on the black ink on her skin.

She doesn’t. 

He waits for a second, granting her the right of choice. When she still remains in his hold, he continues to sooth the balm over her skin; not disregarding, but noting,

Bucky has been granted access to a part of her that no one has ever seen before; and it ignites something fierce in the crevice of his chest. Honored. Protective.

“Aquaphor, I find, is the best at this,” he speaks up after the tension in the silence smooths over a little more, waning out in the minutes that creep into the hours of early morning, “ ‘s not heavy, and, uh… you don’t need a lot to get the job done.”

The woman soothes over the balm on her raw hands and wrist. It feels so much better, now, and the cotton fleece inside the sleeves of the sweatshirt add a much needed comforting warmth.

“Thanks, Buck.” She says sincerely.

Bucky smiles - cat-like and affectionate. “Don’t mention it.”

He can still feel the weight of her hands in his long after they’ve parted. The sweet tinge of clove tickles at his nose still. These little things find themselves clinging to his mind - a mind he doesn't completely trust…and yet, somehow, finds comfort in the thought of leaning onto those little remnants of her.

He discards the Aquahor into the junk drawer again. She grabs her tea mug, and so does Bucky. She leads them out of the kitchen, with Bucky flicking the light switch off as they move to the living area. The Addams Family still hums on in the background; the exaggerated studio laughter of some ironic joke sounding as the pair enter the space. He at first turns to settle onto the couch, but upon seeing her find a spot in front of the cushion on the wooden floor, he, too, takes up residence beside her on the ground.

The woman settles down on the floor, placing her cup on the side of her. Bucky watches as she reaches behind her to pull her bag from its resting place on the tan cushion. He cocks an eyebrow as she fumbles around, searching for something.

“What’re you doing?”

She doesn’t answer right away. His curiosity almost pushes for him to question again, before she finally pulls what she’d been looking for out of her bag.

“I almost forgot about this,” she hums softly, producing from her bag a red-cover paperback book, “I brought a book to read.”

Bucky tilts his head to the side a little as she smooths over the paperback cover. The shadows in the red shape into the silhouettes of people - children, judging by how small they are - with one girl standing out in the way she is colored in grey.

She sees Bucky craning his neck to view the cover; she shifts the book closer to him, gesturing for him to take the novel in his own hands. Baby blues flicker between her and the book she offers, and after a second of contemplation, takes the book to see it better.

“The Children of Willesden Lane,” he read the first line of the title, his eyes flickering down with each line read, “Beyond the Kinder-Transport. A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival.”

He turns the book to the back, his eyes scanning over the brief synopsis written in white. “Why a World War II memoir?”

“You mentioned it a while ago.”

He blinks, pauses his reading. Once, twice, three times for good measure. He then turns his head to her, brows knit together in question. “I did?”

“Well, not the actual book,” the woman rephrases, “but you mentioned something- like, liking memoirs. So I bought this around that time, but it had been in my reading pile for so long, I forgot about it. I finally made it to it this week.”

“Yeah?”

He doesn’t remember the off-hand recommendation she’s talking about. It’s possible he did do such a thing, and his mind is just being cruel by keeping the memory from him. It has a way of playing such insensitive tricks on him, finding pleasure in his pain. He wishes he could remember it, though; it would make keeping the conversation going a little easier.

Instead, he simply hands the book back to her as she nods in response. He’s willing to trust her word instead.

“Do you like it so far?” Bucky asks.

She takes a moment to think. Coffee eyed glance over the cover of the book for the stretch of a second.

“It’s definitely heartfelt.” She answers. “The author, she writes very raw about her mothers’ experiences. I can’t imagine the emotion that must’ve come up with the conversations for this book.”

Bucky drinks a sip from his cup, then tucks his tea mug somewhere far off to the side. He didn’t anticipate reaching back for it after that last sip. His attention, as strained and tired as it was, focused on the woman next to him.

“What’s it about?”

It takes a minute for her to register his words, her gaze slowly trailing from the book in her hands to the man sitting next to her. When her eyes find his, the tired little glint of curiosity in his baby blues is soft, yet prominent. A delightful little tingle rushes from the tips of her fingers and up her arms, settling at the base of her neck. 

“You want to know?” She questions; a lilt of amusement catching at the end of her tongue.

“Well, if you like it, and you wanna talk about it,”  the brunette’s gaze shifts to the side - not in avoidance, but in recollection, as the spool in his stomach turns and tightens and catches him off guard. His flesh hand reaches up to scratch at the darkening shadow of his chin, “I don’t mind hearin’ and learnin’ about it, too.”

She blinks once, then twice, before the ghost of a grin takes over her lips. She turns her gaze back to the book in her hands, her thumbs peek out of the grey sleeves to  soothe over the cover tenderly.

“The author’s mother, she was a little girl on the Kindertransport,” she begins, her coffee eyes finding him again, “she was a piano prodigy from Austria. When her family found out that there was a way out, they sent her on the Kindertransport to England. Willesdan Lane was the name of the street that the orphanage she went to was on. I’m at that part now.”

She beams the more she speaks about the early life of Lisa Jura; how the piano prodigy sourced her love into her music, and the devastation that came with the reality she would be separated from her family due to the war. Bucky sees the way her fingers fiddle with the pages as she speaks, her words soft yet lively. There is something so tenderly sweet about her comfort that he finds endearing to him. 

He should be alarmed at how soft he feels here, but as her voice calms that anxiety that threatens to rage, he doesn’t even notice how the corners of his lips are ghosting upwards. How his body subconsciously angles towards hers. Like moth to flame; like ocean to moon; like all things destined to find reverence in each other.

“I could read it to you, too.” The offer comes a little hesitant; it hums with a self-indulgence that she doesn’t really expect him to act on. She can’t meet his eyes this time, bashful by her own boldness. Timidity clouds her.

She can’t tell if Bucky notices the shift; and for once, she really hopes he doesn’t. She doesn’t deal with embarrassment well.

But he does see. He sees the way she starts to shrink into herself after she lets the words fall from her lips without warning. He notices the air turn a little still, a little cold. Her little shelter of peace begins to fracture the longer the silence hangs in the air.

And Bucky doesn’t want that. He wants to protect it.

So when he assures her that he wouldn’t mind it in the slightest - that her peace is something he wants her to have here, with him - he sincerely hopes that she takes it.

Because he really likes hearing her talk, he’s learning. And he really likes how she talks so calmly yet vibrantly. Her voice is like a balm to the aching soul; something Bucky is coming to realize feels really, really nice.

“Sure. Why not?”

“A-Are you sure?”

“It’s fine. I don’t mind.”

He’s indulging me too much, she thinks, her gaze carefully meeting his again. They bore into her with a weight of reverence that makes her limbs tingle again.

She opens up the book to the bookmarked page, taking out the little teal divider with a darker blue tassel at the end. She sets it on her knee, but Bucky swipes it at the last minute. She glances at him, chuckles a little, but says nothing, before pulling her knees up to her chest, resting the book on them comfortably.

She starts the chapter she left off on a little shaky. She doesn’t typically read out loud, much less to another person. He tries to keep his eyes trained on the bookmark he’d swiped earlier, fiddling with the tiny little strings on the tassel. It helps some that his eyes aren’t boring into her side profile as she reads. Who knows the kind of mistakes she’d make out of anxiousness.

She reads a few pages, and soon finds a comfortable rhythm to slip into. Every so often, she glances over towards Bucky. She gages his reactions to certain passages, pauses when it seems like he may want to speak. He doesn’t; instead, she’s met with a low hum that assures her she can continue. 

It’s comfortable. It’s nice. Neither fights the subtle ease that seems to wrap them both in its warm embrace, and for the first time that night, the weight in strained eyelids do not come with a price.

It is after three chapters that she begins to notice that Bucky has been a little too quiet. 

She pauses for a breath, taking the opportunity to glance towards him. His head is turned downward a little, with his hair that reaches his eyelashes curtaining his face slightly.. Initially, she thought his eyes were just cast downward towards the bookmark he’d been playing with this whole time, but his eyes blink slow, and his fingers have stopped fiddling with the tassel, and his chest moves in slow intervals, too.

“Buck?”

He doesn’t respond to the call of his name. He barely hears it, muddled by sleep which trickles its way into his brain. Instead, his body begins to lean. In a haste, she lets her book fall  to the side as her body turns inward towards the brunette, bracing for whatever direction he leans.

And he leans towards her.

He tries to catch himself; by the time he feels his body slumping, he’s struggling to reclaim consciousness in order to pull himself together, but his fight is in vain.

He slumps, and he falls. Right into her hands.

“Hey, hey, hey,” there’s a tinge of worry in her voice; that much he hears. The smell of clove surrounds him first before he registers that she’s touching him. Holding him. “You’re okay; you’re okay, James.”

 There’s a blooming warmth that starts at the side of his neck and the middle of his chest, overpowering the cold metal of his dog tags which undoubtedly comes first. They stay, and they guide him down - slowly, slowly, so he isn’t startled - and then the warmth shifts to cradle his head just as it meets the cushion of something softer. The warmth soon envelops him there, and the comforting cloves ceases his restless stirring.

The woman's chest is thundering behind her ribcage. She stares down at the man now nestled in her lap. He is quiet, and no longer stirring. She wondered if he could hear the incessant pounding that is her heartbeat right now, or if he could before sleep took him safely into its clutches. She hadn’t expected for him to slump in the way that he did - all body muscle and mass coming her way, giving her little time to react. He was heavy, surely from the weight of exhaustion that was bone deep.

He was sleeping.

He was…actually sleeping.

One careful hand shifted over his head, brushing away wisps of brown hair from his face. His eyelids were stagnant. His breath against her thigh was even, steady.

He looked… content. Not peaceful, not completely, but the fight against sleep had finally ended, and there wasn’t any sign of discomfort in the creases of his forehead. As rugged and rough as Bucky usually looked, in his sleep, he looked…soft.

‘This is okay,’ she thought to herself, a soft prickling heat creeping up her neck in a slow yet unwavering wave. Her gaze shoots up, her hands covering her mouth as if to keep the thoughts inside. She fears any little sound would wake him, and she doesn’t want that in the slightest, ‘this is totally okay. Everything. Is. Okay.’

Wind howls outside, whistling against the glass windows. It’s enough to snap her out of her stupor, and instead ignite another thought.

Quietly, and with as little movement as possible, she reaches behind her for the pile of blankets that he’d folded earlier in his attempt to make the space a little cleaner. She peels one off, carefully draping it over as much of his frame as she can get without moving too much. Sadly, his shins and feet are left uncovered, but as they are clothed in sweat pants and socks, she hopes he wouldn’t mind it too much.

The other blanket, the woman haphazardly tosses over her own legs, the fabric having little trouble reaching over her limbs.

It’s only afterwards that she finally has the will to look at him again. He still rests in her lap, stagnant, yet calm. She’s never seen this kind of stillness about him before. It’s a strange kind of endearment, though. There’s a soft blooming in her chest that settles right beneath her sternum at the sight of him like this. Something tranquil, she feels…and she quite likes this look on him.

Her hand raises again, gentle and purposeful. Her middle finger extends first, brushing against his hair. A swoop of his brown hair wraps itself around her fingers, and she notes how soft it is with the faint smell of soap. She carefully tucks the wisp of hair behind his ear, and releases a breath she didn’t know she had been holding in her throat. With soft, affectionate coffee eyes, Alahni allows the moment to exist quietly between them, letting the picture emblazone into her mind.

Her fingers tenderly ghost from the shell of his ear to the cusp of his jaw, and her hand settles there comfortably; the palm of her hand rests just under his jaw, while her thumb runs rhythmic strokes against his jawline and cheek. A sense of fondness overtakes her when she feels him crane just a little further into her hold.

He doesn’t pull away.

She fully expects him to…

…and he doesn’t.

Without realizing, Bucky had offered a part of himself to her that very few have been blessed with.

With the ghosting of a grin tugging at her lips, she quietly vows to herself to handle it with the utmost grace and tenderness she can.

Satisfied that the man in her lap was safely asleep, Alahni uses her free hand to pick up her book again, and continues reading. The Addams Family still hums quietly in the background, the light from the television flickering on the pair settled on the living room floor. Winter roars on outside.

An hour passes before she starts to feel the stinging behind her eyelids. Sleep threatens to make room for her now, too, but she tries her hardest to fight it. Part of her is scared that the hauntings of her terror will come back. Part of her wants to continue watching over Bucky to protect him from any terrors that may stir him awake. But words begin to blur together on the page, and she’s starting to yawn far too many times in a row, interrupting her reading far more than she’d like.

The pitch black sky starts to shift into a light navy blue by the time she finally surrenders. She closes the book, forgetting the bookmark as it’s somewhere underneath the mess of limbs and blankets she can’t bring herself to search through. Instead, she sacrifices the cream colored page by dog-ear-ing the corner, before pushing the book off to the side. It rests right next to her forgotten mug of tea, which had now grown cold.

The Addams Family still hums in the background, but her attention settles on the sleeping man on her lap. He hasn’t moved an inch, save the occasional deep inhale. When that happens, she stops her thumb strikes the second he moves, waiting, wondering if he’ll pull away. There’s a sweet little fluttering in her heart when he only buries further into her thigh, and she resumes her caress again.

Three deep breaths of her own, and the last thing she remembers leaning her head against the cushion of the couch before her eyes finally flutter close. 

It’s mid morning when the sunbeams start to stream into the apartment. The warmth from them falls upon Bucky’s face, and after its incessant gleam becomes too much for him to ignore, he peels his eyes open with a grunt.

The first thing he notices is the faint pressure on his jaw. He initially thinks it’s just locked from teeth grinding - a habit of his that came out whenever he slept - so he tries to flex his lower face to rid himself from the fatigue there. 

However, it doesn’t go away.

The second thing he notices is the smell of clove surrounding him. 

That scent can only belong to one person.

Through the grogginess, Bucky’s vision begins to clear. Baby blues land on the mix-matched blankets he remembers using the night prior. He wears the yellow one. The brown one drapes over a pair of legs, and as he raises his head slowly to prop himself up, his eyes travel the length of the body he’d been laying on, before finally coming face to face with her.

She’s fast asleep; her face is tucked into the corner of her elbow, the opposite arm from the one he’d felt draped over him being used as a cushion for her head. Despite the undoubtedly uncomfortable sleeping position, she sleeps quietly, and contently. He’s always found it intriguing how easily she can fall asleep in any place, in any position, and it appears to be so normal and comfortable for her.

Wait.

The brunette shifts to sit on his knees. The blanket falls off of his shoulders, pooling around his legs as he sits with the realization that just dawned on him.

He fell asleep.

He fell asleep with her.

He fell asleep on her.

The previous hours start coming back to him in quick, torturous flashes. Him waiting outside for her. Them eating dinner together. Him fetching one of his sweatshirts for her - the same one she’s still swamped in. Him holding her hands as he helped her apply the Aquaphor on her hands and wrists, blotchy-pink and raw.

Them having tea together. Her reading to him. 

The echoes of quiet laughter and her smile linger at the entrails of his mind.

He looks around him, still bleary eyed and unguarded. Heat rises beneath his sleepshirt, threatening to tinge his cheeks pink, and as much as he tries to push it down, it still creeps up to his ears.

In an attempt to keep his mind from thinking too hard on all that may have occurred hours prior, he shakily finds his footing, and gathers up the tea mugs they’d been drinking from. The reddish-brown liquid sloshes around in their confinements before being poured down the kitchen drain. He sets the glasses in the sink to be washed later, before returning to the living room. 

His pace slows as he approaches the end of the couch, his eyes landing on her sleeping frame. The sun's beams have reached her, now. They land softly on her almond skin, casting a pretty golden halo around her body. For a moment, Bucky’s breath hitches at the sight. His brain stalls, and his heart catches in his chest.

She’s so content. Peaceful.

His footsteps are softer now. Careful not to cause any noise or to make the floorboards creak. He picks up the blanket which had been his and tosses it on the couch. Carefully, he reaches over her body to pick up her book and place it on the couch as well. He chooses to ignore the fact that she’d sacrificed the poor page by dogear-ing it, but it grants him an amused grin at the thought. He’ll have to replace her bookmark if he can’t find it later on.

Once the floor is relatively clear, Bucky kneels down again. He first slips a hand under the blanket, finding where the back of her knees are, and hooks his arm underneath them. His other hand wraps around her waist. As he gently nudges her close to lean on his chest, he tucks her head under his chin, and lifts her into his arms.

The blanket drapes down as he lifts her into the air. He feels her stir in his arms, likely from the sudden shift in position, but he quickly shushes her little whines of discontent. He mumbles, “I got you, I got you,” in a quiet promise into the crown of her hair, before turning on his heels to carry her to his bedroom.

The door had been left ajar from last night, so he is able to just nudge the door open with his foot. His bedroom is sparse for decoration, really. A forest green bedding set adorns his bed, with a wooden nightstand and a chair off by the windowside. His dresser is wooden, too, and on top of it are a few framed pictures of him and his friends. He and Steve take the center position, and around them are images of him with others like Natasha, Clint, and Sam. People he holds near and dear to him; the people whom he seeks when it feels like the world is falling and his mind is fractured.

There is also a picture of him and her, too. It’s a polaroid of when they went to Coney Island on a little group trip some time ago. They both take huge bites out of a big cone of cotton candy - his first time having the treat again after decades. She is mid-laugh in the polaroid, while he is trying to catch the piece of fluff from falling from his lips. He can still taste the sugary blue-rasberry on his tongue whenever he looks at the picture, and it always brings a fond smile to his face.

Bucky passes his dresser and crosses over to the side of the bed that is usually left unoccupied. He carefully lays her down on the mattress, slowly slipping his arms from underneath her. The woman stirs again, but quickly falls quiet once her body registers the softness of the mattress underneath her. As she settles, Bucky reaches to the top of her head and tugs down the receding satin scarf wrapped around her hair over her forehead again.

He’d planned to return back to the living room; intended to grant her privacy as she slept. He wasn’t the kind of man to just intrude on a woman; he had morals and standards he held himself to. Yet, as he fixed the throw blanket to cover her body more comfortably, Bucky caught out of the corner of his eyes her hand extending towards him. He failed to think rationally when her warm touch reached his arm, tender and sleep-riddled. The thought that her unconscious mind was seeking him out, even in sleep, made something strong and weakening bloom in his stomach.

And Bucky was a strong man. His resolve and determination was outmatched by none. 

Oh, but he’d never felt so weak in his life than he did right now.

He didn’t know how long he’d been stood there, battling between respect and honor and an age old craving that he thought had been lost with time, torture and terror.

His body makes up its mind before he can.

Carefully, Bucky rounds the bed to what had been designated his side, despite barely using it most nights. The bed dips with his weight as he tries to discreetly slide into bed with her. Of course, a respectable distance is kept - about half an arm’s length of space still lies between them - but it’s as close as Bucky has consciously been to another person in years. Part of him itches to close the distance, but he quells it vigorously.

This is enough. For now…it has to be.

So, Bucky lies in the morning sunlight that slowly creeps over their bodies; his bionic arm lays over his torso, while his flesh arm lies in the distance between them. The back of his hand presses softly against her back, connecting them once again. The knuckle of his forefinger traces lines into her back; a series of tender strokes and patterns that entrance him just as much as the woman he’s making them on.

And he lays. 

And he waits. 

And in the morning sunlight, he smiles. Content.

The incessant ringing that sounds from the locker room makes her pause mid-dry.

It’s two fifty-seven in the morning, and having been wrecked awake by night terrors of her own past, she needed something to quell her racing mind and heart from the adrenaline coursing through her veins. So, with trembling limbs, she replaced sweat-soaked sheets for the waters of her apartment complex’s twenty-four hour pool that had become her solace since she’d started this new life of normalcy after her tenure as an agent with the Avengers.

The water was cool. Not cold like the ocean or the rivers would usually be at this time of year. The frigid winter air freezes most of the shoreline into white ice that stretches anywhere from a few inches to miles off its coast. The pool stays at a moderately cool temperature year around, and it’s what makes it an ideal place for Alahni to drown her racing mind. Even if the stench of chlorine messes with her nose and her hair would faintly smell of it even after a shower.

She doesn’t really mind it, though. As long as it helps to drown away the terrors that plague her mind.

She fully expected that for the rest of the night, she’d find something in the fridge to put together for a quick late night meal, and spend the rest of the early morning hours reading through Tar Baby again. But as she came out of the showers, patting her braids dry with a microfiber towel and a larger one tucked securely around her chest, the plans she had already decided to commit to, might be rewritten.

Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion, feet sounding in soft thuds as she approached the bench which held her fresh, folded pajama, bag of toiletries, and her phone that vibrated against the wooden beams of the seat, screen alight with a caller ID.

Who is calling me at this hour?

When she finally makes it to her phone, and sees the caller ID that is flashing across her screen, her body freezes. BUCKY B stands out in bold white letters against a translucent image of the same man’s confused side profile - an image taken by their mutual friend Sam Wilson sneakily and sent to their little group as a joke, but one she found endearing enough to make his contact photo.

Something between adrenaline and panic rushes through her veins like before. However, unlike before, it’s not her own terror induced anxiety that causes her limbs to go rigid; it’s the thought of what could possibly possess Bucky to call her at three in the morning.

She doesn’t think too much further on it, before her hand drops the towel she’d been using to dry her hair in favor of the phone that had been ringing for far too long already. She swipes the green phone icon to the left before placing the device on her ear to answer.

“Bucky?” she answers, her voice cracking over the receiver. “Is everything okay?”

Silence. Knots turn in her stomach, and to give her free hand something to do, it comes to grasp onto the bundle of cloth that covers her drying body.

The silence soon gives way to breathing - shallow, barely audible, but there. The static is soft, mixed in with the faint sound of rustling. Was he home? Did he wake from a nightmare?

She’s about to speak again, but there’s a sharp intake of breath from the other end of the line that silences her instead.

“Shit, (Y/N)”, the rasp in his voice confirms to her that sleep was somewhere in the entrails of his mind,  but the gravel that trails afterwards tells her that something had ripped him from it. Something harsh, and cold, and cruel, “sorry.”

A nanosecond of silence stretches again, and yet, it feels like hours have passed. Her hand tightens around the towel, and she swallows the dryness in her throat to speak.

“It’s okay,” she assures. She tries to keep her voice level and calm - grounding - because she knows any hint of hesitation could make him spiral more than he probably already has, “I was just a little surprised, is all.”

“Right.”

Silence.

“Did I wake you?”

“No, no; I’ve been awake for a while now. I just finished at the pool.”

She doesn’t know why she mentions the pool - the one place she always seeks in the turmoil of her mind - but maybe if he knows that she, too, was in a similar predicament, he wouldn’t feel as bad. It’s an attempt at comfort, an olive branch that’s rarely exchanged between the pair who have shared a similar past in more ways than one. “Are…are you okay, Buck?”

She doesn’t expect an answer - at least, not a solid one. She’s surprised Bucky even stayed on the phone this long, because she’s sure that it wasn’t a conscious decision to call her of all people. She had half a mind to ask if he’d called her by mistake. Was there a slip of his thumb on the way to pressing Sam’s contact? But she doesn’t want him to feel wrong for doing so. 

“....yeah,” there’s more shuffling on the other end of the line. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other, a slight sting growing in her heel from standing stagnant for too long. He starts to speak again as she pads over to the opposite side of the bench, settling down on the cool wooden surface, “just…ah…you know…”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She didn’t know if she really wanted to be right in that aspect. She knew of the severity of Bucky’s terrors. She’d seen how bad they’d gotten first hand; witnessing the way it rolled in like an unsuspecting storm. The quiet that started it off, the sinking feeling in her gut when she could see the shift in those blue eyes of his. Always alert, always calculating. Cracked and broken and afraid. Struggling between the man of atonement he wanted to be and the monster of death that he was molded into. Never fully forgotten. Never fully rid of it.

The dampness in her skin grew cold, goosebumps forming in its wake. She tries to breathe through rigid muscles, and a slight burn trickled through her veins. What horrors had his brain conjured up tonight to provoke him to call someone?

“....you, too, huh?”

The three-worded question almost catches her off guard. Her toes curl underneath her, and she isn’t sure if it’s because of the cold tile that’s beginning to make her feet ache, or if she’s trying not to remember her own terror that was the drill she was forced to run as a child test subject.

“Yeah,” she says in a breath that could pass for a sigh, but the slight stutter in the raggedness of it gives away the calm facade she tried to maintain, “me, too.”

She doesn’t like to talk about her terrors. She doesn’t like to remember the copper taste in her mouth from brutal training; or the bile that burned her throat after hours of injections and experimentation strapped onto a cold metal table; or the darkness she’d been trapped inside for so long that she became averse to light as a whole. Coffee colored eyes flutter down to the warmed color of her wrist, blotched with ink in the pattern of a barcode. PSW-001 - PROJECT SOLDIER WOMAN - stares back at her hauntingly.

She doesn’t like to give those horrors the honor of voice. She’s thankful that, out of everyone she’s come to know and love and care deeply for, past and present, Bucky understands this the most.

Even if he doesn’t think it can be reciprocated.

“Would you…-” She purses her lips together, forming a line as tight as the knot in her stomach. When did offering comfort become such a daunting task? 

“Do you…want company?” 

Again, the silence stretches for what seems like forever, and she hates it. Not because she regrets asking, but because of the pressure it might imply.

She’d never known Bucky to ask for help. Yet, perhaps, that's why a part of her extended the offer anyway; because even when someone seems to be good at handling their demons, it doesn’t mean they need to do so alone. 

And Bucky had been alone long enough as it was.

She can practically hear the gears turning in his head, trying to conjure up justifications for refusing her offer. “It’s too cold out,” he murmurs through the receiver, “you shouldn’t be outside at this hour on your own,” he mumbles. 

She can’t help but hum, lips tugging upward into an amused grin.

“You know my history, and you’re worried about me alone by myself at night?”

From him, the breath that’s released is something soft; a sigh of amusement, at most.

It’s sweet, endearing, that he worries even in his state where his mind is muddled and grappling for something steady. Yet, her heart tightens a little, as even when steady grounding is offered, he flinches out of instinct.

And she knows why. She knows because she has done the same. She once thought silence and solitude would fix her; that as long as no one saw the cracked and broken pieces, the illusion of her progress would appear better. That the world would see the woman who was trying, instead of the woman who was struggling; because a facade was easier to sport than allowing others to see the blood of years of warfare and manipulation from hands made to kill.

“You can say no,” she reassures him, steadying herself with a breath to try and ease the knots in her stomach, but they don’t go away; only tighten in the silence and the weight, “I wouldn’t feel any kind of way if you did.”

She turns her wrist inward, pressing it against her stomach like somehow the white towel will swallow the black ink from her skin and erase the trauma it holds. It won’t. Nothing will.

“I get it.” 

She genuinely did. 

Bucky’s silence on the other end speaks for him; he knows that she gets it, too.

She gets wanting to be alone. She gets not wanting to be needy.

…she wouldn’t mind it, though. If he needed someone. 

If he needed her.

“But…if you want someone there,” she pulls her wrist back out into view, the stripes of the barcode staring back at her again, “I don’t mind, James. Really.”

And part of her she really hopes he wouldn’t mind, either.

The silence stretches on for minutes again. Goosebumps make her skin look rigid, and her thighs press together for a semblance of warmth. The towel is the only thing keeping her fairly warm, and if it weren’t for the way that the crevices of her body still hold a cool dampness from the lingering traces of water from her shower, she would’ve forgotten the clothes she’d brought to change into. Yet, she waits, with baited breath, leaning forward in anticipation as her ear tries to pick up any trace of sound coming from the other end of the line.

“I wouldn’t wanna bring you any trouble, (Y/N).”

A weak attempt at deflection; his last one, it sounds like.

“It wouldn’t be,” says the woman, “I’ll…bring food. And a book or two. It’ll just be like we’re hanging out. Like old times. No trouble at all; I promise.”

Silence again. She chews at her bottom lip. She doesn’t ever really know if her reassurances ever work with Bucky. He had an interesting way of making a girl’s mind wonder to no end.

Still, she waits….until he speaks again, and the knots in her stomach finally seem to loosen a little.

“....what did you have in mind?”

Bucky wasn’t wrong when he said it was too cold outside.

Even bundled up in her puffer coat and the neck gaiter pulled over her nose, the cold still bites at the apples of her exposed cheeks, and wind howls past her ears and whips at her braids wildly. New York had always been infamous for its frigid temperatures, being surrounded by so many bodies of water which made the wind chill a hazard of its own. And that was just during the day.

She'd only visited Brooklyn Heights twice; the first time was with Steve when he was feeling particularly melancholic in regards to the brunette he had befriended so many decades ago. She’d found him on a park bench, not speaking, but basked in memory of war and companionship. She didn’t pry, then, despite her curiosity as to who held such a grip on his mind that the bright warmth he brought to the others could be dimmed with a longing reverence. She just sat with him, and eventually, the blond would apologize for the worry he’d caused, before opening up about the significance of the neighborhood he’d found himself having wandered into. The second time was when Sam dragged her along to visit Bucky some time after their excursion to Louisiana to make sure he’d settled into his new home. She’d brought him, as a housewarming gift, a copy of THE HOBBIT, because she didn’t want to come empty handed. Cooking had not been a proud skill of hers yet, and she wanted to give him some semblance of joy from a time in his life he undoubtedly missed heavily. She never knew what became of that book - if he ever read it again or if he just stashed it away somewhere out of sight - but she was relieved at the faint grin that she earned from her thoughtfulness.

Now, instead of an all too thick book in her arms and a scratchy scarf around her neck, she instead carried a brown paper bag of take out from a jerk place she often frequented when she visited the city - the only place still open in the wee hours of the morning  - and a buzz of worry thrumming under her skin. Bucky was the kind of man who told you not to worry about him. That only made Alahni worry more.

She remembered the sound of his voice that crackled over the receiver of her phone nearly an hour ago. He sounded tired. The kind of tired that lingered where the restfulness of sleep should have been. The kind of tiredness that comes when sleep evades you for days. The kind of tiredness that weighed heavy on the mind, in the bones, and in the spirit.

She knows that kind of tired all too well.

What she also knows is that Bucky is exceptionally good at hiding things. So despite what she heard over the phone, Alahni truly has no idea what she’s about to walk into.

The soft crunch of powdery snow sounds as she turns the corner on the block which Bucky lives on. A yellow glow is cast upon the streets, and it catches the silhouette of stray snowflakes that fall in wide intervals. There’s a quiet that befalls the streets that makes her breathe in the crisp, thin air to disarm the loom of alarm that always rises when quiet pushes its prominence. 

She is further soothed when she sees the very familiar silhouette of Bucky standing outside his brownstone. His head is tilted back, exposing the apple of his throat to the cold air. His gaze is extended upward, but not to look at the few stars that still shine through the city’s light pollution. It’s to hold his attention to something that can keep his mind from straying away. But he must’ve heard her footsteps, even from the end of the block, because his head tucks into the high collar of his jacket, turning towards her direction.

“Why’re you standing outside?” She calls from the halfway mark, marking a new trail in the fresh layer of snow with her footprints.

His hair is growing out from its short cut. Dark brown locks kiss the creases in the middle of his forehead. It’s ruffled and tousled - he’s been running his hands through it a lot, it seems. 

“It’s dark,” Bucky answers, his voice like thunder pushing through the cold air. It softens the closer she approaches, “was waitin’ on you.”

She has to crane her neck upwards to look at him, his cheeks swell with air to warm from the biting cold, trails of white smoke leaving his lips in a slow, steady stream. He has on sweat pants and his winter boots; the jacket, however, was his leather one, and from what she could see, the only thing underneath was his sleepshirt. Hardly the kind of attire to be waiting outside in the cold for someone. How long had he been waiting?

“You didn’t have to, y’know.” 

Bucky shrugs in response. His tired eyes  flutter closed for a second as he does so. Thin lips stretch into a lazy cheshire grin.

He steps to the side, allowing for her to take the first step up the stairs of the brownstone building. He follows behind - close, guarding, like always. Deft fingers reach from her left side to push the already ajar door further open. He enters when he’s sure that she’s safely inside. Rhythmic thumping of heavy snow boots sound as the pair ascend the stairs to his apartment, bouncing off the walls and filling the silence with presence. 

Bucky’s apartment isn’t that much different from when he first moved in, she sees. There’s still minimal furniture, and decoration is sparse. Though, she does notice that where a small green loveseat once sat against the wall, there is now a longer, almond colored couch in its place. The same console stand hosts the same television screen, which plays an old television show in black and white. Judging from the woman in a long, elegant black gown, and the man in a striped zoot suit and slicked back hair fawning over her, she concludes that it must be the 1964 rendition of The Addams Family.

There’s a fake potted pathos plant in the corner in front of the extended kitchen countertop. Two wooden stools are parked neatly under the ledge of it. The smell of instant coffee lingers; not overwhelming, but homely.

“I can hang your coat up here, (Y/N).” Bucky offers, hand extended out as Alahni is mid-shed of her winter gear. The woman quickly peels off her coat and stuffs her hat, gloves, and neck gaiter into the right sleeve, before handing it to the taller man. “Shoes can go there. Sorry for the mess.”

“It’s fine.” She slips off her boots, arranging them neatly behind the door next to Bucky’s who’s been chucked haphazardly on the mat.

A few paces further into the abode, and she can see the little things strewn about the place that make it more homely for the brunette. There’s a hoodie laying on the back of the couch - grey and worn. On the back kitchen counter, there’s a coffee pot which is the culprit for the warm, roasted scent. On the kitchen’s windowsill, there’s a real pathos plant - with one leaf tipping into a soft yellow color and the bottom feeder plate empty of water. On the counter are some older looking newspaper articles and clippings underneath an open notebook with messy cursive and two books; a copy of THE HOBBIT - her copy she’d gifted him, worn along the corners and edges - and a newer edition of THE TWO TOWERS.

Further into the living room, her eyes find the cluster of blankets on the floor in front of the couch. A pillow is there, too, with a glass of water on the console stand, half-drunk and forgotten.

When a soldier returns from war, it’s hard for him to enjoy the common pleasures of life again. She remembers being told once, but she can't remember from who. Too many military men she'd surrounded herself with in her former days. Even your own bed isn’t comfortable anymore. It’s too soft. Makes you feel too vulnerable.

“Are you watching The Addams Family?”

Bucky makes his way from the foyer of his apartment after hanging up both of his and her outerwear. His dog tags sway across his chest as he moves, glinting in the kitchen lighting. His brows furrow, his head turns towards the television in the living area. He shrugs.

“I was listening to Suspense,”, he says, “but I guess it went off while I was asleep.”

He makes his way into the kitchen, shifting to the side so that he doesn’t brush too harshly against her. Still, the air which surrounds him is charged. There is an ache there, she can tell. For what, she can’t really say.

“Plates?”

“Oh- yeah.” She doesn’t want to think too hard about it, though. If she does, she’ll get the urge to ask, and right now, Bucky doesn’t really need questioning. He gets that enough from the therapist he’s always harping about.

Selfishly, she also doesn’t want to be asked any questions, either.

“What’s this place again?” Bucky asks while fishing for two plates from the cupboard. He sets them down on the countertop - one for each of them - then turns back around to search for silverware in the white drawers.

“Baba Manson’s, over on Montague.” She answers while slipping into one of the stools on the opposite side of the countertop. Her feet find purchase on one of the poles of the stool’s structure, rolling back and forth for rhythm. “He stays open pretty late. I like going to him; he always makes sure to stack his plates high.”

“Yeah?” Bucky opts to stay on the other side of the island. Perhaps it makes him feel a little safer with the distance. Secure. Controlled. He sets out two sets of forks, spoons, and knives. They glint in the kitchen's lighting, too, dull shine and all.

The woman busies herself with taking the styrofoam containers out from the brown paper bag. Both are large plates, steaming from the heat of the food. Jerk chicken, fried plantains, rice and peas, and braised cabbage makes the plates heavy and filling. She places the first container onto Bucky’s plate, careful to try and not make a mess of the food threatening to overspill. Afterwards, she takes her own plate from the bag, then pushes it to the side to be discarded later.

“They can get a little messy, though,” she warns, but Bucky doesn’t seem to mind the rice and kidney beans that fall onto the plate below the styrofoam container the second his spoon dives into the meal. Seeing him eat well brings a bit of relief to her.

“So,” she begins, one hand searching the other wrist for an extra hair tie to use to tie up her braids, “Suspense. Is that a show you like?”

With a mouthful of rice and peas, Bucky glances up. Blue eyes watch as she pulls her hair into a loose ponytail, though wisps of hair from her goddess braids still frame her face like a halo. The lighting brightens her almond skin, and it shines with prominence.

Bucky swallows the bite of food a little too quickly - his throat stretches and burns from the lump of substance he wasn’t ready to take. With a short grunt, he speaks, “Yeah, it’s alright. Was a radio show in the early forties, and it got turned into a television show around uh…forty-nine, I think?”

“Sounds kinda spooky, with a title like Suspense.”

Bucky shrugs. “It’s the kinda ghost stories you tell kids to keep ‘em in line. Hauntings and boogeyman tales and stuff like that.”

Coffee eyes flicker across his face as he speaks. She takes her fork and pokes a piece of plantain with it, raising the savory-sweet piece to her mouth. “You ever get scared by them?”

“Me? Nah.” He brushes it off so casually, the woman almost believes him. “Some of the boys in my unit, though? Probably. But that was back in the day.”

“Sorry, I forget,” the woman hums in response after swallowing the plantain she’d forked into her mouth, “you’re Mr. Tough Guy. Of course you wouldn’t be scared.”

Her teasing is lighthearted, the sound of her laugh like the soft tinkling of bells in the spring. He meets her with an eyeroll, but the air is light and gentle around them. While terrors still linger in the hidden corners, the light from the kitchen’s overhead blesses them with a soft familiarity. One Bucky hasn’t realized how much he wanted. How much he missed.

Being on his own, he thought it would help him deal with things better. He didn’t think the presence of another could be so…impactful.

Bucky thinks this while he busies himself with washing out the utensils used for their extremely late dinner. He catches the other woman standing in his living room, arms crossed over her chest. She holds a scrutinizing gaze towards his television screen where The Addams Family continues to play. Her nose is scrunched up and her eyes squint in the television lighting. Crows' feet tickle the corners of her eyes.

“You’re looking very judgey over there.” He comments from the sink. Brown wisps of hair brush his forehead, his head turned to the side to catch her reaction. He turns the faucet off, grabbing the hand towel hung above the sink to pat his hands dry. Like an animal caught foraging, she startles a little, wide eyes flickering between Bucky and the television.

“What?” She stutters, “I-I’m not judging. Nope. Not at all.”

“You’re totally judging.”

“Am not!”

She pads over to the couch, careful to tip-toe over Bucky’s makeshift sleeping pallet as she makes her way to her bag. She wants to be careful in his space. Even with the evidence of his lack of sleep on display, she doesn’t question it; just acknowledges it in passing. Part of him stalls for a bit; like he expects at some point for her to bring it up. He doesn’t want to lie to her - he really doesn’t want to lie about it - and it makes the lingering pit in his stomach weigh just about as heavy as the exhaustion that runs bone deep. It tugs at him still, even now, with that prickly feeling that makes his eyelids ache every time he blinks. 

Yet, it’s the images that flash behind his eyelids every time they linger closed for too long, that keeps him from finding respite.

The blood. The blood stains his hands crimson. Thunderous orders sound in his ears. There’s an incessant ringing that bleeds into his brain and it won’t go away. There’s a gun in his hand, and the magazine only has one bullet left. Smoke emits from the barrel in a steady stream of white. His eyes are blue, and cold, and they feel nothing. Nothing but the mission. Nothing matters but the missio-

“-uck? Hey, Buck?”

“Huh?”

“You there?”

Bucky blinks back the stinging in his eyes. They aren’t tears. Just remnants of the terror that's plagued his mind for the past week straight.

“Yeah, sorry. What was that?”

She pauses for a moment. She tilts her head a little bit, eyes flickering across his face. Had she seen it? Had she seen the flashes of his past across his face? Had he let his mask slip?

“Was just asking about the bathroom,” she speaks again; it’s calmer, slower, and her eye contact is intentional. It’s to ground him. To tell him that she is there, that she is real, and that his present was in his control, “to change into my sweats?”

His breath is measured by the pounding in his chest. It thrums in his ears underneath the sound of her voice. He takes a deep breath that shudders as he exhales through his nose. The harsh thrumming mellows into a quiet whisper. He still feels it pumping in his veins, faint, yet present.

“Second door, over there,” Bucky finally answers, his fair hand extending to gesture to the second door on the wall behind them. The change of clothes bundled and hugged to her chest catches his eyes. He swallows thickly at the tension that thickens in the air between them.

If she did see anything, or notice the way he zoned out, she didn’t say anything, she merely bid him a tight smile, before stepping away to give him space. When she disappears behind the bathroom door, Bucky releases a shaky breath. The towel in his hand wrinkles from how tight he’d been holding on to it. The metal of his left hand had been long dried.

A sudden frustration bubbles in his sternum. It starts as a low fluttering, but soon he can feel the ache of his tightened jaw and the tautness in the muscles in his face. The towel collides with the countertop with a soft thwap as Bucky huffs exasperatedly. “Fuck.”

His hands, both flesh and metal, brace the edge of the countertop. He screws his eyes shut, as if to will away the flashes that occur at the worst times, but despite best attempts, they never seem to follow his command. The torment he faces at the hands of his past comes in droves he can never escape, and while Bucky should be used to it by now…the hauntings of the killer he used to be never cease to find new ways of reminding him anyway.

He hates that it still gets to him. He hates even more that sometimes the facade he’s so carefully crafted breaks at the worst opportune moments.

. . . he does, however, appreciate that she doesn’t question it. Not right away, at least. He knows she sees it, feels it in a way that others simply couldn’t. She doesn’t urge him to talk. Doesn’t bombard him with an interrogation like his therapist does. She doesn’t treat him like someone who needs figuring out; who needs saving. Because she gets it.

She gets it. 

She’s probably the only one who's gotten it since Steve. Since Sam. 

Since everyone else whose been gone.

Bucky turns his head to look at the bathroom door. Baby blues soften at the thought of the woman on the other side of it. He breathes a sigh into the air before him and tries to shake off the shadows that still loom. Exiting the kitchen area, he gets two paces past the bathroom door before he hears his name being called from the woman inside.

“Buck?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you, uh. . .” 

Bucky pauses mid-step, brows furrowing, before retracing his last two paces to stand in front of the door.

“You good in there, sweetheart?”

Another second of silence passes.

“Do you have an extra sweatshirt I could borrow?”

He blinks once. Twice. Three times for extra measure.

“What was that?”

There’s shuffling on the other side of the door. Bucky tries not to listen too hard, but his curiosity is piqued.

“Do you have another sweatshirt I could use?” The woman reiterates; her voice is a little bit hesitant now. Bashful, even. “I think I forgot to pack mine, and I- uh…I need something long sleeved.”

Thin lips pull into a tight line. There’s a slight pang in his chest that comes with the realization of the reason behind her request.

“Uh, yeah,” Bucky replies, and his feet, now with a newfound purpose, restart their pace towards his room, “gimme a sec to look; I’ll find something.”

His steps are filled with a sense of urgency now. She can hear the difference between when he was first walking past the door and now as he does so again with the intention of going to his room. There’s a light creak that sounds when his bedroom door opens, and as she does not hear the same whining in reverse from the hinges, she deduces that he’s left the door open.

The woman takes a deep breath as her gaze flickers from the bathroom door back at her reflection in the mirror. It’s still something she hasn’t quite gotten used to - seeing her reflection like this. Something calm, controlled, domestic. 

If she’s naive enough, she can believe those things about herself, too. She ties her hair up at night with a satin scarf to protect her hair like other women. She sings songs of sweet love and fun like other women. Sometimes, she’ll see someone attractive, and grow a little hot under the collar if they happen to look her way, like other women.

But then, as her coffee colored eyes trace the patterns of scarring across her skin, the veil of nativity falls from her eyes, and she is reminded of the reason why she could never be any semblance of normal. 

Her hands sooth over the varying bumps and dips and ridges of scarred skin and tissue that litter her arms. Some are lighter than her complexion; no older than a couple of years. Others are darker, having marked her since youth. Each tells its own painful story that she’s reminded of every time she undresses; every time she pulls back a layer of clothing, she reopens memories of a past she’d do anything to forget.

She remembers each one, too. The long, darkened line that runs across her shoulder? A bullet graze from a blocking drill that nearly killed her. Dark dots that cluster together on her bicep? Cigarette burns from a scientist frustrated with her “lack of cooperation”.  The smaller dots that could be mistaken for freckles at the junction of her elbows serve to show the numerous injections she’d suffered through since birth.

And at the end of her right arm is the one that evokes the most violent of reactions. PSW-001 stares back at her, tauntingly. Always there. Always a present reminder of a past she will never escape. The killer she used to be.

Her thumb swipes over the barcode tattooed on her wrist. The longer she stares at it, the harsher her swipes become. Her thumb digs into the light underside of her wrist, rubbing at it like somehow the ink will come off. It never does - she’s tried so many times before.

An incessant stinging creeps into her eyes. She blinks once to chase it away. When she opens them again, her vision is blurred, and crimson paints her wrist red. It drips from her hands, thick and warm and frightening. Her throat goes bone dry as tendrils of the thick substance raise from her fingertips. She tries to will them down again, but they do not respond to her mental call for control. 

The smell of copper is all consuming, invading her senses without remorse. A sudden tightness presses harshly against her ribcage, and she feels like she can’t breathe. A cold, prickly feeling crawls up her spine; the blood sticks to her like a second skin, soaking under the warmth of her skin, and it terrifies her.

Shaky eyes flicker around the sink, spotting a drying towel on a rack above the toilet. Off, get it off, get the blood off- 

She reaches for the towel, nearly stumbling to grasp for it, her other hand grabbing the faucet knob and turning on the hot water. She scrubs frantically at her skin, praying that the blood will come off. Yet, the harder she scrubs, the deeper the blood sinks into her skin. It clings onto her melanin with a vice grip. She can feel it clawing her skin with each scrub. 

You cannot escape us, (Y/N). You cannot escape the blood you’ve bathed in-

“--/N)? (Y/N)?”

She blinks again. Once, twice. Three times for extra measure. The haze in her vision is gone. So is the blood that was supposed to be on her arms. 

“(Y/N)? Everything good in there?”

The water still runs hot from the faucet. The towel she’d used laid balled up in the sink. Her hands and forearm sported blotches of angry pink. She’d scrubbed herself near raw, and the tenderness shot a slight sting up her arms.

“Y-Yeah!” She had to ignore the incessant stinging to hurriedly shut off the running water, as well as the burn from the excess water she hurriedly wrung out from the towel, before hanging it back up in its original place.

With her heart still hammering in her chest and body shaken from the vision she’d had, she slowly took the two paces towards the bathroom door, cracking it ajar just enough for Bucky to peek inside.

“Sorry. Must’ve spaced out.” She speaks again. A weak attempt to avoid suspicion, but Bucky isn’t naive. He sees the wavering in her coffee eyes; he hears the labored breathing. A bubble of worry rises in his throat, forcing him to speak around it.

“You’re good,” he reassures, “found that uh, sweatshirt you wanted. It’s kinda big, though.”

The woman shakes her head - a little too eagerly for Bucky’s comfort - “It’s fine. The bigger, the better.”

A moment passes where silence hangs a little too tensely. Then, Bucky shoves the sweatshirt into the opening of the door. He doesn’t look. He doesn’t peek. He grants privacy while still offering his presence.

She swallows the lump in her throat, carefully taking the sweatshirt from his grasp, muttering a wavering thank you before closing the door again.

She shrugs the sweatshirt on, and not to her surprise, it nearly swallows her. The cotton fleece on the inside makes for cozy material, though, so she doesn’t mind that the sleeves extend past her fingers, or that the collar is a little wide. Instead, she tucks a bit of the fabric in the front of her sweatpants, and adjusts the neck to sit better on her collarbones. There’s a scent to the sweatshirt, too - not unpleasant, but it does give a nod to its owner. Something metallic that lingers on the left side specifically, but overall there’s a warm, spiced scent that sticks to the cotton. Cinnamon, maybe? Cardamom? Paired with something woodsy, like pine, and it evens out the spiced aroma that tickles at her nose a little bit. 

Focusing on the scent of his sweatshirt, her heart rate slows to normal. Her shaking has reduced to a tender tremble that, thankfully, the long sleeves have expertly hidden.

‘I am okay’, she thinks to herself, reciting the words in her head slowly so that every syllable sticks, like her therapist taught her, ‘I am safe. I am here. I am in control. I am okay.’

After she’s repeated the mantra enough times that a part of her believes it to be true, she finally musters the courage to exit the bathroom.

When she reappears, her bundle of outside clothes folded neatly and tucked into her chest, she finds Bucky in the kitchen again. He’s hovering over a space on the back counter, muttering to himself. She raises an eyebrow.

“What’re you doing?”

Bucky turns at the sound of her voice, lifting himself from the counters edge, revealing what was hidden behind his torso. Two clear mugs, an electric tea kettle, and a box of tea with two sachets already pulled out.

The woman tilts her head. She’d never known Bucky to be a tea drinker.

“I forgot I had these.” He finally says. “The shrink once said somethin’ about tea helpin’ with…this.”

She notes how he refuses to give name to the situation at hand. Whether it’s because he simply doesn’t want to, or he can’t bring himself to do so, she isn’t so sure of. She crosses over to the living area to stuff her clothes into her bag. The blankets and the pillow that once made his sleeping pallet had been folded and placed on the opposite end of the couch.

“I’ve never known you to drink tea.” She hums in response, her feet carrying her back towards the kitchen. Instead of taking up residence on the stool like earlier, she rounds the extended counter top to enter the kitchen area.

“I don’t,” he says while pouring the hot water from the electric kettle over the sachet in his mug. The closer she gets, the aroma of sweet plums fill the space with the rising steam from the water, “but I grabbed this a while ago, and never really found the chance to use it ‘til now, I guess.”

Bucky pours hot water over the sachet in the second mug, then pushes the electric kettle to the back of the counter. From his right, he slides over a bag of sugar and a bear-shaped bottle of honey. “Pick your poison.”

She feigns a moment of thought, dramatized by the tapping of her forefinger to her chin and a quirked eyebrow, before reaching for the bottle of honey. She opens the cap and turns the bottle over, squeezing about five seconds worth of it into her mug. While Bucky spoons sugar into his tea, she places the bottle cap closed and upright at the back of the counter. She sees the extra spoon he’s laid out for her to use, but she doesn’t take it.

Instead, she hovers her finger over the reddish-brown liquid with honey floating inside, and moves it in a circular motion. In tune with her movements, the liquid in the mug also begins to swirl around rhythmically. A little whirlpool circles round and round in her mug until she’s deemed the liquid thoroughly mixed, before slowly closing her hand into a fist to bring the whirlpool of tea to a stagnant halt.

“Hey,” Bucky’s voice sounds, a mixture of awe and disbelief, “hey, no fair- that’s cheating, (Y/N).”

“‘Cheating’?” She repeats, a small scoff of amusement leaving her lips, “how is this ‘cheating’?”

Bucky gestures between her hand and his own, which has been busy stirring his chosen sweetener. The sugar is being extremely difficult to dissolve.

“I’m doin’ manual labor over here; and you’re takin’ the easy way out!”

“Oh, my god-“

“That’s not fair, I should take your tea back!”

“Do you want me to do yours?”

The offer catches him a little off guard; but as he attempts to sputter out a response , Alahni’s hands are already reaching. 

With one hand she takes the teaspoon Bucky had been using, placing it down on the now empty wrapper the tea sachets came in. The other hand grasps the unoccupied side of the mug and glides it a little closer to her. Even as her fingers overlap his paler ones, she doesn’t quite falter in her movements. She just becomes a little more intentional with her touch.

She uses the same procedure as before - hovering her finger over the reddish-brown liquid before spinning it in circular motions, allowing for a little whirlpool to form in the middle of the mug. In seconds, the clear little crystals of sugar begin to dissolve obediently; as if the gentle, womanly touch of hers was all it needed to comply.

Grumbling sounds when Alahni finishes the process. Bucky’s blue eyes flicker between her and the tea mug, and if she weren’t mistaken, the entrails of a pout were forming on his lips. “Little show off.”

“I don’t think that’s what you’re supposed to say to someone who just helped you with your tea,” she chimes, tilting her head to the side a little with a knowing look. The one that teases him with the words I’m right without her ever having to say them, “saving you from your poor manual labor.”

Baby blues roll to the back of his head, a subtle sucking of the teeth sounds, too, but he doesn’t bite back. Instead, he takes his loss as graciously as Bucky ever could take a loss - with a little huff and dramatized thank you that makes her voice flutter in the air like sweet chimes in the spring. It’s a sound that’s very refreshing to the ears. 

And he really likes the way it sounds. 

Especially when it’s him who can make it happen.

When she pulls away, it’s like a cold front swoops in. He doesn’t like how the loss of warmth makes him feel. She doesn’t like the loss of contact quite much either, but their grievances are not spoken into existence. 

Even so, it lingers still. The tension; innocent and all-consuming. A tender thought of what would happen if it stayed longer?

The woman returns to her cup, wrapping her sleeve-covered palms around the curve of the mug as she brings it to her lips. As her back meets the edge of the opposite counter Bucky leans on, a hum of satisfaction rises from her throat. The warmth of the tea soothes the trembles from earlier, and while her hands still feel a little raw from the scrubbing, the comfort from the fleece-lined sweatshirt and the warmth from the tea seem to make it a little bit bearable.

“Is this…plum?”

Bucky nods, mid-sip, his bionic arm tucked underneath the other as he drinks. “Yeah. They supposedly help with memory and stuff, so, it seemed fitting, with this tea and all.”

She thinks back to the notebook and newspaper clippings she saw earlier when she came in. Her eyes shift over to where it still sits - packed up and moved off to the side a little bit for cleanliness. 

Her gaze returns to center, passing between the mug at her chest and the man standing across from her. She taps a nail against the glass mug before she speaks; slow, tender, intentional, “Is it still coming back?”

Bucky’s arm shifts from underneath the other, the subtle clink of metal sounding on the marble countertop as he braces himself against it. She watches as his chest rises with a deep breath, and slowly falls with a grounding exhale. His fingers flex around the mug in thought.

“Sometimes…. it-ah, it comes in droves,” his baby blues are averted to the side, unable to meet her gaze, “sometimes, it makes me fish for ‘em. Ain’t really pretty, no matter which way it goes.”

“Yeah?”

Bucky takes another breath; a tired one, strained from vulnerability, “Yeah.”

He takes another sip of his tea. She watches him with soft eyes. For a moment, they flutter down to the reddish-brown liquid in her own mug. Her tinted reflection stares back at her, and her chest grows a little tighter.

With a measured breath, the woman confides. “I get the visions, still.”

She can feel his gaze on her - not hard, or investigative, but patient. “Well, flashes,, mostly, now. They come and go; quiet, but harrowing. The visions, though…they’re always the worst.”

She’s holding onto her mug a little tighter, now. It acts as an anchor for her, as she centers her energy onto the cup at her chest. The warm scent of plum wafts to her nose, giving her something sweet for her mind to anchor on.

“...that what happened in the bathroom?”

The muscles in her throat tighten a little too harshly. She can’t speak, so she nods instead. His hum lets her know that even without eye contact, he’s received the response.

She raises the rim to her lips again, taking another sip of the tea and letting the sweet warmth trickle down her throat. She reclaims her voice again; soft, quiet.

“I don’t always remember them,” she mutters, her hands falter from her chest as she places the half-drunken mug on the countertop. The slightly unsteady clatter marks the return of the trembling in her fingers, “but I will always remember the weight of their blood in my hands. I can never forget that feeling.”

In slow, careful motions, she tugs the sleeves of the sweatshirt upward. The material bunches just in the middle of her forearms as she reveals the tender, blotchy pinkness that litter her hands and wrist. The dryness had begun to set in, making a thin layer of white begin to settle onto her caramel skin. Her hands start to trace over each other, fingers mapping out invisible paths with no end, only retracing. 

“I…swear I had blood on my hands.” She admits with a shaky breath. “Their blood. And I tried to get it off, but I…-”

She doesn’t hear Bucky set his cup down, or the sound of his junk drawer opening at his side. Doesn’t see him take barely a step forward to her, but when his shadow crosses over her own, blocking out the kitchen’s overhead lighting with his height. What she does see is his paler hand carefully extending underneath hers, cradling both of hers hands in his with an unmatched reverence.

The touch stings a little, but the intent behind it emits no ill will. His caress is characteristically tender. Bucky handles her, not like he’s scared she’ll break, but like something precious. And it tugs at her heart so gently.

And he whispers, “I get it,” with a voice that bleeds with knowing.

“....yeah.” Is all she can whisper in return. 

Her fingers curl around his hand, and it is a soft weight to him. Bitterly sweetened by her trembling touch, his skin alights with a warmth that threatens to flush him red. 

He gets it; probably better than anyone.

He gets it; and he wants to help.

So, quietly - because the silence between them was too tender to break, and neither could find words that seemed appropriate to say - he produces the tube of Aquaphor he often kept in the junk drawer of his kitchen for similar situations he found himself in, and helps her apply it to her hands and wrists. The sooth that follows the sting is a lot like the anxiety that comes with allowing someone into one’s world, she thinks, as the coil of unease loosens itself into a loose spool of thread in her stomach. 

Accidentally, his thumb brushes over the ink that stains her right wrist. He’s caught glimpses of it before, but seeing it up close now brings a different reaction; one that makes his stomach tighten. He expects her to pull away from his grasp when his eyes settle on the black ink on her skin.

She doesn’t. 

He waits for a second, granting her the right of choice. When she still remains in his hold, he continues to sooth the balm over her skin; not disregarding, but noting,

Bucky has been granted access to a part of her that no one has ever seen before; and it ignites something fierce in the crevice of his chest. Honored. Protective.

“Aquaphor, I find, is the best at this,” he speaks up after the tension in the silence smooths over a little more, waning out in the minutes that creep into the hours of early morning, “ ‘s not heavy, and, uh… you don’t need a lot to get the job done.”

The woman soothes over the balm on her raw hands and wrist. It feels so much better, now, and the cotton fleece inside the sleeves of the sweatshirt add a much needed comforting warmth.

“Thanks, Buck.” She says sincerely.

Bucky smiles - cat-like and affectionate. “Don’t mention it.”

He can still feel the weight of her hands in his long after they’ve parted. The sweet tinge of clove tickles at his nose still. These little things find themselves clinging to his mind - a mind he doesn't completely trust…and yet, somehow, finds comfort in the thought of leaning onto those little remnants of her.

He discards the Aquahor into the junk drawer again. She grabs her tea mug, and so does Bucky. She leads them out of the kitchen, with Bucky flicking the light switch off as they move to the living area. The Addams Family still hums on in the background; the exaggerated studio laughter of some ironic joke sounding as the pair enter the space. He at first turns to settle onto the couch, but upon seeing her find a spot in front of the cushion on the wooden floor, he, too, takes up residence beside her on the ground.

The woman settles down on the floor, placing her cup on the side of her. Bucky watches as she reaches behind her to pull her bag from its resting place on the tan cushion. He cocks an eyebrow as she fumbles around, searching for something.

“What’re you doing?”

She doesn’t answer right away. His curiosity almost pushes for him to question again, before she finally pulls what she’d been looking for out of her bag.

“I almost forgot about this,” she hums softly, producing from her bag a red-cover paperback book, “I brought a book to read.”

Bucky tilts his head to the side a little as she smooths over the paperback cover. The shadows in the red shape into the silhouettes of people - children, judging by how small they are - with one girl standing out in the way she is colored in grey.

She sees Bucky craning his neck to view the cover; she shifts the book closer to him, gesturing for him to take the novel in his own hands. Baby blues flicker between her and the book she offers, and after a second of contemplation, takes the book to see it better.

“The Children of Willesden Lane,” he read the first line of the title, his eyes flickering down with each line read, “Beyond the Kinder-Transport. A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival.”

He turns the book to the back, his eyes scanning over the brief synopsis written in white. “Why a World War II memoir?”

“You mentioned it a while ago.”

He blinks, pauses his reading. Once, twice, three times for good measure. He then turns his head to her, brows knit together in question. “I did?”

“Well, not the actual book,” the woman rephrases, “but you mentioned something- like, liking memoirs. So I bought this around that time, but it had been in my reading pile for so long, I forgot about it. I finally made it to it this week.”

“Yeah?”

He doesn’t remember the off-hand recommendation she’s talking about. It’s possible he did do such a thing, and his mind is just being cruel by keeping the memory from him. It has a way of playing such insensitive tricks on him, finding pleasure in his pain. He wishes he could remember it, though; it would make keeping the conversation going a little easier.

Instead, he simply hands the book back to her as she nods in response. He’s willing to trust her word instead.

“Do you like it so far?” Bucky asks.

She takes a moment to think. Coffee eyed glance over the cover of the book for the stretch of a second.

“It’s definitely heartfelt.” She answers. “The author, she writes very raw about her mothers’ experiences. I can’t imagine the emotion that must’ve come up with the conversations for this book.”

Bucky drinks a sip from his cup, then tucks his tea mug somewhere far off to the side. He didn’t anticipate reaching back for it after that last sip. His attention, as strained and tired as it was, focused on the woman next to him.

“What’s it about?”

It takes a minute for her to register his words, her gaze slowly trailing from the book in her hands to the man sitting next to her. When her eyes find his, the tired little glint of curiosity in his baby blues is soft, yet prominent. A delightful little tingle rushes from the tips of her fingers and up her arms, settling at the base of her neck. 

“You want to know?” She questions; a lilt of amusement catching at the end of her tongue.

“Well, if you like it, and you wanna talk about it,”  the brunette’s gaze shifts to the side - not in avoidance, but in recollection, as the spool in his stomach turns and tightens and catches him off guard. His flesh hand reaches up to scratch at the darkening shadow of his chin, “I don’t mind hearin’ and learnin’ about it, too.”

She blinks once, then twice, before the ghost of a grin takes over her lips. She turns her gaze back to the book in her hands, her thumbs peek out of the grey sleeves to  soothe over the cover tenderly.

“The author’s mother, she was a little girl on the Kindertransport,” she begins, her coffee eyes finding him again, “she was a piano prodigy from Austria. When her family found out that there was a way out, they sent her on the Kindertransport to England. Willesdan Lane was the name of the street that the orphanage she went to was on. I’m at that part now.”

She beams the more she speaks about the early life of Lisa Jura; how the piano prodigy sourced her love into her music, and the devastation that came with the reality she would be separated from her family due to the war. Bucky sees the way her fingers fiddle with the pages as she speaks, her words soft yet lively. There is something so tenderly sweet about her comfort that he finds endearing to him. 

He should be alarmed at how soft he feels here, but as her voice calms that anxiety that threatens to rage, he doesn’t even notice how the corners of his lips are ghosting upwards. How his body subconsciously angles towards hers. Like moth to flame; like ocean to moon; like all things destined to find reverence in each other.

“I could read it to you, too.” The offer comes a little hesitant; it hums with a self-indulgence that she doesn’t really expect him to act on. She can’t meet his eyes this time, bashful by her own boldness. Timidity clouds her.

She can’t tell if Bucky notices the shift; and for once, she really hopes he doesn’t. She doesn’t deal with embarrassment well.

But he does see. He sees the way she starts to shrink into herself after she lets the words fall from her lips without warning. He notices the air turn a little still, a little cold. Her little shelter of peace begins to fracture the longer the silence hangs in the air.

And Bucky doesn’t want that. He wants to protect it.

So when he assures her that he wouldn’t mind it in the slightest - that her peace is something he wants her to have here, with him - he sincerely hopes that she takes it.

Because he really likes hearing her talk, he’s learning. And he really likes how she talks so calmly yet vibrantly. Her voice is like a balm to the aching soul; something Bucky is coming to realize feels really, really nice.

“Sure. Why not?”

“A-Are you sure?”

“It’s fine. I don’t mind.”

He’s indulging me too much, she thinks, her gaze carefully meeting his again. They bore into her with a weight of reverence that makes her limbs tingle again.

She opens up the book to the bookmarked page, taking out the little teal divider with a darker blue tassel at the end. She sets it on her knee, but Bucky swipes it at the last minute. She glances at him, chuckles a little, but says nothing, before pulling her knees up to her chest, resting the book on them comfortably.

She starts the chapter she left off on a little shaky. She doesn’t typically read out loud, much less to another person. He tries to keep his eyes trained on the bookmark he’d swiped earlier, fiddling with the tiny little strings on the tassel. It helps some that his eyes aren’t boring into her side profile as she reads. Who knows the kind of mistakes she’d make out of anxiousness.

She reads a few pages, and soon finds a comfortable rhythm to slip into. Every so often, she glances over towards Bucky. She gages his reactions to certain passages, pauses when it seems like he may want to speak. He doesn’t; instead, she’s met with a low hum that assures her she can continue. 

It’s comfortable. It’s nice. Neither fights the subtle ease that seems to wrap them both in its warm embrace, and for the first time that night, the weight in strained eyelids do not come with a price.

It is after three chapters that she begins to notice that Bucky has been a little too quiet. 

She pauses for a breath, taking the opportunity to glance towards him. His head is turned downward a little, with his hair that reaches his eyelashes curtaining his face slightly.. Initially, she thought his eyes were just cast downward towards the bookmark he’d been playing with this whole time, but his eyes blink slow, and his fingers have stopped fiddling with the tassel, and his chest moves in slow intervals, too.

“Buck?”

He doesn’t respond to the call of his name. He barely hears it, muddled by sleep which trickles its way into his brain. Instead, his body begins to lean. In a haste, she lets her book fall  to the side as her body turns inward towards the brunette, bracing for whatever direction he leans.

And he leans towards her.

He tries to catch himself; by the time he feels his body slumping, he’s struggling to reclaim consciousness in order to pull himself together, but his fight is in vain.

He slumps, and he falls. Right into her hands.

“Hey, hey, hey,” there’s a tinge of worry in her voice; that much he hears. The smell of clove surrounds him first before he registers that she’s touching him. Holding him. “You’re okay; you’re okay, James.”

 There’s a blooming warmth that starts at the side of his neck and the middle of his chest, overpowering the cold metal of his dog tags which undoubtedly comes first. They stay, and they guide him down - slowly, slowly, so he isn’t startled - and then the warmth shifts to cradle his head just as it meets the cushion of something softer. The warmth soon envelops him there, and the comforting cloves ceases his restless stirring.

The woman's chest is thundering behind her ribcage. She stares down at the man now nestled in her lap. He is quiet, and no longer stirring. She wondered if he could hear the incessant pounding that is her heartbeat right now, or if he could before sleep took him safely into its clutches. She hadn’t expected for him to slump in the way that he did - all body muscle and mass coming her way, giving her little time to react. He was heavy, surely from the weight of exhaustion that was bone deep.

He was sleeping.

He was…actually sleeping.

One careful hand shifted over his head, brushing away wisps of brown hair from his face. His eyelids were stagnant. His breath against her thigh was even, steady.

He looked… content. Not peaceful, not completely, but the fight against sleep had finally ended, and there wasn’t any sign of discomfort in the creases of his forehead. As rugged and rough as Bucky usually looked, in his sleep, he looked…soft.

‘This is okay,’ she thought to herself, a soft prickling heat creeping up her neck in a slow yet unwavering wave. Her gaze shoots up, her hands covering her mouth as if to keep the thoughts inside. She fears any little sound would wake him, and she doesn’t want that in the slightest, ‘this is totally okay. Everything. Is. Okay.’

Wind howls outside, whistling against the glass windows. It’s enough to snap her out of her stupor, and instead ignite another thought.

Quietly, and with as little movement as possible, she reaches behind her for the pile of blankets that he’d folded earlier in his attempt to make the space a little cleaner. She peels one off, carefully draping it over as much of his frame as she can get without moving too much. Sadly, his shins and feet are left uncovered, but as they are clothed in sweat pants and socks, she hopes he wouldn’t mind it too much.

The other blanket, the woman haphazardly tosses over her own legs, the fabric having little trouble reaching over her limbs.

It’s only afterwards that she finally has the will to look at him again. He still rests in her lap, stagnant, yet calm. She’s never seen this kind of stillness about him before. It’s a strange kind of endearment, though. There’s a soft blooming in her chest that settles right beneath her sternum at the sight of him like this. Something tranquil, she feels…and she quite likes this look on him.

Her hand raises again, gentle and purposeful. Her middle finger extends first, brushing against his hair. A swoop of his brown hair wraps itself around her fingers, and she notes how soft it is with the faint smell of soap. She carefully tucks the wisp of hair behind his ear, and releases a breath she didn’t know she had been holding in her throat. With soft, affectionate coffee eyes, Alahni allows the moment to exist quietly between them, letting the picture emblazone into her mind.

Her fingers tenderly ghost from the shell of his ear to the cusp of his jaw, and her hand settles there comfortably; the palm of her hand rests just under his jaw, while her thumb runs rhythmic strokes against his jawline and cheek. A sense of fondness overtakes her when she feels him crane just a little further into her hold.

He doesn’t pull away.

She fully expects him to…

…and he doesn’t.

Without realizing, Bucky had offered a part of himself to her that very few have been blessed with.

With the ghosting of a grin tugging at her lips, she quietly vows to herself to handle it with the utmost grace and tenderness she can.

Satisfied that the man in her lap was safely asleep, Alahni uses her free hand to pick up her book again, and continues reading. The Addams Family still hums quietly in the background, the light from the television flickering on the pair settled on the living room floor. Winter roars on outside.

An hour passes before she starts to feel the stinging behind her eyelids. Sleep threatens to make room for her now, too, but she tries her hardest to fight it. Part of her is scared that the hauntings of her terror will come back. Part of her wants to continue watching over Bucky to protect him from any terrors that may stir him awake. But words begin to blur together on the page, and she’s starting to yawn far too many times in a row, interrupting her reading far more than she’d like.

The pitch black sky starts to shift into a light navy blue by the time she finally surrenders. She closes the book, forgetting the bookmark as it’s somewhere underneath the mess of limbs and blankets she can’t bring herself to search through. Instead, she sacrifices the cream colored page by dog-ear-ing the corner, before pushing the book off to the side. It rests right next to her forgotten mug of tea, which had now grown cold.

The Addams Family still hums in the background, but her attention settles on the sleeping man on her lap. He hasn’t moved an inch, save the occasional deep inhale. When that happens, she stops her thumb strikes the second he moves, waiting, wondering if he’ll pull away. There’s a sweet little fluttering in her heart when he only buries further into her thigh, and she resumes her caress again.

Three deep breaths of her own, and the last thing she remembers leaning her head against the cushion of the couch before her eyes finally flutter close. 

It’s mid morning when the sunbeams start to stream into the apartment. The warmth from them falls upon Bucky’s face, and after its incessant gleam becomes too much for him to ignore, he peels his eyes open with a grunt.

The first thing he notices is the faint pressure on his jaw. He initially thinks it’s just locked from teeth grinding - a habit of his that came out whenever he slept - so he tries to flex his lower face to rid himself from the fatigue there. 

However, it doesn’t go away.

The second thing he notices is the smell of clove surrounding him. 

That scent can only belong to one person.

Through the grogginess, Bucky’s vision begins to clear. Baby blues land on the mix-matched blankets he remembers using the night prior. He wears the yellow one. The brown one drapes over a pair of legs, and as he raises his head slowly to prop himself up, his eyes travel the length of the body he’d been laying on, before finally coming face to face with her.

She’s fast asleep; her face is tucked into the corner of her elbow, the opposite arm from the one he’d felt draped over him being used as a cushion for her head. Despite the undoubtedly uncomfortable sleeping position, she sleeps quietly, and contently. He’s always found it intriguing how easily she can fall asleep in any place, in any position, and it appears to be so normal and comfortable for her.

Wait.

The brunette shifts to sit on his knees. The blanket falls off of his shoulders, pooling around his legs as he sits with the realization that just dawned on him.

He fell asleep.

He fell asleep with her.

He fell asleep on her.

The previous hours start coming back to him in quick, torturous flashes. Him waiting outside for her. Them eating dinner together. Him fetching one of his sweatshirts for her - the same one she’s still swamped in. Him holding her hands as he helped her apply the Aquaphor on her hands and wrists, blotchy-pink and raw.

Them having tea together. Her reading to him. 

The echoes of quiet laughter and her smile linger at the entrails of his mind.

He looks around him, still bleary eyed and unguarded. Heat rises beneath his sleepshirt, threatening to tinge his cheeks pink, and as much as he tries to push it down, it still creeps up to his ears.

In an attempt to keep his mind from thinking too hard on all that may have occurred hours prior, he shakily finds his footing, and gathers up the tea mugs they’d been drinking from. The reddish-brown liquid sloshes around in their confinements before being poured down the kitchen drain. He sets the glasses in the sink to be washed later, before returning to the living room. 

His pace slows as he approaches the end of the couch, his eyes landing on her sleeping frame. The sun's beams have reached her, now. They land softly on her almond skin, casting a pretty golden halo around her body. For a moment, Bucky’s breath hitches at the sight. His brain stalls, and his heart catches in his chest.

She’s so content. Peaceful.

His footsteps are softer now. Careful not to cause any noise or to make the floorboards creak. He picks up the blanket which had been his and tosses it on the couch. Carefully, he reaches over her body to pick up her book and place it on the couch as well. He chooses to ignore the fact that she’d sacrificed the poor page by dogear-ing it, but it grants him an amused grin at the thought. He’ll have to replace her bookmark if he can’t find it later on.

Once the floor is relatively clear, Bucky kneels down again. He first slips a hand under the blanket, finding where the back of her knees are, and hooks his arm underneath them. His other hand wraps around her waist. As he gently nudges her close to lean on his chest, he tucks her head under his chin, and lifts her into his arms.

The blanket drapes down as he lifts her into the air. He feels her stir in his arms, likely from the sudden shift in position, but he quickly shushes her little whines of discontent. He mumbles, “I got you, I got you,” in a quiet promise into the crown of her hair, before turning on his heels to carry her to his bedroom.

The door had been left ajar from last night, so he is able to just nudge the door open with his foot. His bedroom is sparse for decoration, really. A forest green bedding set adorns his bed, with a wooden nightstand and a chair off by the windowside. His dresser is wooden, too, and on top of it are a few framed pictures of him and his friends. He and Steve take the center position, and around them are images of him with others like Natasha, Clint, and Sam. People he holds near and dear to him; the people whom he seeks when it feels like the world is falling and his mind is fractured.

There is also a picture of him and her, too. It’s a polaroid of when they went to Coney Island on a little group trip some time ago. They both take huge bites out of a big cone of cotton candy - his first time having the treat again after decades. She is mid-laugh in the polaroid, while he is trying to catch the piece of fluff from falling from his lips. He can still taste the sugary blue-rasberry on his tongue whenever he looks at the picture, and it always brings a fond smile to his face.

Bucky passes his dresser and crosses over to the side of the bed that is usually left unoccupied. He carefully lays her down on the mattress, slowly slipping his arms from underneath her. The woman stirs again, but quickly falls quiet once her body registers the softness of the mattress underneath her. As she settles, Bucky reaches to the top of her head and tugs down the receding satin scarf wrapped around her hair over her forehead again.

He’d planned to return back to the living room; intended to grant her privacy as she slept. He wasn’t the kind of man to just intrude on a woman; he had morals and standards he held himself to. Yet, as he fixed the throw blanket to cover her body more comfortably, Bucky caught out of the corner of his eyes her hand extending towards him. He failed to think rationally when her warm touch reached his arm, tender and sleep-riddled. The thought that her unconscious mind was seeking him out, even in sleep, made something strong and weakening bloom in his stomach.

And Bucky was a strong man. His resolve and determination was outmatched by none. 

Oh, but he’d never felt so weak in his life than he did right now.

He didn’t know how long he’d been stood there, battling between respect and honor and an age old craving that he thought had been lost with time, torture and terror.

His body makes up its mind before he can.

Carefully, Bucky rounds the bed to what had been designated his side, despite barely using it most nights. The bed dips with his weight as he tries to discreetly slide into bed with her. Of course, a respectable distance is kept - about half an arm’s length of space still lies between them - but it’s as close as Bucky has consciously been to another person in years. Part of him itches to close the distance, but he quells it vigorously.

This is enough. For now…it has to be.

So, Bucky lies in the morning sunlight that slowly creeps over their bodies; his bionic arm lays over his torso, while his flesh arm lies in the distance between them. The back of his hand presses softly against her back, connecting them once again. The knuckle of his forefinger traces lines into her back; a series of tender strokes and patterns that entrance him just as much as the woman he’s making them on.

And he lays. 

And he waits. 

And in the morning sunlight, he smiles. Content.